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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.
No service with a monthly cap is a good deal...
40 pounds? Now that's a heavy modem.
Letter
Can we subscribe from New Zealand?
Thats only two external harddrives worth of pr0n! Any self-respecting geek could easily reach that cap in a month.
This sig is false.
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
With the exchange rate currently running at ~$1.8/£1..
Plus.. I *rarely* max out my 1mbps line as it is.. who's going to have a good use for this.. (I don't use BitTorrent, mind.. the donkey does for me).
a free wireless router
And how am I supposed to plug in the network cable? I knew there was a catch!
I don't know the market in the UK, but this is not such a good deal if I compare to Videotron, in Quebec. I get 6.5 MBps down, 900kBps up, no cap, 70$ CAD monthly. The UK package comes up to 95$ CAD (according to yahoo.com). Mine is a bit slower downstream, but I'd rather have faster upstream. Plus 25$ CAD cheaper.
Brittain is a big slap in the face to the whole population density perspective on why the west sucks at infrastructure upgrades..
>$85 a month U.S. Jimminy
This sounds like a great deal for students...we split 1.5mb/s four ways, and there are definitely times when I can feel the strain...then again, we also split the bill 4 ways, so it's not so bad ;)
We've had 8 Mbit/sec ADSL in the UK for almost two years now... I know because we've got it.
g or y.asp?id=1
http://www.easynet.net/broadband/broadband_cate
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.
I pay half as much for the exact same speed here in the States, and I don't have a download cap... and the US is supposed to be lagging behind the rest of the world in broadband. You limies are really getting screwed!
/dev/random
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~
this looks pretty good. their other broadband offerings are good too. my housemate signed up to aol broadband (512k service) because it was the only one with no monthly download cap. these guys have the same thing for the same price, so i might check it out. good stuff
i wish i was but oh well
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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When I hear about how cheap and plentiful 100mbit is in parts of Asia, I sit back and cry.
... not.
/.
When I have 30GB caps here, and have the standard cable setup for USD$50/mn makes me pissed. Hell for a mere USD$500/mn at work, we have a full T1 (1.5/1.5) what a deal!
Oh well, keep posting sad stories
I'll keep coming back.
My guess, they do this to discourage servers and P2P. For Joe Average, i estimate internet usage consists about 90% download and 10% upload. So 400kbps is more than enough for most of their customer base.
Well I am suprised they are offering that speed. I live in one of the major UK cities and here we can only get 512k for £25 a month. What a rip off. I envy you all with all that speed.
Here on the grand old University of California network, I get about a megabit up, up to 3.5 down...
They have a 2gb/day per mac address bandwidth cap... but that's trivial to avoid... it takes four command line operations:
ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 hw ether (new mac address)
ifconfig eth0 up
dhclient
Of course, this connection is complimentary with my ridiculously overpriced education, so bargain/value is hard to compute...
Despite the reliability concerns of Verizon, they do offer a pretty hot deal on DSL. Here in New York, we get 3mbps down and 768k up, which is far better for bittorrent, for $30 a month. No kidding. That's alot better than 40GBP. We also have no cap. They have a 500GB per month cap, and on just 3mbps you can download 972GB per month. Seems like we've got the better deal here in NY.
Now, if they'd ever deploy fiber instead of just claiming it's deployed...
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
I'd love 8mbit downstream, but why is it still a sad 400kbit up? I can understand that upstream costs nominally more and they don't want you to run a massive servers, but that large of a discrepency (20:1) just makes no sense.
What I think would make the most sense is giving people a few mbit upstream (closer to 2:1 or 3:1) and then limiting them to something reasonable, like 2gb/day (best done a floating 10gb/5 days or something). That way the upstream is there when needed, but doesn't let people run massive servers 24/7.
I pay less than half of that for 8/1 and no cap!
I live in Sweden.
I get Road Runner Premium from Time Warner Cable, and today they up'd the speed to 8Mbit down, an the upstream is 512/k I pay $10 (as an employee) but the cost is $64-80 depending on the level of service you have.
Question: How many people have enough space to *store* that much data. Video streaming might eat into it, but even that doesn't hit the full bandwidth and wouldn't be 24/7.
Unless you count those that run big servers, have massive storage space, or download tons of pr0n and archive it not many people will get near that anytime soon.
