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100mbps Fiber Service To Your Door

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the somebody's-door-anyhow dept.

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?"

6 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. Their DSL prices are higher? by Brento · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?
  2. Last mile by fishybell · · Score: 4, Interesting
    As far as being a good last mile solution, it fares well, mainly because of symmetric speeds. Of course the last mile is not where you're going to see the speed bottleneck, it's at both the ISP and the webserver/etc that you're connecting to.

    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).

    --
    ><));>
  3. We don't ever learn, do we? by NerveGas · · Score: 4, Interesting
    There are a couple of fundamental problems with 100 mbit fiber to the door. First, the cost. With real, gauranteed bandwidth costing anywhere from up to $1,000 per megabit (depending on the quality of the provider), that means that they are going to have to oversell their bandwidth like *crazy* to try and make any profit. With a 100 mbit connection, it only takes a very small number of kiddies with P2P clients to use enough bandwidth to make the entire project unprofitable. Five people using an average of 50 mbits/second each could potentially cost the company over a hundred thousand dollars per month. That means that they'd need a minimum of 2,500 customers just to break even.

    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:

    • capping bandwidth
    • overselling like mad, effectively capping bandwidth
    • charging a lot


    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.
  4. Re:$100 monthly point-to-point by Bonker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!
  5. From The TOS by Nick+Harkin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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

  6. Former Fiber Customer by hippoart · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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