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100mbps Fiber Service To Your Door
BitHive writes "With all the talk on /. about the last mile, it looks like people in Mason County, WA may get what I've wanted for years--a 100mbps fiber connection straight to their home. The ISP, DONOBi claims the personal account is 'unlimited,' but since they don't allow servers, and have a business account which is capped at 5Gb/month ($3/Gb addtl), I think we can guess at what their idea of 'unlimited' is. Their service offerings can be found here. Is anyone on this service or knows something they can report?"
Since I doubt the actual internet connection speed will be 100mbps, this seems like an amazing option for businesses with multiple locations in the city.
Imagine a 100MBit connection between your offices for only $100 a month?
The mail system was the best way to deliver high quality porn to your house, but now with this..
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Getting fiber to my door is cool, but when will they get it to my living room? I don't have a plug for my computer at the door :(
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
But what are they hosted on? /. effect.
Commence
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
i get enough fiber as it i...excuse me i have to go to the bathroom.
Not complaining, just pointing out that YMMV.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
5Gb per month? If they really are talking about gigabits and not gigabytes, then that is somewhat ridiculous. Oh boy, I can download one CD image (of a piece of software I already have, of course) per month. What a great service. --n
I work in western washington and I just had a cisco rep in here talking about something vaguely related but he told us the only reason they can afford this in Mason County is because they own 3 hydro dams and have no idea what to do with all the money they are making, so they decided to pull fiber to every house. They really don't expect to ever recover the investment. Almost makes you want to move though...
the cap is stupid, I will say however that the per GB over rate is resonable...3 bucks is not bad. if the rate is even graded down to the say 10 MB over that would be better. my question though is, if you had that to your house, what would you do on the net? it would take oh about 2 days to get the stuff you want that month and then what...refresh /. and be bored?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Somehow I've gotta wonder when their DSL prices are more expensive than their fiber prices. Something's gotta be amiss.
What's your damage, Heather?
I wonder if you get a static IP on a personal account. If you are on a business account do you get multiple IP addresses? How many? For this price I would not be suprised to see a bunch of web hosting companies spring up there.
hmmmm...
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
This has actually been in place for some time and there are a couple of other ISP's in Mason offering fibre connectivity via the open access network, but full scale rollout has been slowed down for a number of reasons. Some political and some financial. Currently they are reviewing a wireless solution for lastmile due to unexpectedly high costs for lastmile fiber solution. Last commisioners meeting I went to had some interesting discussion taking place regarding alternative solutions for last-mile.
Real per customer business costs far exceed various estimates due to the fact that to sign up customer X at the end of the street you have to essentially lay out fiber for EVERY home between your splice point and customer X. And unless every one of those customers signs up, you may have just expended $15k or more (since they Mason is doing an underground install not poletop) for one customer.
I'm sure their backbone isn't 100Mpbs, but the rates are very competitive, and the restrictions are no worse than most cable or DSL plans. This would be more than worth making an ISP switch if I can play quake with my friends across town on a 100Mps connection. $3.00 per extra gig seems a tad pricey though...
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Trying to make a Suffix Tree
Sorry, I gotta stop coding and go get some fresh air.
Derek
No, you were beaten by an ontopic post. You suck.
Sure, they also offer a business account that has limited bandwidth and allows servers, but that account costs the same amount as the personal account.
So, I think they're being trustworthy. They're just saying, if you want to run servers, you have to pay for bandwidth. If you want to download pr0n, gobble away. It's a stupid model, but it doesn't seem duplicitous.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I thought only the baby bells had rights to lay out lines? At least thats what I hear from slashdotters who bicker about what de-regulation would do to the isp industry. Southern bell for example says if the isp's do not like it tough, they can lay out there own lines. Interestingly the government has specific contracts to the baby bells from the old bell laboratories to only use them and no one else when digging up public property like roads and open land.
My guess is they will try to stop this isp or actually bill them through the roof since they do not want anyone else to play ball. I find it unlikely for the second to be true since more supply = less demand for their bussiness dsl and T1 service.
http://saveie6.com/
with 1 Gb = 1000 Mb, if you max out the connection at the theoretical 100Mbps you'd hit the monthly 5Gb cap in 50 seconds. Of course, at actually achieveable rates, it would probably take a few minutes.
And after that, you could be paying $3 every few minutes. That sounds kind of pricey to me...
What this will be exceptional for is people who have computers at various points in the Donobi network. Here are the people who will gain the most: company with multiple office locations, people who's company let's them work from home (VPN, VNC, etc), and of course, gamers. Gaming within the network will be supreme.
I currently have Comcast. The connection can be flaky at times (supposedly because I am doing it wrong), but the speeds are incredible. I love having a 25-50 ping on the games I play, but when one of my room mates is uploading files (I'm talking to you Kai) on WinMx my ping goes down the tube fast (400 anyone?). I would love my 2.5 mbps down just as much as the next guy, but I would trade my soul just to get a synchronous speed even as low as 768 kbps (256 now). Now 100 mbps? that's fast, no matter what the other problems (pay for downloads beyond 5gb, etc).
><));>
Same TOS for all types of accounts. Basically, you being AFK while connected is not allowed... Idiotic rules.