Heh, here in Saskatchewan I get 5Mbps down, 1Mbps up, and all for CA$38. I guess that's what you get when all the bandwith for the entire province (bigger in land area than Britain) is divided between a population of >1 million. I guess there was no way around running big fibre backbones through here, and we just get to suck away at them. =)
GET THEM INSIDE THE VAULT!
For a rabid Linux hacker, it is easy to bust that CAP by downloading DISTROs after DISTROs not to mention package updates after updates.
Try Gentoo Distro for starter.
Yes, but Sweden's government paid for most of the installation of a fibre network. If you get taxed 60% of course you are going to get cheap broadband.
Some countries prefer a free and open market, however.
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"Brittain is a big slap in the face to the whole population density perspective on why the west sucks at infrastructure upgrades..." Isn't it because of obfuscated sentences and clumsy mispellings? Call me ignorant, but I have no idea what perspective you're talking about..
How fast is the connection from the CO to other major backbones? How much of the 8mbit is committed bit rate? How much is guaranteed if say all possible users start downloading at the same time?
Is that ISP's network multihomed?
And even more importantly what is the latency to yahoo.com, Torontos 151 Front St, backbones in NYC, and the Silicon Valley Sprint networks? How much is the delay to alter.net routers?
In short, will you see 80ms or 30ms playing counterstrike on your average server in the US, Canada or Korea?
All this is assuming their internal switches are all non-blocking preferably gigabit switches with either gigabit or 10gigabit uplinks, not 10mbit ethernet hubs. Also assuming their modem and CO equipment are both nonblocking doing the pppoe and breaking up 1500-sized packets to fit because most people dont enter 1492 in their MTU settings.
If their networks are in such good shape, more uplinks will be appreciated more than higher speec downlinks, maybe 4mbit/1mbit or even 4mbit/4mbit SDSL, especially if they provide static non-pppoe IPs. These things simply allow other possibilities even for the consumer market which wants to share pictures, stream out videos to relatives, and run game servers.
With all ISPs inching up their technologies, upgrading their equipment in each iteration, it escapes me why dont they quite simply lay down fiber optic ethernet lines in the streets running at 100mbit both ways, and just be done with it. Their operating costs will absolutely plummett, and fiber optics do exceed the ADSL distance. What is cheaper, a new cisco or juniper DSLAM, with countless ADSL DMT/DOCSIS modems, or piles of made-in-taiwan switches and fiber cables??
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
... UK downloads of major BitTorrent clients have increased by a factor of eleventy billion.
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.
Does it go on forever?
Here in Sweden this is commonplace. You can get 8mbits/1mbits from the Telco, pricetag about US$56/month. No download cap, no upload cap. You can get 24mbits/3mbits as well, but I'm too lazy to check the price on that.
Then there's several other companies offering DSL with various merits as well as prices.
Me, I'm happy with my fiber-LAN hookup. 10/10, no caps whatsoever, and five IP-adresses to use for whatever purpose I want. Price about US$40/month. If I want to I can get 100/100 for about US$80/month.
And yes, I know that we who live in Sweden are totally spoiled with broadband.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Bulldog Broadband tried an 8mb service in the UK for about six months, but dropped it because of poor takeup. I can't see this product doing any better since, like Bulldog's, it's only available in Central London where the population density makes it economical enough to cover British Telecom's exorbitant local exchange access fees. Even if you do live in London, you have to live within 2000 yards of an exchange to get 8mbps.
Although they say they have plans to expand this to other cities in the UK, I really don't see it happening.
Too bad Nehru and her daughter weren't.
The Raven
That speed is definitely impressive!
:)
Keep in mind that the price is in pounds, however.
For example, up here Sympatico offers their "Ultra" service - 4Mbps download, 0.8Mbps upload - for CAD$60 = US$48 = 26 pounds. That's with no caps.
Their regular service, 3Mbps down, 0.8Mbps up, is CAD$45 = US$36 = 19 pounds. Again, no caps.
I'd be interested to hear what the prices are like in Korea, for example...
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From my reading on Broadband Reports, I thought that 128k up couldn't support 3M down, and Verizon offers 768k up with its 3M down package. Isn't 400k really cutting it to support 8M down?
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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
or I can work for an ISP. Regardless, the ISP I work for is offering 20 mbit connections to customers using adsl2+, however, most of that bandwidth limited for use with the ip video we are providing.
