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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!
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...
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.
Because US is a backwater country, in terms of Internet connectivity, mobile phones et cetera.
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
Where is your point? T1 looks pretty the same to me.
No...your math is correct, but I would like to know what internet service provider you have that offers you more than 1.5Mbps (or about 192KBps as you evaluated). My current provider offers 512Kbps down and 128Kbps up be default (I am going to start paying more and get 1Mbps down and 512Kbps up). so 1.5Mbps down is GREAT for $17 per month. And then I would like to know what T1's you have been using that offer up 1.5MBps? Cause none of the ones I have ever dealt with do ;)
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...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...
On the other hand, some of us have 1.5Mbit DSL which isn't shared (though capped up at 384)... mmmm.. DSL...
sic transit gloria mundi
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.
Can't speak for the poster, but here in the Wichita, KS (US) area, my cable modem can sustain downloads of 350+ KB/s (2.7+ Mb/s)[1]. The cause for concern on my part is that the cable company has never made any sort of guarantee as to what caps they place on the units. I could wake up one morning and find that they've capped me at 128 KB/s and have no recourse.
[1] Being a cable modem, my transfer speeds are asyncronous. My max upload speed is only around 28 KB/s. I'd be interested in seeing whether or not the powerline broadband in HK is async or syncronous.
You call customer service and yell "MORE POWER!!! (grunt, grunt, grunt)"
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Just a guess, but I would expect most networking services to become economical in areas with the highest population densities first.
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.
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If I recall correctly, the technology generated too much intereference to comply with existing FCC regulations. I don't recall the specifics. . .
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?
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"
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.
You are so completely and utterly wrong. Internet speeds are ALWAYS in bit per second. Like my Charter cable is capped at 768 kiloBITS per second. DSL is often 1.5 megaBITS per second. Dialup is 56 kiloBITS per second.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
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.
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I've been telling people this for years...thank fucking god someone else understands this, I was going to have to kill myself the next time I heard some DSL retard brag about paying $100 a month more than me for the same speed connection because he "doesn't share his bandwidth so it's faster"
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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)
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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
Didn't have to buy any marketing, I don't get cable where I live, I had to get DSL. Hell, I wanted cable when I signed up.
The point is, who cares where the sharing takes place. It's the same damn thing in the end.
Not necessarily, seems cable would be more sensitive to what other people in your immediate surroundings are doing, whereas with DSL the effect is more spread out over all the subscribers.
But sure, if you want I'll change to bragging about having a provider that doesn't oversubscribe :) All I know is that I do get that 190KB down and (more importantly) the 48KB up.
sic transit gloria mundi
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
Ok, you win. From now on I will start hating my DSL connection and bitching about how slow and inconsistent it is :)
sic transit gloria mundi