Lalala
High speed internet access will not truly be cheap until it is considered a utility instead of a commodity. Until then, people will be making wads of cash selling it to people, and that is the way it should be. Once it turns into a utility, you will see a lot more gov control over it.
So, you have to ask yourself: Would you rather have cheap Internet service or an uncontrolled Internet?
Something we all have to learn is that you cannot eat your cake and have it too.
Thats just my humble opinion,
SirLantos
The flying hamster of DOOM rains coconuts on your pitiful city.
Call me nuts, but isn't advertising something as "unlimited" when it's not, generally considered fraud? I don't care if it's really x amount of bandwidth + no servers, blah, blah, blah, but the company can't really advertise "unlimited" if it's not. A real "unlimited" pipe to the Net at xxGig/S is called a T-1, or greater. Those are generally $1500/month.
100Mbs along with both a bandwidth cap and restrictions on servers? Not for nothin, but what's the point? If you couldn't run a server of your own (negating the usefulness of outbound 100Mb) and could exceed your monthly cap in like an hour if you maxed out your download bandwidth, why even have this? Oh, and you get to pay out the nose for the router? I'd rather keep my cable, thanks.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
One OC-192 will be able to serve 100 Warez Servers / P2P Users / ISO Downloaders, etc....
A similar plan is under development in adjacent Kitsap Co. WA with their PUD. The fiber net would service Bainbridge Island, with its ferry terminal directly across from downtown Seattle. I don't have specifics, but the timeframe is this year. And a lot of commuters would begin telecommuting and some software companies would be looking at cheaper real estate and high-speed connectivity.
Downtown Tacoma did a similar infrastructure upgrade, and attracted similar business from metro Seattle. (Not a huge amount - after all, it's still Tacoma.)
The second problem is the routing/switching. Let's say that they signed up those 2,500 people on the service. If even one tenth of them actually tried to use even half of their bandwidth at the same time, you're looking at 12 gigabits per second, which is more than an OC192 can handle.
Yep, there are some serious problems here. The kind of problems that they will only overcome by one or more of the following:
It looks like it will still be as good (or better) than DSL, but don't cling to the hopes of actually using 100 mbits.
On the other hand, I *have* been in places where one person could actually use 100 mbits. I watched a single download from Microsoft coming along at 11 megabytes/second - 88 megabits/second. Of course, the place had a barely-used OC3.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
no...its duplicitous in that they claim to be an internet service providor. Internet Service is defined as TCP/IP networking with server capability. internet ACCESS is being able to download from servers to view web pages etc.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
You could say its like a cheaper co-lo; most of the time co-lo is at least 99 bucks a month;same for a dedicated server. So 5GB/month is usually plenty for a server, though I wish the company would allow larger usage for more money. So you could probably download tons with the personal accnt, but I wouldnt upload 100GB/month on it.
That would be excellent for me. My Internet habits entirely consist of...
* Checking Slashdot and a few other discussion boards
* Checking my e-mail
* Chatting on Jabber, AIM and MSN
* Updating my website
* Occasionally downloading Redhat's software updates
* Sometimes playing streaming music (but not very often)
That could easily be les than 5Gb/month.
Follow me
100mbps? Wow! 100mbps is 1 bit every 10 seconds! I can talk faster than that!
Now, a 100Mbps connection, that I could get excited about!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Juyst to clarify, Donobi is just one of many ISP's on our fiber network. The Fiber itself is being laid by Mason County PUD3.
The PUD website is http://www.masonpud3.org
There you can find a complete list of retailers, and more information on the Fiber project.
From their site:
4 Port Router:
Installed to one (1) computer with CAT-5 cable (50ft.) $150.00 / Mo
Hmmmmmm.... gimme 3! Jeeze, Mom 'n Pop will buy anything, I guess. I'd be happy to lease 'em the other 3 jumpers for $50.00 / Mo, US.
"Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
They dont allow servers. Neither does Road Runner. Doesn't stop me, doubt it stops most people. What are they going to do, block all incoming traffic?
I pay about $20 per month for having a 10-megabit jack in my wall enabled, that's about par for fibered cities in Sweden. DSL in general is a notch more expensive and a lot lower on the bandwidth ladder, it's about $25 per month for something like 2048/512 ADSL.
I guess it has to do with cost of equipment and return on investment in densely populated areas (I live in a high-riser, so suburban villas may be different and more of a DSL place).
I doubt it from what you are saying there may be 100 mbps fiber to your door but the area that this covers is inhabited by the biggest hillbilly population in washington state. The only reason that there is fiber connectivity out there is that there is a school in the middle of nowhere that by state law needs connectivity and to make it anywhere near profitable the telco sells the accounts.
"In any case, you will be disconnected after approximately 8 hours of continuous connect time"
This isn't something i expect/want from a fibre optic line, neither is:
We expect that you will promptly disconnect your modem from our dialup facility when you are not actively using the connection. If we discover that your system is connected to DONOBi but idle (not sending or receiving data) we may disconnect you.
http://www.donobi.com/terms_of_service.php
Mason County! Why the hell are they putting that there? Mason County (for all of you who don't know), is a VERY rural community, who's biggest TOWN is Shelton, WA (pop. ~9,000 (maybe pushing it)). Most of this county is forest/logging country and the rest is farming community. What the...?
ASCII a stupid question, get a stupid ANSI!