Sorry what was that!? UK customers are getting something thats not a rip-off? whats next, tube fairs going down!?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Actually, we could have had that kind of infrastructure in the UK too. Back in the 1980s BT wanted to replace the existing copper network with fibre across the board at its own expense. The catch was that it wanted the government remove the restrictions that were preventing it from becoming a content provider. Basically, their plan was to recoup the costs through competing with cable and satellite providers, but the government (Thatcher's) nixed the idea.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
CableVision offers an even nicer deal with their OptimumOnline. For $30 for the first 6 months ($45 each month after), you get 10mbit down/1mbit up cable internet, with a free modem. I tend to realistically sustain no more than 8mbit/sec down though, but it's still amazing (no monthly cap)
Cogeco up here in Ontario offers 10Mbit Download/1Mbit upload cable connection, which is caped, but not enforced for about $70 CDN (which is probably like $50US)
I was just there. Now *that* is what I am
expecting for broadband. Its fibre to the home.
(This was in Kyoto). VoD applications (movies, pay for shows, pr0n, its all possible).
In the good old US of A we can get 1.5 or 3mbps WooHoo!
Hedley
I have 10Mbps at home for some months now, with TelstraClear ... Is New Zealand that ahead of the UK?
Might want to checkout the maximum theoretical inbound and outbound bandwidth of the ISP too before you rush into things...
It might be that they only have a 1 gigabit pipe connecting them to the rest of the internet, which would ensure that the only time you'll reach 8 megabits, is when you are only transferring to other people on the same ISP.
Then the routing might be so bad that you have 600ms lag which will make it terrible for gamers.
Anyone actually on this ISP and checked the lag, and the average speed?
Microsoft and SBC are supposedly teaming up to provide IP television someday. SBC has test sites in Missouri running adsl2+, reporting speeds of 24 mbit connections...
Wonderful, the telco Allendale Communications is already offering IP television with adsl 2+, with actual production speeds of 19-23 mbits. However, end users are limited to 2 mbits for surfing and the rest is used for IP telvision.
Of course I had to buy my modem, or pay $5 extra per month, but whoopty do.
Long Island , New York 1mbit up, 10mbit down - 50$ a month (cable)
The assymetry has gone too far...There should be at least 1 Mbps upload. Preferably 8Mbps.
TWC here in the hundson valley/NYC area has a "premium" roadrunner service that's 8m/512k for about $20 or so extra a month. I don't know anyone that has it though, so I can't claim it's true speed. It's not well advertised, just like the additional public IPs for $4.95/mo, it's buried in their FAQ on the website somewhere.
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.
I run Second Life, which is an online game / community / realtime VR thing. It pulls 100Kbps when it is happy, and 300+Kbps when there is a lot going on. If I run this for 40 hours a month that is 16+GB. I'm sure there are games which want more, and people who run games more often.
I'm also sure the ambitious can make quick work of 500GB, especially with avid co-domestic gamers who also download pr0n.
you know who you are.
You guys should stop moaning, it could be a lot worse. Here in New Zealand I pay US$50 for 2mbps down, 256kbps up, and if I exceed 10GB in a month the speed's cut back to 64kbps.
This is all because the short sighted NZ government decided against opening up the local loop. This means the government sanctioned monopoly can make a fortune supplying a crap service.
thanks for playing. You read it well: 20Mbits/sec DOWN and 1Mbit/sec UP. No cap. and that's for 30 Euros per month.
The service comes with free telephony to any french landline (calls to mobile phones cost something), and very cheap international rate, like 3 eurocents to europe.
Once you've got all that, you can pay an extra monthly fee to get hundreds of TV channels. With 20Mbits/sec ... that should do it.
All of this is given to you thru Free.fr triple-play box, the FreeBox. My Mom's been with them for a couple of years and has the original, more clunky incarnation of today's sleek freebox. Here's a picture of it.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
you must live in wisconsin, true or not?
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India the "heart" of outsourcing is a country that has horrible broadband. They do have DSL with caps, and there cable internet service is really bad. I believe in India there is something called a local loop where they use wireless transmitters to local subnets which have some sort of ethernet implementation on some private network. Just a way to suck money out of the customer. Looks like a lot of the telcos in India are out there to suck money out of the consumers and bail out. Maybe Bangalore and Bombay might have good broadband for people who live in the cities municipality . . . Don't know for sure. Which brings up another point, is that in India that there is big initiative to lay down tons and tons of fibre optic cables. What this will result in is pretty much unknown. But maybe the lack of high bandwidth broadband is good so the Indians can put higher bandwidth into schools, colleges and office buildings. Broadband communications will become like phones, one day the whole world will have every person and thing they own with an ip address ( ipv6 ). But yes it is most probably that the densely populated countries will adopt newer technologies better and force the market to better and greater technologies.
