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Powerline Broadband in Hong Kong
DBordello writes "After a successful two year trial run, Hutchison Global Communications (HGC) has commercially launched a broadband over power line service in selective areas in Hong Kong. According to CNET news, the service offers 1.5 megabit per second speeds at a monthly cost of HK$138 (US$17.70), but users are forced to sign a seven month contract."
but users are forced to sign a seven month contract.
Forced? For a little over $17 a month? Heck, almost all broadband providers in the US force you to sign a 12-month contract, at $35+ a month! I'd take a 7-month contract at that price any day!
Mery Christmas, to everyone!
Does it have an ad campaign along the lines of "Sign up now and get 3 pirated movies free!"?
In other news, Hong Kong is without power after a surge (ha, ha) of users immediately began swapping pirated software and movies...
Why is this not available in the US yet?
-Berj
One thing to realize is that Hong Kong is a very small island with very high population density. Even so, the story says the company is only serving selected areas. That means there is very little distance between the server and the customers.
Power Lines use you as broadband!
As far as I can tell, no one's forced to sign anything. Potential users just make a decision as to what they value more.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
fry your computer at will.....
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
From the article:
"Users are required to lock into a seven-month contract in return for a modem, or power socket."
Now all we need is a PCMCIA version. Then we'll have a modem that gets its electricity from the computer and the information from the wall outlet.
And you thought tech support had it rough now...
"Nono, sir, you don't..."
[BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZttt *spark, *fssszt]
My
Limekiller
go kill yourself
Remember people, 1,5 megaBIT, not byte. Stop packing your stuff and forget about the 17 bucks T1 line. 1,5 megabit / 8 = 0,1875 megabyte per second or about 192 kb/sec. In other words, below common cable internet speeds.
So either this new powerline ISP is crap, the original author typoed or my math is fucked.
Hate me!
Power companies are frightened of fuel cell technology. They want to find more ways to tie users into the power grid.
Now bootlegs from Hong Kong can get to the USA faster! Sweet!
...but users are forced to sign a seven month contract.
HGC: "So, user, you MUST sign this contract that will FORCE you to endure seven WHOLE MONTHS of low-cosy, high-speed broadband access that will allow you to download lots of illegal stuff!!"
User: "NO! NO!!! Please, God, don't force me to... hang on...YES! YES!!"
So, um... where's the problem here? I sure don't see one...
i remember reading about an american developer of delivering internet over power lines and they were claming to deliver speeds above the gigabit barrier to home users, Media Fusion was their website but by the viewing of their blank page, it seems the company went belly up...
Ignoramus. A T1 is 1.5 Mbps (= 192 KBps) too.
They talk about 10mbps soon, though, and that's T1 speed.
-Berj
I don't know how safe i would feel with those frequencies going threw every electrical wire in my house and device. My alarm clock radio next to me head would be emitting some serious RF. Itas bad enough living near hv powerlines, I couldnt imagine what would happen now.
from the article:
The official said HGC could provide a service of up to 10Mbps, leveraging on its fibre-optic network.
so you can get about 6.5 times the bandwidth of a T-1 if you can afford it.
T1 is 1.54 megabits per second up and down
The fastest you can realisticly afford in the uk is 1m/bit from the Cablecos and thats £35! ($55). Any more and your looking at paying £100+ a month! £11 for the equivlent of T1 would be sweet.
Scottish Eletric tried Broadband over Power Lines but they failed due to interference problems.
I have my Eyes set on new technogies such as ADSL 2.0, Wifi from the sky and 2 way sataliite for faster and cheaper broadband!
How do you know what the up/down speeds are? I don't see a breakdown in the article...
The problem is, within three to four months, you can enjoy the service with about half of the price you need to pay (which, however can not be lowered because of the contract)...
:)
is the problem clear now?
1.5mb for $17 per month? Who gives a f*ck if it is a 7 month contract. A 10 year contract would still make it a better deal than anything I've every dreamed of seeing. Give it to me now!
I'm stuck here with no broadband access at all. Cable and DSL are not available, only satellite which is expensive. Stuck with dial-up.