The first thing I do when I turn on my computer is tune into internet radio, usually a 128kbps mp3 stream for around 4 hours a day. At that rate, I'd use up my 3GB quota before the month was half over, and that doesn't even include browsing the web, sending and receiving e-mail, or downloading files. I'll stick with cable until they can figure out a better definition for "unlimited".
I really hate those dispositions...
Many Internet service providers block all email from sites that are primary by senders of unsolicited email. In addition, you agree to pay the following in the event you are responsible for, generating or cause any unsolicited commercial e-mail to emanate or appear to emanate from DONOBi. $500 per event plus $1.00 per message sent, plus $50 per complaint received by DONOBi, plus any damages or loss of service(s) to DONOBi, as a result of any spamming or other violation of these policies. These damages include, but are not limited to system shut downs, retaliatory attacks or data flooding.
Translation into abuse:
Spam with reply-to address <user>@donobi.com
Replace <user> with name of loved one.
Is that disposition really necessary?
Unlimited access accounts are for intermittent usage/connection to our system as long as you are physically in front of your computer and actively using the connection.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
I usually leech on the order of fifteen to twenty gigs a DAY. These guys have not done their homework on how the customer uses the product...
...either that, or they are trying to present a politically correct image of how the product will be used, in case they will go the way of the other dot-bombs. In any case, they have shown to be pulling numbers out of thin air. My guess is that the executives' secretaries print their e-mail for them.
Wow... in non-Soviet Washington, the PUD pulls your fiber.
I'd explore Kara. Anybody else with me?
YOU FAIL IT!
This offer is complete crap.. what should i do with 100mbit when i'm only allowed to download 5gig/month?
/month...
that makes roughly 10 minutes download time for 5-6 movies
sucks...
BBB have have som ares where they give 100mbit connection to ewry household. well in most citys they only offer 10mbit. but it cost about 32US a month. they have an unlimited transfer quota witch is nice. i guess thats why many sites in sweden are on bbb 100mbit ;). some peopel migth wonder how they can earn money from this well they cant or at least not so far. but their bussnis model seems to include owning all fiber that they use and not rent fiber connections. so when their net is completed they can lean back. guess they will lose alot of money in the meantime they have allredy gone bankrupt once but then a bigger company bought them. too bad my household cant get bbb ;(
Still, even changing it to that effect means you could use your entire 5G in about 7 minutes.
/. a server with what we have now (client side) just envision what we could do with a bunch of 100Mb/s connections - just a thought.
Then again I have a 1.544 to the house (cablemodem) and my real life speeds run between 300kbit/s and 1Mbit/s (37KBytes/s to 125KBytes/sec) - so generally speaking we are still going to be limited by the bandwidth on the server side.
If we can
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I have access to a 100Mbit fiber connection like this in Austin through Eagle Broadband. They have the same bizarre anti-service as this other company mentioned has, which I find interesting considering they're on the brink of bankruptcy. I can't even get service from these folks as their sales staff seem to refuse to return my calls.
I also don't understand the anti-service that these broadband providers offer. They absolutely refuse (at least via policy) to allow you to even connect to your office over a VPN, much less run a server on your network. In fact, Eagle won't even allow its customers to run a game server, and they can disconnect you if you accidentally have a share running on your system (like who disables default shares anyway?)
When are these people going to realize that service is the key to success, as opposed to anti-service? What's the rationale behind the anti-service policy? Why can't I even get a sales person to call me back? Sigh.
Mod this down for a troll, but if their TOS states that someone has to be in front of the computer then just go get yourself a blowup doll and put its hands on the keyboard and stare away while you are away. Simply push the doll aside later on when you return. This way, someone will always be in front of the computer.
While I agree that the bandwidth cap might discourage home users, it still makes great sense for business users. The cap is set at 5GB (that's gigabytes, no matter what the website says) and our service is not affected if we go over the limit--our checkbooks, however, are. We pay a rate of $2.20 for each GB after the 5 GB limit. Consider the amount of data we can send for the same price as our (now backup) T1:
$900 for the old connection - $40 for the first 5GB = $860
$860 / $2.20 per GB = 390GB
390GB Extra + 5GB Included = 395GB monthly
We can deal nearly 400GB monthly for the same price as our old connection. If I recall correctly, we paid the PUD $200 to bring the fiber from the road to our building and we pay something like $5 monthly for each of our IPs (except one, which obviously is included with the base price).
We're extremely happy with the service and frankly I'm amazed that a county as rural as Mason has such great internet access. It's far better than is available just 30 minutes away in Olympia, WA.
I recently bought a house in a new "Smart Community" in suburban Virginia. The community was wired with direct to home fiber and 100mb ethernet throughout the neighborhood. The provider is a company called Openband - http://www.openband.net - and over the same network (although not over the same fiber) they provide our cable and phone services. Its actually a pretty good little packeage that is paid for in our home owners fees. (the cost in the fees for basic phone, internet access, and the basic cable is about $150 bucks, which is not bad. The whole network is connected out through a T1 at the moment, but as more homes come online, that will up to a T3. So while they claim they have 100mb network, the connection is only a T1. The entire house is wired with cat5, so I ahve at least one if not two data/phone/cable connections in every room, which is pretty sweet. All in all, its a pretty nice set up.
robjob
Astound Cable, a seren communications company, but like many people pointed out who has 100 mb/gigabit gateways or modems ? The fiber runs to a box on my garage and is then split to coax or rj-45, or phone line depending on the usage. :)
Their thru-put is great
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
With a blowup doll, who needs Internet?