Only half a terabyte, oh no!
All your Sybase are belong to us.
Contrast that with Canada: CD$50/month for 3Mbit, effectively unlimited (up to 8-10Mbit available).
you had me at #!
Is that so much to ask?
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Through Free. It also includes TV through ADSL, and VoIP including free nationwide calls.
Talk about a breakthrough!
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.
What does George Bush have to do with the cost of broadband?
this is my sig.
has got much better in the last year
I am using a budget ISP and I get 24gb on 1500/256 ADSL for AU$80 a month (static ip, no ports blocked, free downloads midnight to 8am).
did 50gb d/l last month
---- Put Sig here:
Why does one person need 5 static IP's to their house? I mean... Isn't NAT good enough? How many servers does one household need?!
I wish I could just get *one* static IP at a decent cost... (well, free with my connectivity really)
At one point about 6 months ago, it was costing me as a Melbourne CBD residential customer well over A$200 per month for about 6 or 7GB total download at 1.5Mbit. (The base rate was something like A$80 but only 5GB was included.)
Then I switched to the $170 "business" 512kbit plan because I needed a static IP, wanted to save money by downgrading speed, and hopefully get a larger download inclusion. (That plan was advertised as an $89/month plan; the extra $80 is a "hidden" port access charge, not shown in their online schedule and carefully hidden in their application form, that blindsided my budgeting.)
This is particularly ironic because I was one of the first to sign up to ADSL in Melbourne - back when the offered product was 1.5Mbit and unlimited data for something like $100-$110/month. In a few months, the ISP (same one) realised they were losing money hand over fist (presumably thanks to Telstra) and abruptly changed the contract terms on us early adopters.
you had me at #!
we're finally getting wide rollout of Verizon's FIOS network.
:(
5Mbit/1Mbit for $39.95
15Mbit/2Mbit for $49.95/month
30Mbit/5Mbit for $199.95/month
Unfortunately, they aren't actually hooking up the good parts of the city (ie Cambridge and downtown) because apparently they don't like installing it in multihome dwellings. Yawn! Guess I'll have to move to Newton.
*hugs his 50 meg DSL* Ahhhh, 50 mbps down, 3 mbps up. I think that YahooBB would make a killing in other parts of the world. And better yet, I only pay 4000 yen for the connection (about 38-40 US $). On the other hand, it is basically just a giant LAN here in Japan.
I think tiscali.fr is offering 16Mbit for 30Euros/month in France already. The only screwup seems to be that 1st) they do not tel anywhere on the mage its clearly 16Mbit/sec eventhough from people feedback it is and 2nd) its only available in big cities ...
But honestly I was quite surprised when I first saw that...
For those of you who read french:
http://register.tiscali.fr/forfaits/signup.php
How come download caps seems to be The One Rule when talking about broadband in the UK and the US? I live in Sweden and I haven't heard of any ISP using download caps and several providers are offering 26Mbit/s down (if you live close enough to the telephone station). Currently I have 13Mbit/s down and up (VDSL), static IP and I've been running servers without any complaints since 2001 ( I haven't had VDSL since then but the same ISP). This costs me 399 SEK ( ~44 EUR, ~57 USD ) per month, a bit much for a student, but on the other hand I couldn't be happier with the speed!
You make it sound as if it was something wonderful. As somebody who's had Videotron in the past, I'l fill up the necessary information.
- In my neighborhood, cable would get slow at Rush Hour. This was back then with a 4mbps connection
- They constantly change the deals. Sometimes, they make things better and sometimes really bad. For example, We (family) left because back then, the download limit per month was 6GB and for that speed, completely ridiculious. we payed $270 cause we downloaded around 20GB. Not long after we left, they made a sudden change by raising the cap's limit although we were never informed if such possible change to occur in the not-so-distant future.
- Their slower plans have silly caps that are in place to make more ppl go with the fastest/unlimited plan. The caps are easily beat within days. At least 500GB makes more sense than 20.
That being said, we use AEI because it's $30/monthly for 3Mbps/800Kbps. Of course, the technical support blows beyond your imagination but it's fast most of the time. Of course, Bell's Sympatico (competing xDSL-providing company) isn't that great either "Can you verify if you have a microwave close to your modem?" shrug...
