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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?"
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 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).
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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.
Uhm, yeah, but $3 a GB overrun isn't exactly a lot.
Think about it. If you have a gigabyte of traffic *every* day, every month, you're out about $100-$120 including the regular fee every month... not that bad for the kind of service these guys are offering.
Frankly, I'd be a lot more concerned about the 'no servers' rule than the cost.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
i had this dispute with burlee.com, they offer unlimited space and bandwith and then bill you a "non-disputable service charge" of $250 to $500 for each "infraction". Before i knew it, my $120/yr hosting was now $600+ . I reported them to the bbb along with at least 10 other people. Some guys were charged over $1000 and then took burlee to court...i felt sorry for them.
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|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
"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
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".
Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, USA laid fiber to the curb a few years back and provides reasonable transfer rates and pricing including some "allowing" servers. Check out some of the details here.
At the time it was first being rolled out I was working for a small business in the town and oversaw the our connection, which was fiber to the door. Speeds on the town network were up to 100Mbps while anything outside the network was capped at 1.5Mbps for $50 a month.
I've posted this before. If I were to start a DSL ISP, here's the pricing structure I'd use, for both residential and business use (extra support and bandwidth guarantees would cost extra, and most certainly be purchased by businesses). No restrictions (beyond banning DoS attacks (including being a bot), spam, open relaying, and such; if you are disconnected for those activities, you owe $250) and no ports are blocked. We'll even adjust reverse DNS if you ask, at no charge.
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.
Wha? I pay $150 for a quarter rack of space, and $200 per 256kbits/sec ($700 for a full T1) of pipe.
Granted, there is a premium b/c it is at a hosting facility on eight different backbones with garunteed 100% uptime (where they define 'up' as less than 100% packet loss, but in reality it is always up).
I'm talking about T1s to a location, not in a datacenter. I'm not sure what you mean though, if you are at a datacenter you should be riding on their pipes to the backbones, and a T1 should never be mentioned. I pay $200/mo for a leased server at 10MBs at Rackspace, and will probably switch to a better deal soon.
Are you saying I got a raw deal? The premium name-brand folks wanted $800+ for the same thing (asking price, of course, not what they would really settle for).
The best prices you can get if you are just looking for coloc space is to find a datacenter and use them directly. HE.net is a great one, and is fairly reasonable in what you can get, if buying in larger quantities.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I know I'm jumping on this one a little late, but I have a 100mbit fiber connection to my apartment, and it only costs me 50$CAN per month. That's about 32$ to you americans.
It's unlimited, they let me run servers and whatever else I want. It's a pipe set up for the condo complex I live in, in downtown Toronto.
Name your favorite distro, and I can download it in a minute or two. If their pipe is big enough.
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
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.