And this thing works over powerlines? And is *cheaper* than all the other broadband methods?
Oh dear! Punish me with that contract at $17 a month! Please punish me....
I pay the equiv of 55 US per month for a 512k ADSL connection with a monthly download cap of 11.5 GB. The minimum contract length I could sign was 6 months.
Welcome to broadband in Australia. If your household can actually get it, it's not even worth getting.
haha you have no life, oh wait a sec....
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
You call customer service and yell "MORE POWER!!! (grunt, grunt, grunt)"
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I pay 4200 Yen($35 US) for a 12 MBPS ADSL connection from Yahoo Broadband....and there is no minimum contract...
Just a guess, but I would expect most networking services to become economical in areas with the highest population densities first.
1.5Mb for only a bit more than $17 a month? Hell yeah!
The Broadband electric contracts you!
For the cable people, power-line broadband is also a possibility and the issue will again be pricing and reliability. I can image people staying away from power broadband because of reliability. If I lived in one these suburbs that has frequent power fluctuation (and I have worked in them), I would stay away from power broadband and install a UPS.
So the question is will the power companies install repeaters to reach the unserved population, and will that population pay at a rate that supports the service. Previous experience tells us the answer is no. We could implement another tax to help subsidize those who live far away from power lines, but I am not sure broadband is a necessity. It will be interesting to see how the (generally) conservative power companies and rural dwellers lobby congress on this issue. Certainly low population density suburbs and rural areas are more expensive to serve.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If I recall correctly, the technology generated too much intereference to comply with existing FCC regulations. I don't recall the specifics. . .
I bet all of the computer companies in Hong Kong are going to be receiving lots of calls about people who hooked their modems up to the power outlets.
Can I move to China?
Cable modems, modems, T1s, etc are ALL measured in BITS.
I read the article, but I don't know Hong Kong well enough to know what you said. Anyhow, it doesn't change my comment.
There is something different about the H.K. power system, as I remember. Can you help with this?
Meanwhile, in the US, we are paying $50 a month if we can even get DSL or broadband, and with luck we might even get 768Kbps down.
Sheesh, this sound like one of those In Russia message.
The HK power systems is 220v, same as the UK. There is nothing special about the HK power system as opposed to the UK power system.
However, because almost everyone lives in apartment blocks of 40 stories (average), converting one single building to powerline internet at construction time can result in 200+ flats with powerline. A typical large suburban development will be 10 towers, each of forty+ stories, with 6 or more flats per floor. If you own the company which builds the flats, you can build in your other company's internet, and lock those tenants into your services. Not only do they have to buy from you, they have to pay you a monthly access fee. Also, at build time, you can lock out cable and telecoms providers, so tenants have to pay extra to have those services.
dave "and you thought it was a free economy"
This article(From science and computers, a new face of Jesus) on CNN website shows the face of Jesus re-created by scientists. "The Jesus plastered on the cover of this month's Popular Mechanics has a broad peasant's face, dark olive skin, short curly hair and a prominent nose. He would have been 5-foot-1-inch tall and weighed 110 pounds, if the magazine is to be believed...". Search the web for more pictures...
You've got dumb friends :-) New York City has had the Holland since the 1927 and the Lincoln Tunnel since 1937, and traffic jams on both since probably 1947. Hong Kong's tunnel didn't look substantially bigger. It may not be as much fun as the Star Ferry or the little hovercraft taxis, but the real question about it is why anybody would bother having their own car in Hong Kong when there's no place to park. (Though I suppose that's not much different from Manhattan...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Your comment added some serious understanding to the article.
There is a big issue here. About half of the cost of DSL broadband in Portland, Oregon, USA is for the telephone company to deliver it. ATT has a monopoly on cable distribution here, so they do not sell cheaper than DSL.
Powerline distribution is cheaper and opens the market to competitors.