Well VZ is in my alley (Lewisville, Texas) installing fiber to the home. They "promise" 15mbps down and 3mbps up for $49.99. Yea, we'll see.
... is all I can say.
My ISP provides me:
100Mbps fast ethernet (TP-connection in the wall)
UL Download
5 Static IPs
no connection fee.
Run any type of server.
290 kronor (4300 yen).
I've been paying 60 Euro per month since year 2000 for a 10 Mbits connection with unlimited traffic. It's behind a NAT server, so I don't have a public address, but that not a very big limitation for residential Internet use.
One of the fastest ADSL connections is 2560/768 Kbit/s for 136$ with no download cap. I pay about 50$ for my 256/128 Kbit/s. So it really sucks to some of your connections. The fastest connection, that I have heard of, is availible in Lund in Sweden. 1 Gbit/s for about 100$. http://www.labs2.com/pr/press2004113001.html
However, no way how you slice and dice this, the people in the UK really do live in the 1800's bandwidth-wise.
I recently moved house and had to get ADSL installed, when looking I noticed UK Online and this 8MB offer. I was very interested....
I had pre-emptively got my network set up, and bought an ADSL router to match my specific needs while waiting for the phone line to be installed to then be able to get ADSL.
After getting the phone line and doing a check for 8MB availability on their web site, the house was in a 8MB area, great!
I rang them to sign up only to find that they woulnd't let me use any other router than they one they would sell you to "assure continuous service" and "be able to support the hardware". At the time (late december last year) the router they were selling was £70, which is a bit expensive for anyone who knows what they are doing.
I did a bit more checking and found out that other ISPs will be offering 8MB services around spring, so I'd recommend to wait and get a better offer later.
Some countries also prefer free healthcare.. .. and a unemployment that's possible to live on (think rent + electricity + food) .. and government-paid salary when a company goes bankrupt
Income tax in Stockholm is around 30%
The VAT/GST is 25%
Employer tax (which us mortals never see) is 12%
Of course, if you're clever you can get rid of a lot of VAT/GST by simply purchasing things you need to be able to do your job.
Myself? I'm just waiting to deduct my new a64 3500+ rig, my new tv + stereo ("video-conferenceing equipment") - and my ISP bills.
Trust me - us Swedes can be really sleazy when it comes to claiming our money back - so in the end, it's not really that expensive.
Why is it actually cheap? because the exchange rate between USD/GBP doesn't matter! Say, a $45 game would also cost £45 here, and a guy who earns $15k a year would get £15k if he had the same job here!
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
Atleast we can afford toothpaste, shame about the dollar going down, damn shame that.
Thank you, Thank you.
Not trolling here, but that kind of speed will cost you about 25-30 bucks a month here in France, with better upload speed, no cap, and TV service to boot.
Sucks to be British....
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
Not sure why europe is very expensive on internet connection, but here in Japan I pay about 50 US dollars for the FTTH which gives you 100Mbit/s up and down and no bandwidth limit and no port limit, so I run some servers at home.
The ISP costs about 15 US dollars with one static IP, but there are others including which only costs 5 US dollars, but this is not static IP.
The line literally never goes down and is mostly at full speed (it gets about 50Mbit/s in real world). It's always the other end, that is choking, even on many many multiple connections at once.
On the other hand, for 8Mbit/s DSL lines, we have to pay about 30 us dollars.
Japan did a great job on cheap internet connection imo.
I see a number of comments pointing out that you can get better deals in other countries. Well, that's great - I'm happy for you all, really.
However, the point you're missing is that - at the moment at least - this is an incredible deal in the UK. I currently pay £26/month for a 512/256 connection (static IP, no caps or filtering), and have seen a couple of 2Mb/256 connections offered for about the £40/month mark.
So, yeah, I'm envious of France and Hong Kong and everywhere else, but for the UK, this is incredible (in the literal sense of hardly being credible - time to check the small print...)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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im pissed.. just moved house.. where i lived before i could get it... and guess what? now i cannot :(
I've seen the UK Online website a while ago. It is great news that Local Loop Unbundling is finally starting in the UK.
To everyone saying the UK Online offer is terrible to what they have in their countries... yes I am perfectly aware of that! The UK is totally lagging behind most countries for ADSL. Currently a 512/256Mb connection with no download cap will cost at least £20 a month.
But why do you think Free.fr can offer such a great deal? Local Loop Unbundling. Which started in France in 2001.
Now I hope that more ISPs will follow UK Online's and Easynet's (who already make UK Online's offer look really cheap as they only do 'business broadband') lead, and that we will see increased competition.
