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8Mbit Broadband to Become Available in the UK
UK Online is offering 8Mbit broadband service to the UK. The upstream is 400K, and there's a monthly download cap of 500GB, but at 40 pounds per month, plus 50 installation and a free wireless router in the package, that has to be among the best deals on offer from anyone.
I'm stuck on 1500Kb/s (256up) with 20gig a month for $50... and that's considered the best deal in the country now... it's not fair
I pay $105.95 a month for Speakeasy DSL. That is for a connection with 6000kbps down, and 768kbps down. That connection has no bandwidth limits. Not a bad deal, if I do say so myself, considering I can run any servers I want on the connection.
Now let's look at the offer that was described in this article. If we convert 40 UK pounds to US dollars, we see that this connection costs around $75 a month, depending on the exchange rate.
My connection through Speakeasy is roughly $25 a month more, has no bandwidth limits (and 500GB is very easy to reach on a fast connection) and a faster upload speed to boot. There is also no mention as to whether this connection allows servers or not. However, I am guessing it doesn't, considering that Speakeasy is an exception on this policy rather than the rule.
When you consider all of these factors, this "best deal around" doesn't really seem to be quite so great anymore.
Actually, it seems quite expensive. I pay $60 per month CDN (at 26 pounds, it's just over 1/2 the price of this "deal"), and receive 6.5Mbps down, 900kbps up, with no limits.
There's no installation charge, and the cable modem is included.
I prefer to have more upstream.. and a little less downstream. That upstream is far more useful. So is the lack of limits.
Oh. By the way, this isn't make believe speed either. Videotron actually delivers. I get downloads at > 700kbytes/sec all the time.
Here in Hong Kong, I am getting 10Mbps Up and Down, with no upload/download limit (Of course they said you can't setup any kind of server in your home in the fine prints but who knows :P)
How much? Not more than USD 20 per month! The service was there for some years already. And there are now serval ISP providing the same service so the price is getting even lower~
500GB = 4,000,000,000,000 bit
8Mbit = 8,000,000 bit
4,000,000,000,000/8,000,000 = 500,000
8Mbit/s gives you 500,000 seconds
There are 2,592,000 seconds in a month (30 days).
That means that if you let it download constantly at maximum speed, you only get to use it for a week.
Of course, if you can find 500GB to download (constantly), then you've probably already figured that out.
Ironically, here in the US, with cable, I routinely get 1.5Mb/s down, with no cap.
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Many are going to ask: How are you going to use 500GB? 8Mb/sec = 1MB/sec. So you would have to download(at maximum bandwidth) for 500,000 seconds = 138hrs = 5.75 days. Not very much. Then think about how much you could take in a month: There are about 60*60*24*31=2678400 seconds in a month. With 1MB/sec and 2678400 seconds you could D/L about 2,678 GB. That's 2.67TB! Still, the cap is pretty low for the speed.
At least they tell you the cap. I have Comcast and don't know what is it, but it is purportedly around 2.5 gigs a day. This service sounds like a really good deal to me.
Actually George Bush likes broadband and thinks everyone in America should have access to it. Thats why you guys get it so cheap. Over here our government are screwing us over with 1.5mbps down 256kbps up and 20gb cap for $50/month. That is the best deal avaliable and the fastest our connections get to is 2mbps. Later on in the year ADSL2+ is being released so we should be able to catch up to the rest of the world soon.
FYI I am in Australia
Have you metaroderated recently?
Britain has a population density roughly 8 times higher than the U.S. and only half that of South Korea.
Pre-referenced for your pleasure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_korea
http://www.free.fr/
20 Meg Down, 1 Meg up, 100+ channels TV,
Free fixed calls to all of France, Free
installation!
That is very expensive. In Japan, for example ADSL connection from Yahoo Japan costs you about 4000 yen per month (less than 40 US dollar) for 50 Mbps ADSL.
And also fibre optic connection has become very common and cheaper. For example Usen Networks (one of the provider in Japan) provides 100 Mbps fibre optic connection for only 2950 per month.
I use the fibre optic that comes with 5 static IPs. And it costs me about 5000 yen per month.
Download cap is totally never heard in here. As far as I know, all packages come with unlimited bandwidth.
If they're buying transit from a telco, the line they buy has symmetricaly identical bandwidth... The only thing that would make upstream more expensive per byte is if they have caching proxy servers they feed you through, so you're getting stuff from their network rather than IP transport they're paying for from someone else.
The 33:1 contention ratio (I never see contention ratio advertised by US ISPs, I note) means that for every 8mbps they're piping to the DSLAM, there are 33 people who could be trying to use that at 8mbps, so if everyone's using it at the same time, you're likely to get ~250kbps. Not as attractive, is it?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
In Canada, You can get 5.0/800 for $45 and there's no cap on how much traffic you can generate. Come to think about it, I've never seen a cap on cable internet. BTW, most people in canada have cable available, as there is usually only 3 channels (1 of which is french) if you just use rabbit ears. So cable covers most of the country. Cue the "But I Don't Have Cable" whiners.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You download more than 10GB's of distros each day? I can see 1-3GB, but anything more is crazy.
Contrast that with Canada: CD$50/month for 3Mbit, effectively unlimited (up to 8-10Mbit available).
you had me at #!
No cap whatsoever. I haven't tried uploading stuff yet, I just got my ADSL2+ modem yestarday, but it looks like I can hit 1Mbps all the time upstream.
Add to that that there's no cap whatsoever, and you can run servers as you want. Additionally the modem is free, includes optional router functionnality and you can add a WiFi card for a mere 20 euros.
Oh and they now give you 1GB hosting space with no ads, PHP, MySQL, and unlimited traffic (no pr0n allowed though obviously).
That shit rocks.
You can also get 2Mbps upstream but that requires disconnecting the baseband phone line (and you have to pay ~90 euro for it).
Oh, and to top-it all off, free.fr is like super Linux friendly. I remember back in the day when all they did was offer free dial-up, they'd really stress the fact that they were a lean and mean operation because they used linux on commodity hardware. Now, if you look at their various FAQs, tutorials and manuals, you'll ALWAYS find very very precise instructions on how to configure Linux with, say, their freebox, outlining which kernel extensions you need to get, how to compile and load them, so you can do things like IP over USB and crazy shit like that.
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My ISP provides me:
100Mbps fast ethernet (TP-connection in the wall)
UL Download
5 Static IPs
no connection fee.
Run any type of server.
290 kronor (4300 yen).
Free.fr is an excellent provider.
:
:-) (except NetApp for file storage)
For the 30 Euros, you get
- No upload/download cap
- free static IP and DNS name
- 1 GB Web account with PHP and MySQL
- you can create as much web sites as you want
- you can also create several email accounts.
- you can choose your telephone number
- you can receive the voice messages from your phone via email
The set top box provided by Free runs under Linux and almost all of their servers runs under Linux
Here in France, free (it's an ISP) has a 20mbps down /1mbps up offer for 30. It's bundled with VoIP phone (free when calling anywhere in France) and cable TV (some 100 channels)...