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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();
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...
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?
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.
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/
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!!!!
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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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.
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.
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.
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).
"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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
I live in Tokyo and have a 100Mbps B-Flets line since August last year. I'm paying $230/month (27000 yen), with no restrictions of any kind. I have my own server at home, and neither uploads nor downloads are capped.
I was a bit sceptical at the beginning, but my ISP confirmed the 'no restrictions' part after I emailed them.
Of course, porn is ilegal here in Japan, so I guess that's the reason why they have no problem in allowing customers to set up their own server.
My site
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.