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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?"
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...
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.
You dont need 100Mbps to play quake (or anything else) with your friends across town. That's all about lag times, not bandwidth.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
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.
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 would agree with you that Mason County is in the middle of BFE, being that I live in Shelton, Mason County's metropolis of 6,000 people.
BUT, the reason Fiber is here has nothing to do with Schools. It has to do with the Electric company (Mason County PUD 3) using BPA Fiber and making it available to their customers.
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
Note that forking over for a business account here will cost you...exactly the same as the personal account.
Translation: 'For $40/mo, you can have all the surfing, etc. you can handle, OR you can have all the servers and crap you want with a 5 GB/mo cap. If you choose option 2, we'll be happy to sell you more throughput at $3/GB.'
So, I think they agree with you. IF you pay for your bandwidth, THEN you can use all you want. Otherwise, you're stuck with surfing really* fast.
* Depending on site/route conditions, etc.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Our Fiber connection comes from NoaNet (www.noanet.com) and uses the existing BPA (Bonneville Power Administration) infrastructure. The pricing we recieve is based on 95th percentile billing, so you aren't charged on what your actual use is, but on what your average use is.
Most end customers use very little bandwidth, but then burst when they are downloading a large file, demo, etc...
Currently we have no plans to clamp or cap as you refer to it bandwidth. We do charge more as your usage increases, but at under $2 a GB, it is fairly reasonable.
You honestly think that $39.95/month 'pays' for a 100mbps Internet feed? The current going rate for el cheapo national ISPs is about $75/meg in 100 meg chunks so you are talking about $7500/month. Decent backbones (i.e. WCOM, Sprint, ATT ...) charge $200+/meg/month.
You are officially outdated here. This is not 1992. Bandwidth is plentiful, and cheap. The pipes are bigger, maintenance costs are the same. I have personally priced out getting my own trunk and I can gaurantee you that it isn't that much through Sprint. Try about $350 for a dedicated T1 (not counting telco charges) with no bandwidth cap. In case you failed to noticed, backbones transfer huge amounts of data, and are no where near capacity.
I can get 300GB of bandwidth at a datacenter for $100/mo.
Now, assuming the fiber to the home is similar to Ashland, Oregons product it's a large ethernet network over the city. It has several ISPs that relay the traffic to the fiber backbone.
Get real people, the Internet is EXPENSIVE to operate and maintain. throw all the spammers in jail and the price would drop some I'm sure.
Wow. Could you please just disconnect yourself, now. You are about as clueless as they come. You are the same type of people who were ranting about the Skyline being brought to the US market and costing over $60K because that's what it costs to buy one in Japan, ship it over, switch the steering wheel to the left side, pay taxes on it, and perform the rest of the street legal modifications.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
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 ;(
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.
From the colocation page ( http://www.masonpud3.org/Telecom/Colocation/): Featuring a Gigabit (1,024 megabit/second) Backbone through the entire county!
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.
I too live in Austin, and have a connection via Eagle. I have a fixed IP from them (as they NAT upstream so without it I couldn't run any services at all). The people I spoke with specifically spoke about some people requiring a static IP to use VPN to work, and they didn't have any problems with it AFAIK.
And what's up with the news service?? They require authentication now?? What password??
-- I speak only for myself.
Read. The damned. Web site.
If you don't want the business account, you don't have to worry about that. You sacrifice the ability to use server. This is what we in the Real World call 'give and take.' And it comes with the territory of paying a lower price for a service.
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
T1=1.5Mbps, $350/1.5 = $233 per Mbps, while he was quoting $75/Mbps-$200Mbps!
Yeah, I really botched writing it. T1s are not commonly used anymore because they are too expensive. DSL prices (redundant DSL lines or sDSL) are much more effective for businesses. When latency isn't an issue, even Satellite is cheaper for what you get.
My point was that T1s aren't what are being used anymore, so bandwidth isn't that expensive. I completely missed writing that.
Calling someone as clueless as they come, when you don't even understand how bandwidth is priced, is pretty damn silly.
No... I'm just illiterate.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
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 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
Our DSL prices are higher than our Fiber prices because the phone company makes those charges higher....
We provide the best prices we can on all of the different media available. DSL is more expensive to us, but Fiber is only available in certain areas... There are petitions for customers to sign to try and help get Fiber into more areas, but it really comes down to what the Public Utility District for that county is willing to foot the bill for.
We are providing IP service over the PUD network of Fiber optics. Customers also have the ability to have On-Demand video provided over the pipe & other services like telephony. Those are currently outside the realm of what DONOBi offers, but we are working with the different PUDs in the areas we can to provide all of those services to our customers.
Jeff Wood < jwood [at] donobi [dot] com >
Manager of Hosting & Development Services
DONOBi
Before you all get excited over stuff like this, I have to tell you that the biggest business in Mason County is the QFC grocery store in the middle of town, an possibly the all but-shut-down-by-tree-huggers sawmill. This is no silicon B-To-B mecha. It's a cow town with 2 roads in and 2 out. The big passtime for kids here is not hacking, it's painting thier high school name on the train bridge.
;-)
I tried to picture a business with 'multiple locations in the city' and I almost spilled my soda laughing.
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.