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."

Comments

What is the

[mingot]

What's the upload speed?

Re:What is the

[khedron the jester]

isn't it usually ½ the dl speed?

Re:What is the

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

No, its usually the speed of the line, its just american residential has dicked us around long enough for people to expect it.

When you run a 100mbit line to your office, if you only get 90mbit upstream you complain about the SLA being broken.
When you run a 5mbit line to your house, you're lucky if you get .3mbit up.

Re:What is the

[Goosey]

For me 2MB down, 30KBs up Not so hot in Plano

Re:What is the

[sqrt(2)]

Exactly the problem with charter here in Southern California. 3 mbit/s down 256 kbit/s up :(

They claim it's to stop "home server" use.

Re:What is the

[calyptos]

What exactly is wrong with home servers?

Re:What is the

[toddbu]

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.

Re:What is the

[sdpuppy]

In order to get the download bandwidth, upload is in the neighborhood of 110 baud.

What, you don't want to upload to paper tape??? :-) :-) :-)

Re:What is the

[willpall]

Bandwidth is not free, people. Home servers that need more than 256 kbps upload speed generally use the bandwidth on a consistent basis. The service you get residentially is extremely cheap compared to business-class circuits, and this is why. You get the speed benefit (down) of a fat pipe but you won't get the volume that a more expensive circuit would offer. This is not because your ISP is evil, simply because, gasp!, they intend to make a profit.

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.)

Re:What is the

[InvalidError]

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?)

Re:What is the

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:What is the

[jZnat]

Finally breaking the 1 Mbps barrier that broadband has been facing. ;)

Re:What is the

[Xaria]

So what's wrong with a download/upload limit? Give me a 5 GB /month data limit on a lightning fast connection over an unlimited 256K connection any day!

Re:What is the

[KillerCow]

I'd be more concerned with hitting your download limit for the month in under an hour.

Re:What is the

[sqrt(2)]

Well a lot of good it does, I can get anything I want through BT maxing out my down speed ~360 kB/s.

Re:What is the

[sqrt(2)]

Well that wouldn't work for me. I max my upload speed out 24/7 and am using probably 2/3 of my download speed at any one time, I use a lot more than 5 GB per month.

Re:What is the

[damsa]

It's price discrimination. Business folks will pay more, price discrimination however is illegal, especially for those in monopolistic positions. Therefore, you charge different prices for consumers and businesses, but you change the upload speed. And Voila, no more price discrimination.

Re:What is the

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent perspective on the DOCSIS capabilities and limitations, vs. FTTP. There's a third distribution model that merits some discussion as well: PPP networks. I work with a carrier PPPoETTP network at work (Ethernet to the prem) which resolves a lot of the bandwidth sharing issues typically found in less sophisticated ETTP implementations (there are other issues, such as security matters especially related to directed broadcast and similar problems that PPPoE provides further control over).

Many of our customers migrate from either the big DOCSIS provider in the nearby metro (very well run, I should add), or from poorly run incumbant DSL networks lacking PPPoA. Their feedback is that the network is almost always faster than what they used to have (yet the advertised rate is often less - e.g. 500 kbps). Three things account for this, one of which is better control in the last mile via PPP protocol overlay over the DSL or Ethernet transport. Well designed transmission systems are also important - e.g. taking your traffic from the head-end of the customer connection and bringing it back to your central node. Egress capacity is the final component - e.g. where does your wholesale Internet come from.

I should note that wholesale capacity costs nothing like retail per Mbps. Anyone who compares the two is definitely dealing with apples and oranges. Wholesale IP is sold with the expectation that it will be packed - completely aggregated - by the carrier buying it. The upstream is selling you (hopefully) unaggregated capacity, meaning of 45 Mbps, 45 Mbps less protocol overhead is there for your demand. DS3 rates from reliable, unaggregated providers still exceed $10K per month for 45 Mbps flat (not a burst/measured product). That's a realistic ~$200 to $250 per Mbps per month.