Here in France
I get a 12Mbps/1Mbps without data volume limits for 30. (39$ or 20£) At this price the IP telephony and DSL TV is included.
Hey the brit it's time to revive the old middle age habits and invade France all over again (you want to consider southern France first).
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But still, I get a symmetrical 10Mbit up/10Mbit down, no download caps for roughly $40/£20 a month here in Sweden - pretty much a mainstream connection.
My parents have me beat though: they have 100mbit fiber for ~$30/month. There are even some places that are supposedly selling gigabit connections to consumers, but I don't know anyone that actually has it.
Just means that location is everything when it comes to getting speedy internet access. You have to be lucky enough to live in a decent spot.
Well, compared to the 0.384/0.128 Mpbs I get for the same amount of money where I live, I'd say it's right about time I should start weeping like an infant. Either that or leave the country :(
Considering that the UK is currently stuck with deals like 512/128 for £20 a month
Can I suggest, then, that you take a look at Metronet . They offer, IMHO, a better deal.
(No, I don't work for them, just a satisfied customer)
I have 4Mb from Bulldog at the moment. UK Online can't supply me in my area. In general, Bulldog has a much better coverage and they throw in a rental free phone with free UK landline calls.
Did he inhale?
In France, Free.fr gives up to 20 Mbit/s (down) / 1 Mbit/s (up) + TV + free phone for 29.99 /month.
This ISP is particular because they designed their own modem/router. They are the ones that innovates and push the market in France.
I used to be with Metronet for dial-up (i stil use them for hosting). They are local to where i live (Harrow) and they are pretty good, and friendly folks.
The only reason why i left them, was to get the NTL £10 a month unlimited dialup, which was a total joke, then when i moved to DSL, the offeres metronet had back then were not available. I feel i woudl have got it much cheaper had I stuck with metronet.
Have a nice day!
with 512k upload, and no cap, for around 60 euros around here.
i had a sig, once..
I run a GSP company, and we use about 400-500GB of bandwidth a month per server, so unless your going to download lots of films, music tv programs etc, which is bad due to the fact that the people who make them DO NOT get their money for their work, i doubt you would go over 500gb very often
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That £40 will buy you a hell of a lot more than $100 at the moment.
I can get a 8Mbps/1Mbps ADSL line WITHOUT transfer caps or other restrictions for 7 euros less per month in Finland and this country is quite expensive usually. ;)
www.plus.net, who I use, do 2Mb/256Kb 50:1 home ADSL with 2Gb bandwidth - their 'lite' service - and you pay £2 for each Gb over and beyond the 2Gb.
Ideal for me (a light user by the standards of most around here) and a really fair and decent company to deal with.
John
I admit that I don't know which fiber network any of the various broadband companies use, but I think some of them have their own fiber networks instead of using the ones from the previously government owned national telco.
:-) (However, it was a special deal that was only available to student apartments, but still...)
:-(
:-)
The biggest cause for the low prices is actually fierce competition among broadband providers since 1999. Back then you could get 10/10Mbit for $40/month if you lived in a few lucky cities, and since then all the other competitors have had to match that price.
Back in 2002 I paid $30/month for the same speed, and that was provided by the biggest competitor of the national telco, so I'm *pretty sure* none of that fiber was paid for by taxes in any way.
Now I pay $50 for 8/1, because I could only get ADSL. If I had lived closer to the nearest phone station, I could have gotten 24/10 for the same price using VDSL. Stupid copper wire quality.
Anyway, the tax-funded fibre networks you are thinking of usually exist in small and remote cities where the city council decided that a local fibre network would make the city more attractive to people and businesses. I don't know if it's working, but it's apparently very nice if you live there.
Forgot to say that the cost is £20/month all-in, and there's no activation fee IIRC. I don't work for them, by the way - just a satisfied customer.
John
I have optic fibre directly into my apartment from LABS2 for 245 SEK (roughly £16) per month. It's supposed to be 10Mbit/s in both directions, but they don't seem to cap the incoming speed so I routinely get upwards of 20Mbit/s. No DL cap either. Only trouble is diskspace when a couple of gigs per hour come down the line... This is cheap even for Sweden, but not the cheapest. LABS2 offer approx. the same service for 125SEK (£8) per month in other cities.
DOCSIS 2.0 gives up to (roughly) 40Mbps down and 10Mbps up on really good cable plant. DOCSIS 1.0/1.1 manage uploads of 5Mbps maybe, 2Mbps more typically.