Just a couple unrelated observations:
* This is nothing new in WA. Around 2000 we were shopping for an apartment in Issaquah, WA. There was a small ISP providing fibre-to-the curb service for comparable prices, with no bandwidth limits in a planned community. I cannot recall the community's name nor the ISP name, but for those who are in the area, take exit 17 on I-90, Northbound on SE Front St, Right on Issaquah-Fall City Rd., then take the first right (Black Nugget Rd.). Follow it all the way to the end and there it is.
* Without a doubt, the amount of bandwidth available for Internet-bound traffic is not going to be 100Mbps. But assuming they don't do QoS at the port level, having that kind of bandwidth to the curb will at least speed up P2P and gaming traffic within your neighborhood. You may also achieve better performance for certain applications than traditional DSL and cable services if the provider were to do QoS at the edge with something like this.
Here in Atlanta, most of the new neighborhoods have fiber to the door, and I've been told (by several reliable sources) that it's 100Mbs. I personally have the services, but it's capped at 2Mbps, and served as DSL over Fiber.
The fiber comes into the telco box from BellSouth like the other services, and then there's card that does (something), and I get a ethernet cable run from that card to my house. So when I hook up to my DSL connection - there's just a jack, and I run PPTP over it; I personally use a Linksys router to do so.
But the technology is there. They just limit the bandwidth, for obvious reasons. $50/mo.
I've hit 12GB a week each direction just running Freenet, after adjusting the weekly average to way below that (the throttling does not work as advertised). No significant file transfers were going on -- the throughput of Freenet does not make swapping large binaries rewarding.
It is a significant non-business need for larger quotas. I had to pull the plug on an active Freenet node because my ISP has his own caps and I couldn't get it down to the 2 GB per week I could spare.
1) calculate transmission time for a 64 byte frame at 56k, 1Mbit, and 100Mbit
2) calculate transmission time for a 1518 byte frame at 56k, 1Mbit, and 100Mbit.
3) compare each of those times to the transmission time of light from Los Angeles to New York.
4) do the same for a TCP SYN/ACK sequence.
5) discuss the correlation of bandwith/distance/UDP/TCP vs end to end latency.
From the colocation page ( http://www.masonpud3.org/Telecom/Colocation/): Featuring a Gigabit (1,024 megabit/second) Backbone through the entire county!
Look them up. Best damn dsl provder on the plante. Im a very satisfied customer.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
In our silly midwestern town it was not too long ago (two weeks or so) that our city council finally made it legal. But, now we have to wait for our state public service commision to allow this service to be instated. Which means more time before our market can reach a higher level of parity between cable/DSL/fiber. Supposedly our electric company has run the cable throughout the city, but not to the houses because it has been (and still is technically) illegal to do this. Its all the government's fault that we consumers cannot pay a nominale amount for our internet. I say this because of the mandates essentially making public services monopolies in each town. For example, I believe only fifty miles away people have a choice of Cox or Qwest high speed access. Of which Qwest I believe is comparatively cheaper than Alltel which we are forced to use. Just my two cents.
I dont like it when people think about what I think (say). Rather I try to make them think like I think.
Given that this guy was hoping to avoid restrictions, I would recommend avoiding Speakeasy like the plague. Their policies are very arbitary. I once ended up with a tech support person on the weekend who couldn't fathom what traceroute was. For typical home users, that may be acceptable, but for the /. crowd, you want Megapath.
--
Free software isn't free, but expensive software is expensive.
Why offer it there? It's out in the middle of nowhere, and is just rednecks and fishermen. They probably couldn't turn on a computer even if the only button on it was an on button.
Of course, now that I think about it, they look like a little mom and pop isp, so they couldn't handle the bandwidth requirements that opening up service in King County would consume. (King County being Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue for you lucky people that don't live in this colonial little village).
Someone used the phrase correctly! *faint*
--- "No matter who or what, a box of flowers is better than a smack in the belly with a wet fish." --RAH
I used to work for a company in Canberra, Australia that has built a fibre network in order to provide telephony/tv/video-on-demand/internet access to all of the city (~350-400K people IIRC).
It wasn't an ethernet network, nor was it FTTH. The "last mile" was up to 300m (1000ft) of copper CAT5. It was essentially ATM to the home. A DSL network if you really want to call it that.
The throughput to each home is 52Mbps so could carry a payload of around 36Mbps. Over this, you got your tv/video services and your net connection.
A typical video stream would take up to 9Mbps, with HDTV stuff reaching as high as 23Mbps. This still leaves >10Mbps for each home!
The network is considered to be an open network, the cable company isn't actually an ISP, there is multiple ISPs on the network all able to service every house.
It's a pretty cool setup, but developed with video as a priority and data as an also-ran. That doesn't really matter as data can continue just fine with retransmits, tv/video won't put up with that (results in blocking/pausing/skipping).