So when a home user expects 5 Mbps sustained for $45, you know there's going to be a problem.

In case you're curious where the DOCSIS guys are going, expect further control and differentiation of the application protocol used. SMTP and DNS regulation were just the start (and more of a reactive action). Transparant HTTP proxy has its issues as well. Regulation of VPN protocols on residential networks was the first clue as to the long-term direction. Expect an opt-in protocol model in the next couple of years rather than opt-out (for instance, you will be given permission to use HTTP/80, HTTPS/443, and explicit "legal" ports) and be further forced into proxies of the legitimate services when possible to ensure you're not putting tunnels masquerading as legit services. The security and support issues have changed the profit model, and price competition is really heating up with WiMax coming and BPL threatening (whether or not that happens is another issue). Either consumers will have to fork out $80 or more per month, or they're going to be eating a lot less. Given the marketing pressures of "more speed is better," it's probably going to be "speed with a ton of rules."

Hope you like fast web pages and just fast web pages...

Re:What is the

[BurnFEST]

Hello from Australia (The land of the Data Caps).

Re:What is the

[mrholyschmidt]

No, its usually the speed of the line, its just american residential has dicked us around long enough for people to expect it.

The line itself has a finite bandwidth. Most home users pull down far more information from the internet than they upload to it. Broadband providers know this, and design their systems so that the bandwitdth allocation reflects it. Hence instead of splitting the bandwith equally between upstream and downstream, more is allocated to the downstream band. Its an optimization issue, not an "evil empire" policy.

Re:What is the

[Zorilla]

That's about 512 kb/sec, right? Sounds about proportional for the usual broadband speeds. I'll gladly trade you that for my 384k down/768k up (really, WTF?) DSL connection.

Re:What is the

[Ancient123]

Seriously my company pays 150+ dollars a month to get a supposedly 5 meg down 768 up that I have never seen even touch 4 megs when my friend can get a 7 meg line at his house for less how does that make any sense? (especially since we sign the same stupid contract with comcast saying we cant host a server) Personally i think it should be about $10 per 1 meg up and every 128 down. (is that not reasonable?) at that price access would be cheap enough for everyone and still allow for high performance connections. (not to mention at that price most hotels/stores/shops could offer free access to customers for a reasonable price as $10 a month is a whole what 2 coffees 1/4 a dress or 1/4 a cheap hotel room? a company that can manage bandwith well instead of being a bitch about it could easily become popular with a large number of people...

Re:What is the

[Khyber]

Let's see. 30 kbytes? that's about a 384 kbit uplink. That's about the minimum uplink necessary for request/send so you can keep getting data packets at the speed you want. Assuming you get 8192 byte packages per every 1024 byte of request packets sent out, that's about right. I get about that on my 3mbit down/384kbit up DSL.

How is Plano, BTW? I haven't been there since this past X-mas, and never got to ride that phat light-rail line between there and Dallas. Is it sweet?

Re:What is the

[didde]

Sometimes, living in Sweden isn't all that bad. At home I have a 10Mbps (duplex) broadband connection without upper limits on traffic and it's "only" about ~$40 USD a month through Bredbandsbolaget.

So, all that talk about ISP's "losing money" on people wanting higher bandwidth up and downstreams is fud. If the ISP in question has the proper infrastructure then it's all about pricing and packaging the different services/products correctly.

Heck, Bredbandsbolaget allows me to instantly upgrade my 10Mbps to 100Mbs down and 10Mbps upstream although that service is rather pricy and the 10Mbps I have today will suffice for some time.

DSL; good riddance.

Re:What is the

[baadger]

If i were a greedy bandwidth whore I would show you this

Re:What is the

[baadger]

Then again your suggestion of 5 GB/month would be consistent with a fairly decent 20:1 contention ratio.

But somehow I don't think 5 GB of porno or 8-10 linux iso's is enough for the average slashdotter.