ADSL can get 8Mbps down, on a good day with a following wind. Any distance from the DSLAM and 2Mbps is far more likely to be the maximum. The ADSL forum says that 640kbps is the max upstream on ADSL. In fact, some kit can pull approaching 1Mbps, but that's it. Even ADSL2plus doesn't raise the upstream by very much.
Anyway, ADSL/Cable are inhernently asymmetric in speed, so a 4:1 down:up speed ratio is sensible and common.
Real speed requires something like fibre to the home, i.e. expending serious money in new infrastructure build rather than using the Technology Genie to wring slightly more performance out of sunk capital.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
When they first launched, the T's & C's had a 4GB daily download cap...
now it's four times better, but note that this only allows about 30 minutes of full speed access a day!
I noted it on my rarely updated blog - Fatal flaw in 8MB Broadband
It's really common, most people have 8 or 10Mbit, depending of which technology is being used in the area. (DSL or fibre).
In some areas, people get 100Mbit downstream.
Yes, the P2P filesharing usage is quite heavy.
I pay SEK 399/mo (USD 56/mo) for 24/3 no cap or port blocking. I also get a fixed IP-address.
Actual speed varies depending on how close you are to the nearest switch (24 mbit probably requires you to live inside the switch - peak measured speed for me has been 18-20 mbit).
Standards Schmandards
We have fluoride in our water now, so the yellow teeth thing doesn't hold anymore. Besides, I've seen plenty of hicks with brown fangs.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
In India DSL http://www.bsnl.co.in/service/dataone_tariff.htm the price is about US$200/month for 2MBPS with a 40GB usage limit
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Both Wanadoo and Neuf do 8Mb/s for around 30 euros per month (around £20/month, half the price of the slashvert). Wanadoo throw in a free wireless router, neuf just the modem. All uncapped, along with a fixed IP should you desire.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Exactly, Free really is great. I work for a *large* organisation, and at one stage I had more bandwith at home than there was for everyone at work. Go free...
I would love to have such deal here in USA. I pay $30 for hmm ( do not want to use bad words ) DSL, and get 15K up and 180K down.
I read about this in about November and went to the site to check about availability to discover that although they covered the area I was in (Glasgow) it would not be active till about Feb.
t m
Info at BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4016031.s
Also to add my voice to the many Brits comments about connection speeds, "Over 2Mb?!?! For only 40 quid!?! WOW! Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie!!"
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
I also use PlusNet, so just to offer a balancing view...
Their products are generally very good: reasonably priced, and it's clear both how much you get to up/download and how fast for your money.
However, their customer service is among the worst I've ever encountered. When I first switched to them, they managed to lose my order for weeks (despite their on-line order-tracking service) until I rang to ask what was happening and they discovered that somebody had "manually edited the database" in some way that broke everything. Then they discovered that having said I could have 1MB, I could only get 512K at my location, and we went round again. Then they forgot to send the splitters that were supposed to be included with the router I was buying from them so I couldn't actually connect. Then they sent me splitters that didn't work (my phone doesn't actually ring now if someone calls me, as I discovered when I missed a call worth a lot of money that I'd been sitting next to the phone for an hour waiting for) and to add insult to injury, when I pointed this out their tech support people suggested I buy a different kind of splitter. (I was paying them for the ones they'd given me as part of the deal I bought.) I gave up in disgust, but my phone still doesn't work.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Even this doesn't seem so hot now; http://www.southern-electric.co.uk/broadband/index .asp
I have a 1.5MB link and that is considered lightening fast over here. What the hell happened to this once-great nation that's what I'd like to know!
12 Mbit Adsl for 40 Euro/month (Tiscali)
Based on current exchange rates, it costs US$75.29 per month for that new UK broadband service. That is exorbitantly expensive compared to the current rate for Comcast High-Speed Internet here in the USA, which is US$42.95 per month for Comcast cable TV customers (at least here on the US West Coast).
Small wonder why the French service costing US$39.09 per month at current exchange rates is truly a steal, especially with the 20 mbps download speeds.
this and this
unused account
In Sweden Bredbandsbolaget sells 24 Mbit for 40/month.
Not very cheap, but fast!
Just signed up for one of their 'business' accounts...and basically only costs me about $5/mo more than Bellsouth wanted to charge me for a DSL account with static IP.
