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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.
40 pounds? Now that's a heavy modem.
Letter
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!
Yea. That monthly cap effectively limits you to about 193k/s sustained 24/7 or you would end up going over the cap by the end of the month with 24/7 downloading. 500GB could be used up in roughly 6 days of using the max download speed 24/7.
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~
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.
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Considering that the UK is currently stuck with deals like 512/128 for £20 a month, or NTLs most generous 1500/128 service for £35 a month, £40 a month for 8000/400 is a bargain.
I wonder if they'll offer a 2000/200 for £20 a month?
I expect this is why NTL are rumoured (well, I recall them sending a letter anyway) to be upping speeds from 300,750,1500 to 1000,2000,3000 in the near future, for the same price.
Not everybody only downloads specific files. Applications like freenet which are constantly uploading/downloading content that you don't specifically request would fill the cap (provided they are downloading fast enough). Besides, 100+ DVDRs of crap a month that I'll never use/view just isn't enough.
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.
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
Any self-respecting geek could easily reach that cap in a month.
You mean self-pleasuring?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
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.
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
C'mon people let's keep the cap in perspective...
As I calculate it and concur with previous numbers, it takes about a week of SOLID streaming, at the full 8Mbps to hit the cap. Are you really going to pull that much data 24/7?
Your download speed might be able to hit 8Mbps, but is the server and interconnecting datapath going to send you the data that fast? My Comcast account (when I had one) was capped at 3Mbps (or 366Kbps if I figure it right, feel free to double check) but I almost never saw anything higher than 250-300Kbps, and that was a minority of the time.
Lament the cap all you want, but ask yourself: is it really a barrier you're in danger of hitting? If you really need to pull that much data, it sounds to my untrained ear that you have small-business-type bandwidth requirements and shouldn't be relying on a residential ISP anyway.
If you object to the cap purely on principle, then that's your own business.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
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!
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
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?
What does this mean?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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.
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
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.
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...
"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?!"
Well duh. Obviously 5.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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