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100Mbps Home Internet Service Next Year in Finland
Listen Up writes "According to an article on CNN, broadband Internet access via cable modems in Finland will be able to hit 100 Mbps as early as 2006. That would be 50 times faster than the average broadband speeds now offered to cable TV homes in Finland. Do you think this technology has the possibility of reaching U.S. shores? Or do you think the already deeply entrenched U.S. politics are going to keep this technology from ever reaching us? There are already thousands and thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' underground around the U.S."
So I assume that these speeds would be possible if Moto partners with a cable company in the states.
100Mbps fiber to door was available in Japan since like two years ago; about a year ago in metropolitan areas they even rolled out 1Gbps service. Finland makes the news because...?
Having 100Mbps would be great, but it's not as if you're going to be able to pull files off of some Web server at the full speed. Many busy servers only have 100Mbps connectivity in total themselves.
You might suggest that 100Mbps would be great for BitTorrent and the like, but the flaw is that ISP's backbones and peering arrangements are measured in gigabits, not terabits. Even an OC-48 can only take 24 customers maxing out their bandwidth on this system. A big European ISP like Demon only has 2Gbps going into the LINX.. enough for, wow, 20 customers to max out their bandwidth.
The ratio of guaranteed bandwidth to advertised bandwidth on this offering is crazy. Backbones just aren't there yet.
There are already thousands and thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' underground around the U.S.
So what? The problem is not bandwidth in total, it is making the connection to the home to the nearest big fiber point. DSL and cable are popular with ISPs because the cables already go to the customer. Running broadband over a phone line or cable costs next to nothing. The big cost was digging up the street to put in the wire. After that, the operating costs are minimal.
If you go to a big US colocation facility, you will find that a lot of bandwidth is really cheap, because the fiber is already there. If you want a fiber connection to your home, you will have to pay an arm and a leg to put the fiber in the ground.
Wireless ISPs have a big potential advantage since they can avoid the last mile problem.
FYI Finland is even more sparsely populated than the united states.
Here in Sweden one of the biggest ISP's (called Bredbandsbolaget or "The Broadband Company" in English) have been offering 100mbits Internet for the better part of a year now.
Admittedly it's only to their fiber/LAN-customers (which I am a part of) and with a traffic cap at 300GB/month as well as a rather hefty pricetag of approx US$113/month.
But it's available to the crazies who want it.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Dark Fiber as nothing to do with home broadband.
Both DSL and cable internet are provided by way of fiber - its just cheaper to convert to another medium for the "last mile". See Comcast's recent dark fiber aquisition.
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I know there are better ways to control the aggregate amount of bandwidth being consumed, but this is a simple way of doing it that is acceptable by a huge percentage of the consumers buying cable or DSL service. Those who really would like to have parity between their down and up speeds are exactly the customers ISPs don't want on residential service. They will lose money on you.
There's nothing evil about that.
(I know the parent poster didn't say they're being evil, but that's the general impression I get on these threads sometimes.)
Libertarian: label used by embarrassed Republicans, longing to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.
Just to clarify to anyone reading this, you are incorrect on terminology (not exactly the right word?). The lowercase 'k' is the SI prefix for kilo. The capital 'K' is for degrees kelvin. I tend to note bits with a little 'b' and bytes with a big 'B', as in:
:)
:P
300kbps ~= 38kBps
Usually, I replace the 'p' with a '/' when dealing with bytes, too (i.e., "38kB/s"). By no means a standard notation, but it works for me. Though it isn't widely used, I've also recently taken to using the IEC's units. For example:
300kbps ~= 38KiBps
(300 kilobits per second ~= 38 kibibytes per second)
Why? Because in a technical context, it's certainly much clearer. If I say I am transferring 1 kilobyte of data, does that mean 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes? It's ambiguous, and in design issues, it can be a critical difference.
Also, the baud rate is the signal transition rate, not the bit rate. Maybe in modems the baud rate and bit rate were usually the same, but it isn't necessarily the case. It is possible (and common) to transmit more than one bit per transition.
Anyway... that's all.
Not for the faster ADSL and cable deals.
One cable channel can serve up to 40Mbps but a single upstream channel is limited to 8Mbps. So for cable (DOCSIS) systems, this would typically be around 1/5, which is approximately what my ISP is sticking with, at around 1/6. (I know each serving group could include an arbitrary number of upstream and downstream channels but I suspect most cable ISPs, including my own, play cheap.)
BTW, there are places where 100Mbps and FTTH are already common, the catch is that these are shared networks. IIRC, in Sweden, a company basically puts everyone on a 100Mbps switched network with a single 100Mbps uplink. There is also Verizon's "Fios" where every house appears to become a node that injects and extracts traffic from an optical ring network. (Why else would the base installation require an SLA battery to specifically power the optical network tap?)
Not to further nit-pick, but 300 baud is 300 "symbols" per second. Using constellation diagrams 1 symbol can correspond to a variable number of bits.
In a dialup modem, 8000 baud is used at 7 databits per symbol to arrive at 56Kbps.
You must be thinking of FUNET's connections (one 10 Gb/s and two 2.5 Gb/s connections for backup). That leaves out the commercial operators' connections to the world.
There's NORDUNET's 10 Gbps to Stockholm, and EUNET (KPN) has two 2.5 Gbps links, to Hamburg and Stockholm. All of that could now be saturated by merely 150 cable customers... there's no way they won't have transfer caps.
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