Most cable modem service in the US is 3Mbps or faster downstream unless the service provider decides to be lame and cap it at 1.5Mbps. Upstream bandwidth is usually 128kbps, because most of the service providers *are* lame about that. Older cable systems tended to be 768kbps upstream. The only person I've met with slower cable modem service is somebody whose apartment building runs the cable system instead of the local cable TV provider, so they cap the service at something like 512 or 768 and provide a wimpy 1 or 2 T1s to feed the building.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
At the raw electrical level, a T1's bandwidth is 1.544 Mbps period. There is no "up and down". Perhaps you meant "up plus down" which would be closer.
At the higher (e.g., protocol) levels, you can divide that 1.544 Mbps (minus overhead) any way you want between up and down, but the sum of up + down + overhead cannot exceed 1.544 Mbps for a single T1.
You can, of course, get fractional and multiple T1's, T2's (6.312 Mbps), T3's (44.736 Mbps) and T4's (274.760 Mbps). All of those are nominal speeds (there's a small +/-). In Europe, and some other places, it's E1: 2.048 Mbps, E2: 8.448 Mbps, E3: 34.368 Mbps, E4: 139.264 Mbps, E5: 565.148 Mbps, all nominally.
The foregoing is a tremendously simplified representation, but you get the picture.
Sigs are bad for your health.
7-monthes is a fungshui thing; it more lucky to make seven month contract because seventy-seven year old wise grandma of CEO predicted so.
and what "selected area" really means is that only those people where the power-line enters the house from the south gets service. people who has power-line from south-east / south-west is okay as long an there are three windows, live dear a pond (with live goldfishes inside), and must be in viewable range of five bushes.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
However, power companies could deliver via fiber optic or coax direct to the home as well. I'd love to see the US electric utility companies decide to compete with the telco/cable duopoly no matter how they do it. The advantage to us other than the obvious one is that the power industry doesn't have a vested interest in protecting either telephone service or television content providers.
See how they do this in Alameda, California. (Alameda is in the SF Bay Area, next to Berkeley)
Tech Public Policy stuff
The UK uses 240 volts.
220 volts, if I remember correctly, is common elsewhere in Europe.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I live in HK.
;-)
Most residental apartments (that I've been to) do not exceed the height of 40 stories. I'd say the average is at around 30 stories or so.
Your point still holds though
Don't quote me on this.
I think the standard for Government housing is 44 or 45 stories, or it was the last time I had to do some work on Government housing development. Hung Hom seems to be uniformly lower than that, apart from that huge pointy thing built recently.
That horrible development at Leighton Hill seems to be pretty tall, not sure exactly how tall though.
dave
Please sign me up for that deal. Granted of course exchange rates are different. I am paying $69 a month for my 1.5 Mbps ADSL http://www.instantnetworks.net/dsl A possible reason why powerline works in other countries rather than the US is becuase in Europe and other countries is because power transformers serve more customers elsewhere rather in the US. It would not be cost effective to do so here. Another reason even before powerline Europe was big on ISDN and it never really caugh on in the US. Why? Probably due to a money issue and DSL and Cable on the horizon. Also goverments control much of the inrastructure and so they can afford to undertake these big projects. In other cases there is no infrasructure to begin with. Example:Why wireless use has skyrocketed in 3rd world countries.
The issue with PLC is getting the signal past the transformer, which requires wireless hardware/inductive couplers/etc. In the US, the transformer/household ratio is maybe an order of magnitude lower than in other countries. Thusly, the infrastructure costs add up to a total cost that isnt competetive with normal broadband. When 30 HK households share one transformer, the implimentation costs for PLC are low.
This will change eventually though. Prices will come down. PLC will come to the US.
..Interesting - I just returned [I stumbled off the plane, replete with stubble] a few hours ago from Hong Kong, and immersed myself in the 'tech scene' over there - and hadn't heard a peep about it. To me actually, i beleive I saw cable prices more expensive than this - very interesting.
Huzzah! More open email relays in China to get spammed with! I can hardly wait!
[insert witty comment here]
Yes, but the newest new housing developments (in "New Towns" like Tseung Kwan O) do!
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skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran
cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices
with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first,
without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from
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