Re:What is the

[Redwin]

Give me a 5 GB /month data limit on a lightning fast connection over an unlimited 256K connection any day

I'd be careful what you wish for, 5GB/month could be blown in 1 days usage if you really wanted to make use of that line. Something more in the region of 100 Gb/month would be useful, anything less and you would have to limit your own usage to stop being cut off. That said, if all subscribers did have a hard limit but were warned that if they broke it they would be reduced to 56Kb or something I wonder what effect it would have on the use of 0wned machines and more importantly the motivation for people to make sure that their machine wasn't wasting their now much more valuable bandwidth.

Re:What is the

[wandernotlost]

Bandwidth is not free, people. Home servers that need more than 256 kbps upload speed generally use the bandwidth on a consistent basis. The service you get residentially is extremely cheap compared to business-class circuits, and this is why. You get the speed benefit (down) of a fat pipe but you won't get the volume that a more expensive circuit would offer. This is not because your ISP is evil, simply because, gasp!, they intend to make a profit.

Seriously, do you really think that if they moved to unlimited upload speeds, every user in America would be saturating their upstream pipe? I don't think so. Sort of like how they switched me up to 10Mb/s down and I still only use a tiny fraction of the available bandwidth/month. Mostly the upstream would be used by chintzy personal websites that only a handful of people look at. BUT people could post their vacation pictures at full resolution and it wouldn't take their family 5 hours to look at them all. And a few people would put up really useful, interesting sites that use a lot of bandwidth and further increase the demand for high-speed connections. And a few people would come up with interesting applications that would take advantage of the ability of the average person to communicate bidirectionally at high speed.

I think the cost-saving argument against large upstream pipes is, frankly, bullshit. (If they can provide lots of high-bandwidth downstream pipes to people at low cost, they can do the same for upstream.) The issue is much more about control of content (Media conglomerates, anyone? Who owns your cable company?) and administrative issues that could be solved relatively easily.

I don't know whether or not it's evil (media company consolidation points to yes) or just short-sightedness (never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence), but they could have kept the Internet a viable two-way communication medium if they wanted to.

Re:What is the

[dgatwood]

Here's what I don't get.... If the assumption is that most home users only use a fraction of their download bandwidth and a fraction of their upload bandwidth and the whole reason that they are cheaper is that rates aren't guaranteed because you're effectively sharing bandwidth with the entire town... well why have caps on the upload bandwidth?

It seems like the people running home servers (in most areas) would be -more- than balanced out by the number of people downloading pr0n and pirating movies.... Just let nature take its course.

Re:What is the

[willpall]

Seriously, do you really think that if they moved to unlimited upload speeds, every user in America would be saturating their upstream pipe?

No. I do think that a large enough chunk of people would, though. What happens to a P2P program when you give it more upload speed? Same thing Windows does when you give it more memory. There are enough people out there who are saturating there u/l as it is, and would saturate whatever the speed provided.

I pay $40/mo for a 3+ mbs line. ***$40***. Obviously my ISP is not expecting me use that speed constantly. The current situation is optimized for consumer internet use, which is what a large majority of people use it for.

I don't know whether or not it's evil (media company consolidation points to yes) or just short-sightedness (never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence), but they could have kept the Internet a viable two-way communication medium if they wanted to.

You're absolutely right. I would attribute their current solution (capping) as a simple (incompetent) way of achieve their goal. If the ISPs instead had a daily/weekly/monthly volume cap or some sort of hybrid between the two schemes, then those vacation photos could be posted and the ISP wouldn't have to worry about all the P2P eroding their profit.

Re:What is the

[wandernotlost]

There are enough people out there who are saturating there u/l as it is, and would saturate whatever the speed provided.

You're right that P2P poses a problem, but there's also a limit on how much people are going to download/upload. If everyone had good upstream, demand would be more easily satisfied as well, and spread out among more people/network nodes.

I pay $40/mo for a 3+ mbs line. ***$40***.