This doesn't sound like THAT great of a deal...especially with the download caps...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What? That's outrageous, I pay more than that for 28k dialup with strict usage limits. Although a 2GB monthly cap pretty much makes a 1152k connection almost useless.
I've had UkOnline 8mb for a while now, great, but they block ports 80 and 8080 for obvious reasons, bit of a bummer really when all you want to do is host a few files ! Mike
The useful bandwidth is the symmetric part.
The rest is deceitful advertising.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
NOT. For those of us who wanted a proper internet connection this system is worthless, why? because we've already got ourselves cable-based broadband.
Is there any reason why 8MBit won't work on cable? I'd have though that it would work better.
Why will no-one pander to those who don't get their phone form one of the most expensive providers in the country?
FGD 135
Metronet are brilliant, and a very well kept secret!
Seems that a speed war may be developing between DSL and Cable providers. Here in Cincinnati (in the US...) Road Runner just upped to 5mbit down but stayed at 512kbit up.
So this 8mbit in the UK would mean this isn't just a US phenomonon, which is a good thing for us all I think.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Specifically, ports 80, 8080, 3128 and 25 are blocked.
Port 25 (SMTP) is no big deal, but if you were hoping to run a web server or even just a backup web server for when your colo box fails...
The upstream bandwidth is comparatively low. With peercasting being the obvious solution to relieving popular free sites of their cost burden, the trend to highly asymmetric home links is not good.
The RADSL technology is intrinsically asymmetric. It sustains a fixed download rate, while doing its best for upload according to the line quality. To increase the upload rate, it would have to reduce the download rate for technical reasons due to using the same copper pair. That is one reason for the relatively low upload rate.
That, however, does not explain why nobody is making adaptive RADSL which can increase the upload rate at the expense of download when there is demand for that. Specifically, when peercasting, there is no technical reason why the modem could not balance the two rates, and when serving, no reason it could not make the upload rate higher than the download. Perhaps we'll have to wait a few more generations of ADSL before we see this. Or perhaps we're supposed to be "consumers" until the revolution ;)
Ho hum,
-- Jamie
... I have over 8MB at my place... 1024k upstram. I pay $0. This move came after I upgraded all of our "regular" DSL users (1.5Mbit/256k) to 3Mbit/512k. I just had to have my home connection faster so I pumped it up to 8MB/1024K. Goodtimes.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Most telco's adopted ADSL because it's one of the only technologies with the reach to actually get to all of their customers. There are other, faster DSL technologies but the range is quite limited to attain those speeds. The problem is in the "A." Asynchronous means that it cannot transfer the same rate in both directions at the same time. The capping took place because they didn't want people to run servers AND they didn't want all the lusers with their infected PC's spewing out virii/spam at 3Mbit - so 256k is fine. Plus, most people really don't need a lot of upstream bandwidth unless they are sharing files AND performing another task like browsing the internet. I know on this particular website, I will get flak for these comments, but most of you probably know that upstream really isn't needed. By us, yes, but by Joe User, no. More upstream would just help the spread of ads/spam/virii become a lot more of a PITA than it is currently, IMHO. By the way, at 400k you can still host a website - you just can't host a really popular website.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Ahem, make that Asymmetric.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
1. Your not physically bigger than everyone at all. Canada = bigger.
2. You are correct, we implemented a copper-based system early on whereas the East held off as much as possible and adopted fiber very early on. Now they can offer wicked services without having to replace the whole phone system.
3.Phone companies (Independent) in the States were a lot of mom-and-pop shops that had no idea how to design a phone system properly. What this lead to was not being able to offer these new-fangled services. Eventually they were purchased by large companies that then monopolized the industry.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
I was upset moving from Pipex UK to Australia, given everything is download capped here. Turns out it doesn't cause me any problems in reality, and I'm quite a heavy downloader (well more than anyone I know IRL) Using iinet in Melbourne Australia. [www.iinet.net.au] 256k download (can't remember upload) 40AUD ~ 16 quid per month Download cap of 12GB per day (PLUS 12GB in the "overnight zone") - so the total is 24GB. Heavy bittorrent use, never reached total. I expect that's something to do with my low speed connection!
That was before BT got privatised in 1985.
That idea was banded around a bit, but if it had gone ahead it would of been a horrible bueacratic mess -- this is a time when it took upto 3 months to get a simple bog standard phone line installed -- how do you think BT would of compete with incredibly expensive equipment - fiber was just starting to become viable for data transfer then. God knows how they would of done anything useful with it.
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