Anyway, here's their URL... http://www.transact.com.au
Come on, Mason county has to be the world capital for imbreading. I live in the neiboring Thurston county and I'm still forced to use dial-up. Why can't they give us this kind of service? After all our population density is higher than 1 person to every 6 miles and as such should be more profitable, right?.
... 8 hours of connection at a time.
I do web performance monitoring strictly for hobby purposes... That utilization is roughly 100 Gigabytes each month.
Thank you AT&T Broadband!
$3/Gb? Ouch!
I have personally downloaded over 20GB in the past month over 1500/256 ADSL. A cap at 5GB/Month is lame. I would love to be able to download things lickity split over 100mbps, but the thought of any kind of cap is, to say the least, not apealling.
DONOBi News
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I hate caps. I wish I still lived in the bay area. the mecca of all things tech.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
and should not be charged for. And I don't understand how we're still using this business model for internet connections at any level. Charge for size of pipe, not for how much it gets used, doesn't literally cost any more to send more data than it does to send less data, apart from possibly using a miniscule amount more of electricity. Yes, it costs more to install (and maybe maintain) a bigger pipe. But once it's in, it's in. In reality it doesn't cost more to send 100GB than it does to send 50GB, and charging by the GB is unwarranted. I always say, imagine how many businesses would not have gone under and would still be running today, and how many more customers ISPs at various levels would still have, and how much more money everyone would be making, if people weren't being charged by how much traffic is generated.
Holy Shit! I'm in the next county over (Thurston)! I hope they expand. What's weird is that the population of Mason County is about 50,000. Seems like a very limited customer base to go installing fiber service for. It's also a very rural county... lots of space between homes. Seems like a very expensive proposition, stringing all that fiber. I can't wait to tell my girlfriend that I actually want to move to Shelton (if you've been there, you'd get it)!
http://lartc.org/wondershaper/
I think timothy there read the page wrong, the donobi page says the personnal plan is unlimited bandwidth/month but no servers or bandwidth resale are allowed, where the business plan is 5Gb/month + $3/additional Gb and does allow servers on it.
now as for Gb vs GB, I really hope their use of Gb is a typo and they aren't using Gb as the proper Gigabit, cause that would mean only 640megabytes/month, and thinking everyone will think they mean 5GB/month (40Gb/month), that could be quite a nasty lawsuit
So at full rate you get 50 seconds of bandwidth a month before they charge you more! Spread evenly you get a mind blowing .23kbytes/sec. At typical modem rates I could use up 4kbytes/sec*60*60*24*31=10.7GBytes or 85.7Gbits/month.
So to get the equivalent of modem bandwidth for a month you would pay $280 ($240 + $40) at $3/Gigabit.
Compared to a $300 1.5Mbit sDSL. Where you could use 192kbytes*60*60*24*31=514GBits or 100x the bandwidth for the same cost.
I'll take my crappy cable modem where I can use as much as my 48k up and 200k down allows per month.
Maybe if that was a factor of 100 cheaper I would reconsider.
For the last two years, I have had a fiber
coming through my window from NTT, the biggest
telecom vendor in Japan. 100megabit service,
switched (no more than 16 customers will ever
share the bandwidth at the switch). About $70
per month. Available all over major cities
like Tokyo and Osaka. No server restrictions.
Yes, 100Mbit makes a difference. Clearly my
bottleneck is now my Pentium-16Mhz based
iptables firewall, with a bus throughput which
can't exceed 6Mbps!
Even better deal at rackshack.net. I now have a growing cluster of servers there ;-)
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
100mbps ... 100 millibits per second? Wow! That's 1/10th baud. You'd better
type R-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-ly!
Maybe they should consider shooting for 100Mbps?
www.sjbaker.org
They also offer that in Whatcom County, WA. All I know is that it's run through the PUD to a local datacenter. An office building in town that I used to maintain a lab at got it, I think it was for $300 a month.
The point to point makes no mention of bandwidth caps anyhow. So I would assume that it's unlimited as well.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
They have an obvious, absolute rule to no servers. They do want to drive customers to the "business" accounts. BUT If you actually look at their page, the business accounts are the same price as the residential ones. The difference being that business accounts have a bandwidth cap.
So you can choose what service best suits your needs. Unlimited bandwidth, geared at downstream only. Or be able to run servers as well, but be limited in the amount of "free" bandwidth you get.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
For once on Slashdot, it would be nice if someone actually read the original material before popping off with the criticisms. As unlikely as that may be around here.
They are selling 2 classes of service. Either:
$40/mo for unlimited downstreaming. No servers allowed.
Or
$40/mo for 5GB/mo, and you're allowed to put up servers, etc. And an extra $3/GB for extra bandwidth.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I used to live in Mason County in Allyn. The 100mb fiber was the only option for Internet Connection other than dial-up. I could get digital cable but not cable modem for some dumb reason. So I paid PUD $250 to install the line from pole on street to side of my house. Donobi wanted an additional $150 or so for setup as well - I told them I could do it myself for free. After much wrangling I got out of that charge. I was only charged $39.99 a month but the problem was that the performance was extremely poor. I lived there about 6 months - had 3 service outages, and consistently low performance. The line ranked below a 256K DSL line on most tests. Donobi technically support was completely useless. I think we were only 1 of 3 or 4 customers that had this due to the high install fee. So the technical support staff was very unfamiliar with the fact that Donobi even offered fiber, much less how to troubleshoot any problems. The downloads were unlimited but again with crappy performance who cares. I have since moved into Seattle and am much happier with my DSL from Speakeasy.net
In regards to those wanting to be more server than user, I have a question:
I would much rather have a 512kbps/512kbps than 1.5mbps/128kbps. If I were to peg my 512kbps upstream running a decent UT server would that cost my ISP more than someone pegging their 1.5mbps downstream running a P2P app?