I paid about $250 for a high-end 300GB hard drive not long ago. That wouldn't have gotten me nearly as much space a few years ago. Network speeds are still getting higher; there are 10Gb network interfaces starting to come out. It only makes sense that our network speeds should keep pace with data storage rates. Especially companies that own their own fiber shouldn't have such a hard time offering large amounts of bandwidth. How many people are paying $40/mo. for a high-speed line now, compared to those paying $20/mo. for dialup a few years ago? Now most people I know have high-speed lines, while not so long ago most people didn't even know what dialup was. If a good portion of those people are casual web browsers that don't use a lot of bandwidth, it shouldn't be too hard to support a few kids with P2P that are saturating their lines.

Motorola is helping Singapore with the same tech

[Stefman]

So I assume that these speeds would be possible if Moto partners with a cable company in the states.

Nice!

[Sweetdelight]

I wish I lived there..And if the fibre doesn't have Caps, That would sweeten the deal.

Re:Nice!

[Triumph The Insult C]

to clarify, they aren't running fiber into the home. they are using the existing CATV infrastructure to do this

i'm not sure what the comment about dark fiber has to do with this unless the cable companies use fiber for distribution (or would in the future)?

Re:Nice!

[willpall]

They most definetly do use fiber. The CATV companies have nodes in each neighorhood that splits that area's internet traffic off the coax and onto the fiber which takes it back to their office. I'm pretty sure they use the fiber for the On Demand-type services and maybe even all the data now. I am not a CATV tech and I'm not sure exactly what their infrastructer is like, but I do know that the cable modem traffic is not shared among an entire town.

Re:Nice!

[dknj]

In the last 5-10 years you have probably seen big trucks with your cable company's name on the side driving around your town or parked in front of certain telephone poles. More than likely they were replacing their copper lines with fiber. RCN did this to the town I grew up in back in '97 and finished in '99. I move and the town where I live now have similiar boxes that RCN introduced to my old area. That leads me to safely assume most metropolitan areas have already made the switch from copper to fiber (if your cable co offers high speed cable, digital cable and telephone service, its safe to assume you're in the land of fiber)

Before we had fiber in our area, we only had 1-way cable modems (cable down, analog up) and we could pull up to 8mbit at 3 in the morning. As more people got cable modems, youd notice diminishing speeds to as low as 200kbps or lose your signal entirely during primetime. This was probably due to the fact that 10 neighborhoods shared a single cable network. As the new boxes were placed on our street, I noticed the original speed returning (and then they capped us :)

disclaimer: i understand how cable networks run from the modem to the CMTS, however i do not have any "real world experience" with cable networks. please correct me where i'm wrong

Re:Nice!

[ChrisZermatt]

I'd like to live there for the *very* hot women -- fast internet isn't going to make me move anywhere!

Re:Nice!

[isorox]

if the fibre doesn't have Caps

You'd poke your eye out. Always terminate fibre, and always wear eye protection.

Re:Nice!

[unigolyn]

In Finland? I think you'd be somewhat disappointed. The Swedish Bikini team is not a pan-Scandinavian phenomenon.

why is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...?

Re:why is this news?

[dreadknought]

How about one of the biggest assembly parties in the world, held yearly in a football stadium in Helsinki?

Re:why is this news?

[temojen]

We're pinin' for the fjords?

Re:why is this news?

[ZeldorBlat]

Finland makes the news because the company that developed the equipment is based in Finland...contrary to the article summary which suggests that 100 MBps broadband will be available in Finland.

Although I'd be surprised to see 100 MBps in U.S. homes soon, the article only talks about equipment capable of providing that kind of service -- not about an actual deployment.

I wish people who submit articles to /. actually read them first...

Re:why is this news?

[p0rnking]

This is news, because it's 100Mbps over cable ... unless that is, Japan is doing the same, and not over fiber

Re:why is this news?

[timeOday]

Finland makes the news because...?

because it offers the promise of 100 mbps over existing TV cables. That is the key right there, because it means the masses (most of us) might actually benefit.

Of course if you live in a single-broadband-provider city like I do, it's hard to imagine why they'd bother.

Re:why is this news?

