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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 :(
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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.
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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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.
"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
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.
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