Next let's assume the reverse direction were also pegged. Figure I would surf, minor P2P action, and connect to other UT servers. The other customer would (hopefully) be a friendly P2P user and share files out for others.
If you were to do simple math, I would be occupying 1mbps of bandwith while the other would occupy 1.625mbps. So my overall question is: is there a cost difference between upstream and downstream traffic for the ISP?
I enjoy running my own domain. DNS, mail, web, etc. I don't do anything exciting with my domain, it's merely for the challenge, education, and personal pride of ownership. As well, I can provide minor services for friends and family. There is absolutely nothing illegal about what I do, in fact I'm giving something back to the Internet community at large, in contrast to a good majority of P2P copyright violations. Yet what I do is against the vast majority of TOS while P2P is rampant and, for the most part, unenforcable.
Up In Winnipeg Manitoba(Canada) two of our largest telecom companies (MTS and Shaw Cable) have been running Fiber to the door for the passed few years and are almost complete... -Those of you from Winnipeg, don't go looking at the junction box on your house, the Fiber is terminated at the pole behind your house still.. Within the next two years, we'll be completely fiber wired.
OK, I think only on /. could a joke like that be considered 5, Funny. All the popular kids in school would be like, huh? or oooooooooook. But geeks, we find nitpicking technical details the funniest shit in the world.
God help us.
p.s. your computer shouldn't be in your living room if you ever want to impress a hot lady you bring home, should you get that far.
Here in beautiful Sacramento, CA we have something very few others have -- a choice.
Winfirst, purchased by SureWest Broadband, delivers phone / data / cable TV to thousands of Sacramento residents via fiber to the home. Comcast and SBC also offer service, but SureWest is better!
SureWest's data rate for home users is 10 Mbps symmetrical. (And it's pretty rare that I can max that out for any period of time.) I believe I am limited to 30 GB a month before I incur additional charges. I would't know because I can't find 30 GB worth of crap to download in a month.
I would imagine that eventually 100 Mbps service will be available here -- the infrastructure for it already exists. But really -- who needs 100 Mbps at home? You're not serving CNN to millions.
Oh and the price -- the package of cable + 10 Mbps data + 1 phone line comes in at about $100 a month.
All in this lovely community we call Sacramento.. Err the Future Greater Bay Area.
It's nice that you guys finally are starting to get what we here call FTTH (Fiber To The Home), but why does it have to be so expensive? All over Japan, 100 Mbps is about US$25.00/month. (Of course, if you're cheap, you can just go for 8 Mbps DSL for less than US$20.00/month...)
Doing quick math, in theory I could reach my monthly limit in just under 7minutes. That's some deal. Of course, good luck finding a 100mbit server but still... even @ 3Mbit you can fill up 5GB pretty quick.
At least they're up front about it.
We've got FTTC here in S.FL but BellSouth doesn't offer any internet / data services over it at this point. All you can use it for is POTS/Analogue modem. Gotta love it!
I live in Mason County, WA and use Donobi's 100Mbps fiber for my internet service. While the service is ok, the speeds have never exceeded 64Kb per second. Donobi's response is that they actually rent service from the local PUD which, they say, is in charge of partitioning off bandwidth.. So be prepared for loads of redtape and not alot of headway.. Also, the service costs $250 to install and start.. unfortunately, there is no other option for highspeed net access in my area, so I am forced to do it Donobi's way, or go dial up.
% units
1992 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: Mbits
You want: mbits
* 1e+09
/ 1e-09
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
100mbps connection isn't very good if you can't make use of it. It's not going to do a home user much more good than a cable modem, if you aren't allowed to exceed a few GB per month, nor can you use it as a server.
Kinda pointless, really.
If you want real fast internet with no transfer limits, come to Hong Kong...I'm on a truly unlimited 12Mbit (1.5MB), meaning I can do 129GB a day, or 3.88TB a month (that's full duplex, and I've tested to within a few hundred MB of the traffic limit). I've run web, FTP, and various game servers, along with different file-sharing programs. The cost? HK$36/mo, or about US$4.75. It's not available everywhere, but where it is, it's an incredible deal.
We offer a 10mbps pipe to the home, also, for stupidly low prices (26.95)- less than that, but I see our prices going up a bit (a dollar or two) over the near future. This is a cooperative RURAL initiative venture for us in Grant County, Washington, between Grant County Public Utility District and us ( a small rural ISP) because the enabling legislation in WA will not allow the PUD's to retail-sell internet services but must wholesale through existing ISP's (not a bad idea from MY point of view, as I was a pre-existing ISP offering dialup and JUST rolling out wireless when they came in).
This is a seriously cool state in terms of the rural internet access legislation passed by the current, Democratic, Governor Locke, and passed (and initiated) by the Washington Legislature. I thank them all, personally. This is a face of the emerging renaissance in broadband internet access for rural United States, and we have internet access here I would not trade anyone for.