[Netssansfrontieres]

100Mbps is indeed available in Japan, and 50Mbps is available in Korea. However, your mileage may differ. Here's why. The 100Mbps (Jpn) and the 50 Mbps (RoK) are nothing more than the clock rate on the downstream link.
Meanwhile, back in The Network, bandwidths are massively oversubscribed. So, many subscribers, each with - say - 100 Mbps or lower speeds, end up sharing a single uplink from the DSLAM (DSL Aggregation Multiplexer) that is itself likely to only clock at 100 Mbps - 500 Mbps.
The result of this is that, yes, your clock rate may be 100 Mbps ... but the actual delivery of files is at far S L O W E R speeds.
Thus, the moral of the story (so far) is that improving one part of the network and not the rest may not yield a net improvement.

But wait, there's more.
In Japanese experience w/ IPTV ... they've found that all that bandwidth on the link from the DSLAM to the user (high clock rate, low utilization because of low availability upstream from the DSLAM) has its own pernicious effects. Specifically, if a packet (or set of packets) drops into the downstream link at a time of low utilization, ... versus going through the highly-oversubscribed DSLAM at a time of high utilization ... the result is high jitter. The packets can be transmitted at regular intervals by the distant streaming server, but get to the customer in herky-jerky form. Then, the home TV equipment can lose lock (hmmm. no packets, ...) and have to regain lock all over again once packet transmission resumes.
AND SO; the improved moral of the story is ... boosting the bit rate of one part of the network without the rest of the network can damage the performance of the whole.

Re:why is this news?

[tamnir]

Getting some facts right:

NTT's "B Flet's" service (100 Mbps FTTH) has been in trial phase since December 2000 and was launched in August 2001, so that's more like 4 years ago.

See this press release.

As for 1 Gbps, let's not get too excited: I too was jumping up and down, until I realized it was a shared line, and all you get in the end anyway is 100 Mbps, as this little picture shows.

Re:why is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Finland doesn't have fjords, Norway does.

Re:why is this news?

[ultranova]

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...?

Because everyone knows that japanese have super-advanced technology - they actually built a battle suit that allowed its wearer to take on Superman's daughter.

On the other hand, such an achievement is nothing short of heroic in Finland - laying down the cable below permafrost in the middle of a snowstorm is difficult enough as is, but configuring the routers while fighting off polar bears and rampaging packs of winter wolfs is not something for those faint of heart.

4Mbps ought to be enough for everybody

[rmadhuram]

I already get 4Mbps downstream from Time Warner of San Diego and it is plenty!

Re:4Mbps ought to be enough for everybody

[superpulpsicle]

For those who truly plan Online games... there is no such thing as plenty. Not to mention the server is always slowed down by that 1 guy on a 56k modem anyways.

Re:4Mbps ought to be enough for everybody

[ssimontis]

Well, you have a little more than me, you are lucky. I have 3.0mbps, but my the real problem is upload. I have never seen an upload speed of over 100kb with my connection, my average upload speed is somewhere between 20-30kbps if I remember correctly. And, Comcast is the only peociswe in my area, so I get to live with it.

Re:4Mbps ought to be enough for everybody

[Midnight Thunder]

I already get 4Mbps downstream from Time Warner of San Diego and it is plenty!

Is this something that we can quote you on in 10 years?

Truth is while 5Mbps may be enough now, it certainly won't be in 5 years. If you look at the increasing size of application downloads, the improving quality of video online, games and IP telephony, and maybe even eventually video telephony, and even applications we haven't heard of yet because of bandwith limitations, then 4Mbps is going to be tight.

Re:4Mbps ought to be enough for everybody

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Offtopic rant time:
I've been playing Halflife since about cs1.3 and TFC before then. I started with onboard video in software mode on a 166mhz on dialup. I've since gotten a much better computer and connection, but needless to say I learned the internals very well to t weak it properly.

