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?"

Comments

$100 monthly point-to-point

[davinciII]

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?

Re:$100 monthly point-to-point

[vasqzr]

Did you see the 5GB cap?

We suck 10GB a month down our cable modem, I'd hate to see what we do between offices.

Can this new service carry voice+data?

Servers

[nightsweat]

How many popular sites have servers that could handle the load from a decent sized community of 100Mbps?

Not complaining, just pointing out that YMMV.

Re:Servers

[Pxtl]

Thats what I was thinking. Really, the best use of this technology would be a medium-low end private server.

I am perpetually frustrated by the consumer ISP's industry's belief that all their little users must be good little consumers and not actually use their service for anything but browsing the web and e-mail. I find that most ISP's don't even have functioning DNS servers, which means that most IRC servers (and similar old systems) will reject you from logging on.

What bothers me most is the "no servers" policy. I am paying for the bandwidth - why cant I use it as I choose. Also, what if I want to be more of a server then a user? Why can't I get a better system for uppipe and trade-off my download amount? All the standard gear (DSL, Cable) gets several megabits per second but peaks at 200kb/s. Why is it if I just want to run a medium-sized UT server I have to fork over for a "business" account? Your average leech will have about the same strain on their servers, and yet those of us who actually want to contribute to the internet have very few options as consumers, besides paying for corporate-level accounts that we dont want.

Re:Servers

[Shishak]

"I am paying for the bandwidth - why cant I use it as I choose"

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.

This cost per meg doesn't even cover the loop to get the bandwidth to the ISP router. Forget about the cost of delivering the 100 meg to your house. Now assuming your ISP buys the cheap stuff ($75/meg) and is selling you 100 megs for $39.95/month they are overcommitting about 200:1. If you did use your full bandwidth you would piss off 199 other customers. At 200:1 they STILL aren't making a profit.

If you actually paid for what you used I'm sure the providers would have no problem allowing you to use it.

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.

Re:Servers

[Algan]

You know what? I would gladly pay $100 for a decent, reliable 1 meg up/down connection that won't restrict my usage in any way... problem is I don't know where to get it.

Re:Servers

[Shagg]

"I am paying for the bandwidth - why cant I use it as I choose"

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.

This cost per meg doesn't even cover the loop to get the bandwidth to the ISP router. Forget about the cost of delivering the 100 meg to your house. Now assuming your ISP buys the cheap stuff ($75/meg) and is selling you 100 megs for $39.95/month they are overcommitting about 200:1. If you did use your full bandwidth you would piss off 199 other customers. At 200:1 they STILL aren't making a profit.


All of the above is absolutely true, but it has nothing to do with not allowing users to run their own servers. If a user is hogging a significant amount of bandwidth and causing degredations in service to others, then I agree that the ISP should charge them more or cap their usage. But again, that has nothing to do with running servers. You can just as easily hog the bandwidth downloading data as you can serving data.

What you decide to do with your share of the bandwidth feed should be entirely up to you. Do they really believe that running your own secure mail server with 5 email addresses, or running a web server so that Grandma can see pictures of her grandkids online, is going to use more bandwidth than users who download ISOs and/or porn all day long? The policy and reasons for that policy as stated make no sense.

First (?)

[neuro.slug]

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

Fraud?

[NineNine]

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.