"Come on down to Crazy Al's! We got bandwidth for nuthin'! An Infinite number of bits, at prices so low we pay YOU to take 'em!" There are two tiers of service - one price pays all with QoS issues thereby associated - this group is put into a pool of other users, tagged to the ISP's, with the guess being that some will use a bit, others a byte, and the cost will average out. This seems to be working pretty well. The other group is tagged uniquely for billing, and is charged accordingly. Prices may vary disclaimer, here. Bottom line is that we are getting Fiber to the home here for very 'reasonable to the user' pricing. Check out the PUD site with links at http://www.gcpud.org/zipp/
Crazy Al's House of Intertubes - where we make up in volume what we lose per bit...
I would love to see something like this show up in my area of WV...hell, I'd kill for IDSL. Imagine the great pings you could get with this! (being behind a frelling SLC and unable to get DSL, and being 1 mile away from cable of any sort SUCKS)
Here in Japan, 80% of the country has access fiber to the door and 100Mbps connections for under $40 a month.
And we have video on demand over ip.
That pretty much sums it up. I've lived here from about 2 years. I have a house in possibly one of the most desireable neighborhoods in the whole county (Cole Road) and you just cannot, under any circumstances get fiber there. PUD#3 says that to get fiber, you have to organize your whole neighborhood, getting enough committed subscribers, in advance for them to bring fiber out on an cost recovery basis, at minimum.
The actual deployment of fiber in Mason County has been very small: the downtown area in Shelton, one street, 7 blocks of it; a small area in in Belfaire; and a neighborhood north of town (a PUD executive is reported to live there). In total, there are probably less than 200 connections in total for PUD#3's fiber.
There is no schedule for when service will be delivered anywhere except where it already is.
The good news: For those who can get it, Hood Canal Communications (formerly Hood Canal Telephone Company), yes a mom & pop phone company, is the best outfit for fiber, DSL, Cable TV and POTS. Johnny on the spot, fairly priced, run as tight as a marine barracks. Alas, I'm south of Shelton and I can't get HCTC service; I got QWorst.
The bad news: one of the resellers of PUD's fiber has had an intermittent spammer spewing for a while. Check DejaGoo for the details. Someone, I forgot who, someone with significant influence has suggested that all of NOANET's IP space could end up in SPEWS if the spammer isn't killed. This includes all IP space for Mason PUD#3's fiber. NOANET has stated that they will not terminate service for spammers, something about public policy.
But wait! There's more. QWest isn't interested at all. There is a QWest concentrator at Cole Road and Cook Plant Farm Road where all the telephone service along Cole Road goes thru. The best anyone can connect there is 26.4kbs. You cannot get DSL there (3+ miles to the switch in town). You cannot get ISDN. You cannot get DS1. The concentrator is too old, there is no economic demand to put a DSLAM there.
So, I host elsewhere and suffer with slow pipes, rotten service from QWest and nary a chance of getting broadband within the next 5 years or longer.
Whew! I feel better now.
having faster clients does not harm the 'other end' at all, it helps reduce retransmissions on the server end from packet loss, allows for shorter connection durations (get each client handled QUICKLY so others can get a whack), and pushes for better server connectivity in the long run. if 10,000 slashdotters on 56K modems are trying to look at your site all at once and they switch to 100Mbit connections, the server will be able to handle more of them because it will be able to handle each page view in less time.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I would assume they use 10/100/1000 switched Ethernet on the consumer side and buy much smaller circuits from the big guys. Like so many posters have said it would be great within the ISP's network, but web browsing will be limited to the backbone connection.
or 500gb for $99/month.
http://www.calpop.com/dedicated.html
Just imagine, you could host a 4 box 8v8 CTF with virtually no lag!
I have lived in Mason County since 1990 or so. Mason County is the poorest county in Washington. They have been advertising this service for years and have yet to deliver. Mason county has a very small population, and the few areas that this service is actually available are "downtown" in these little ho-dunk towns that got their first mcdonalds just a few years ago. The downtown businesses are a hardware store, some antique (junk) shops, some bars, a pet salon... not much else. A bunch of gas stations. A few weeks ago we got our first chain pizza place (a papa murphey's). Hell, look at their map of areas that are covered:
m ap .jpg
http://www.masonpud3.org/Telecom/Where/Belfair-
Do you realize that that's a SINGLE road? Do you have any idea how few people live along that stretch of road? Look to the upper left of that map, where the big group of streets are all clustered - that's where people actually live. This isn't for the consumer -- it's paid for by our taxes (well, higher electricity bills), but only available to maybe 1% of the population in the county. I think the county would have appreicated lower electricity bills more than a fiber connection that's nothing but a pipe dream.
Hell, I was surprised that they were offering cable internet in my neighborhood... They advertise it and promote it, but guess what? I've been waiting for over a month for a "servicability" survey (which was supposed to take 3 business days). Please don't let your community model their infrastructure and service on that of mason county.
microbits per second, eh?
The Grant County PUD was one of the first in Washington State to install Fiber in this mostly-rural and agricultural county on the "dry side" of the Cascade Mountains. There are about 10 ISPs in the county (including ours. The PUD is the wholesale provider of bandwidth and the local ISPs are retail. Every ISP sells essentially the same service and almost no one is dual-homed because the competition has driven the prices down to the point where no one can afford more than one uplink.We have essentially uncapped bandwidth on 100Mbps fiber for $23 a month (non-static IP).
