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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."

9 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Dark Fiber by BlogPope · · Score: 4, Insightful
    There are already thousands and thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' underground around the U.S."

    Dark Fiber as nothing to do with home broadband. if it were between your house and the ISP, you might have something, but its not. The trick is getting high speed connections where Fiber doesn't exist.

    --
    My other car is a Popemobile
  2. Completely different scale issues by Sv-Manowar · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think its unfair to compare these kind of rollouts to the US on a general scale. The US is practically the size of europe, and due to the state demarkations has almost the scaling problems that deploying across europe would incur (although the same core infrastructure providers would help somewhat). This isn't to say some providers aren't trying, there's definitely been a push towards fiber services as the next generation by some US providers. As for me, I'm just hoping that the UK gets its act together and starts rolling 8mb+ services out around the country, instead of the current spotty availablity in metro areas.

  3. bandwidth cross borders? by Raleel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Anyone know what Finland has actually has for pipes into the country? 100Mbps is nice, but if you want international content, it might not be such a big deal

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    1. Re:bandwidth cross borders? by chefren · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The university network, FUNET, has 10Gbps. In addition several other ISPs have their own backbone lines out of the country. Some of them are listed at the Finnish Communication and Internet Exchange (look at the statistics). I have no idea what the total bandwith of all these operators is.

  4. Re:Benchmarking by 01000011011101000111 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Simple... Standard user downloads approximatly one hour of pron per day, encoded in "scrunched" divx = around 400mb then add 600mb of DRM, and you end up with a "user required download" or URD of 1 gig... The average user will complain if a movie that they are paying for takes longer to download than to watch (or at least will do when they're on supposedly "SUPER-FAST-AmazingLine"), so you've got to get it to them in around a hour. 30mbit/sec = approx 300kb/sec actual download = approx 18mb/minute or around 1gb/hour :P Hence 30 megabits is the absolute minimum.

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    Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
  5. Skeptical by WhiteWolf666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. Article says 100 Mbps is 50 times faster than what they have now. Thus, they have 2 Mbps cable.

    2. I have 6 Mbps cable. I know people within 20-30 miles of me with 8 or 10 Mbps cable. SBC delivers 3 Mbps dsl, and delivered 6 Mbps to a select few quick enough to jump on the deal.

    Does anyone else find it hard to believe that they will leapfrog technologies like that? Or, that even once those companies start selling the equipment (the article, after all, quotes an equipment manufacturer, *not* an ISP) that deployment will be instant?

    VDSL, VDSL2, and a whole bunch of alphabet soup DSL types exist *right* now, but we don't see them all over the U.S.

    Similarly, many American cable companies have switched much of their equipment to DOCSIS 2.0 stuff, but haven't ramped up the speeds yet (not enough backhaul).

    Avaliability of equipment != deployment. Rather than idolizing some vaporware Finish deployment, we should be looking at places like S. Korea and Japan, where they've managed 2 and 3 digit broadband speeds (in Mbps) *now*, not some-time-in-the-oh-so-near-future.

    I can pull up 100s of articles from SBC's Project Lightspeed, or Verizon's FIOS. Some of them talk about deploying this stuff nationwide in 2003-2004.

    But do I have 100 Mbps internet yet? No.

    This is a non-article. A fluff piece by an equipment manufacturer. I want to hear more about actual deployments (and they do exist), not about some companies wishful thinking.

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    WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
  6. Re:Not fully usable, obviously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    enough for, wow, 20 customers to max out their bandwidth.

    You assume that all of the content they want is not in Finland.

    You assume wrong. There is plenty to see and do, and all you need to make use of it with bittorrent is a number of other people on this service in Finland in the swarm with you. Throw in being able to play your FPS against your local friends while downloading stuff in the background without the latency hit that causes on DSL, and you start seeing where this is going.

    You may be right, nobody may ever get 100mbit from any one place, but that extra padding will make sure that everything else they're doing doesn't suffer while they try.

  7. Re:What is the by toddbu · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Ok, I really can't believe that I'm defending a cable TV company, but here I go...

    Do you really blame them? They pay for bandwidth too, and if you put up a server that everyone wants to hit then that adds to their bandwidth load. They assume that you're not downloading 24x7, but a popular web server can easily be active all the time. So the upload limit makes sense from a pure business/profitability perspective.

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    If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
  8. Re:What is the by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You also have to realize that Cable is a shared connection so the more people using it the slower it gets. So with someone with a popular server it would slow down everyone else. Now is it fair if you are getting 52kbs because your neighbor is hosting a popular website, and chewing up all the bandwidth, and your both paying the same amount, that is why the caps are placed. So everyone can get a fair speed. And I find for normal Web Browsing 3-5mbs is fast enough.

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