However there are political shifts in the wind ahead. The farmers in this ag area are up in arms over the idea that their power bills should be capitalizing the fiber services. Unable to realize the benefits to them long-term (like their kids finding jobs here rather than in Seattle), they want the PUD to finance the fiber without raising electricity rates. With the fiber rollout only about 20% completed, it remains to be seen as to whether the rest of the county can be connected before things change radically.
We all expect this cheap bandwidth to end as the Public Utility District (whose commissioners are elected) wrestles with a way to continue the roll-out while still keeping the politically powerful farmers happy. If the PUD doesn't do it, no one (certainly not the telephone company) will. But will the rate payers, the majority of whom do not understand any benefits to them long-term, allow this to continue? Stay tuned...
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Omg this is soo much better then we get in australia most users who can get broadband pay a similar monthly fee and get 3-5 gigs of data at 512/256 kilobit or pay more like 50 US$ for 1500/512 kbit. I would so love this here in australia :/
60*60*24*30 = 2,592,000 seconds in a month
5 GB * 8 (bits/byte) / 2.5Msecs = 16 kbps of 24x7 data.
Not enough to run a bandwidth-hungry game server, but still respectable. Certainly adequate for web, FTP, and email. (Until you're slash-dotted.)
If you want to run a game server, consider a colo. My team uses The NetGamer which shares their 100 Mbps Cogent fiber in 2 Mbps (uncapped) units for a reasonable price.
It's not stupid if you realize how many customers can't do the math and think 5 GB is a limit they might hit. Those smart enough to know how much 5GB is are probably the same people who will want to run servers.
One might assume that a fat pipe like 100 Mbps fiber would eliminate all contention for your line. Alas, big queues in ISP routers tend to cause problems on your fat pipe when a big download runs in parallel with your interactive traffic. I've found that the WonderShaper is great for both my residential gateway and my colocated game/web/ftp server. It suppresses queuing at the ISP, so that my own gateway can set priority policies on my packets.
Cushman # 1 and #2 are most certainly hydro dams.
Ok
lets get 100MBit fiber lets cap it at 5GB
lets use it all in 2 minutes
I live in Mason County. We're the ass end of Washington state, right now a v.92 connection is considered blistering fast internet access. This story is proof that Jesus loves me and wants me to be happy. I'll be going to Church on Sunday. Ok...maybe not. I really doubt if this company's claims will turn out to be anywhere near real, but hell, if they deliver 1% of what they claim...it'll be huge.
We have 100 mbit Internet access here in Japan. You will get 100 mbit sek both ways. First you need to order a fiber connection from NTT for arround 2000 Euro once payment. After that you need to pay an 10 euro a month for access to internet. If you want static ip accress so that you can put up a server it is arround 80 euro a months. The most new houses and flats all have that installed now so if you move in there you do not need to pay the 2000 Euro! WAKE UP THE REST OF THE WORLD.
Why is it that people feel personal accounts should be allowed to run services?
Personal accounts mean just that personal - not anyone else. I don't understand what all the complaining is about. If you want the service pay for the service. Don't just think $19.95 is going to give you everything. Now of course if the providers upstream connection was that cheap and/or overhead (which it's not) it would be another matter.
grmble... makes me want to become a yank... grmble
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I'm surprised that nobody brought up the other obvious reason for a no servers policy.
How many people are competent to run a server?
How many people think they are competent to run a server, and really aren't?
How can an ISP differentiate?
Let's face it, running a server can really muck up a network. Simple things, like open relay to mail loops to a misconfigured DHCP server acting as a rogue. Then behind all of the stupid or basic mistakes, you have a cracker giving the appearance of simple mistakes while doing Evil. Then you have the cost crunch.
A no servers policy is simpler, even though I dislike it too.
I would run to DSL if it were an option for me. Prompted by this, I need to check out how much more expensive a business account is. I have a mail forwarding domain, and would rather set up a point-to-point SMTP server than use my ISP's POP box with multidrop, for starters.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
On the other hand, if they let your service fall into the toilet you'll just bitch on Slashdot.
I thought that was what we were all here for.
think of the millions of poor fools that have to contend with dsl or cable...or dial-up. for just pennies a second, YOU can have broadband....please won't you help.
This practice of (at the very least) deceptive advertising has become the norm. My ISP (PTD) as well as many others who provide cable access, advertise "unlimited" access and claim that you never have to log in because the service is "always on". Well, I assure you, it's not always on, and there are limits to what you can do on the net. Hell, there's a dialup provider around here (Enternet) that runs a radio ad claiming to be the "official ISP of the new millenium".
Apparently, since one provider made baseless claims and hasn't been sued or prosecuted, that somehow allows them all to engage in false advertising.
"Reintegration complete," ZORAC advised. "We're back in the
universe again..." An unusually long pause followed, "...but I don't
know which part. We seem to have changed our position in space." A
spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the
starfield surrounding the ship.
"Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us,"
ZORAC announced after a short pause. "The designs are not familiar, but
they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have
been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown,
and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown.
Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious."
-- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star"
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