In halflife, and most other games that I've played with the netcode of, Theres no such thing as a 'lagger' slowing you down. The problem is a slow person doesnt update enough so if you run past him and he shoots you, by the time you find out you get pulled back in, which is annoying. The experience does suffer, but theres no way for him to add extra latency to you by just being on the same server. All that happens is the unlag pulling you back, and him being hard to kill while he skips around causing you to extrapolate/interpolate position, or make him really unsmooth if you turn interp down. Thats why its more fun to play on a lan than on a texas server even though I can ping the same to both -- no skippy lagging players that are hard to hit.

Re:4Mbps ought to be enough for everybody

[TooncesTheCat]

You have no fucking idea how the internet works do you, nor TCP/IP or UDP. You just made yourself out to be the least intelligent /.'r I've ever seen. Please go back and play CS. A person on dialup can not lag a fucking server on a decent pipe. Unless the server has way too many player slots for its connection and a 56k'r joins and that breaks the straw on the camel's back. Then you will start to lag. Even then, since the pipe is saturated, everyone will lack. You fucking prick's make it hard for anyone with dialup to have a fun game since your always saying "WTF DUDE UR DIALUP IS LAGNG US PLZ LEAEV ASHOL3"

Re:4Mbps ought to be enough for everybody

[superpulpsicle]

Fuck you. The fact that you bring up TCP/IP at all is a joke. Games just advertise it that way since that is the term most 56k-noobs like you are associated with. Most games actually locks to UDP since it handles the better drop packets and doesn't waste time resending the lost packets.

Have you ever hosted a server for games thru your own firewall and config hardwork? Probably not! Since all your life savings allow is a 56k line, you should be the last person to tell me dick.

Basically you're too cheap to get a real connection, so don't tell me how to host. Until you have monitored other slow 56k laggers slowing down a perfectly good game, don't be calling me or any slashdotters unintelligent.

Possibility of reaching U.S. shores?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think any cat5e can reach that long.

Re:Possibility of reaching U.S. shores?

[jZnat]

They're going to use really strong 802.11xxx connections for your empornium needs!

Dark Fiber

[BlogPope]

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.

Re:Dark Fiber

[papasui]

Not to mention the reason it's called dark fiber is that it's not lit. I'm sure it's cost effective to put a fiber termination system in every customers home.

Re:Dark Fiber

[dsginter]

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.

Completely different scale issues

[Sv-Manowar]

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.

Re:Completely different scale issues

[EiZei]

FYI Finland is even more sparsely populated than the united states.

You're asking the wrong question

[d2_m_viant]

It's not a matter of the "technology reaching U.S. shores"..becuase everyone knows we already have the technology for this. Existing fibre optic lines have the capacity for ALOT more than what we're currently utilizing. It's got more to do with the cost than anything..

Benchmarking

[hattan]

"Based on our research, 30 megabits per second is the absolute minimum in future homes" I wonder what kind of tests they used to determine that figure.

Re:Benchmarking

[01000011011101000111]

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.

Re:Benchmarking

[guaigean]

I agree with the ideas... Just wanted to correct a typo. 30Mbit/sec ~ 3.5MBytes/sec. That's about 12 GB/hr give or take. Unless my math is totally fubar'd. While the idea is possible, you'll have to be spitting out a HD-DVD worth of DRM to slow em down.

Re:Benchmarking

[01000011011101000111]

Ah... no, twas my maths that's fubar... Hey, I've not had much sleep recently....

Re:Benchmarking

[Epistax]

640*480*3*30= 27,648,000 Mbits/sec

duh?

Re:Benchmarking

[Khyber]

30mbps !=300kbytes/sec.

30,000,000/8 = 3750000 bytes. 3750000/1024 = 3662.1 kilobytes. That's 3 and a half megs a second, pal, not 300 kilobytes a second

Dark fiber...

[Faust7]

There are already thousands and thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' underground around the U.S.

So that's where all the dark matter is.

Re:Dark fiber...

[sharkey]

Sounds like Nibbler has been "busy".

Obligatory Monty Python

[wootest]

Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I want to be

Re:Obligatory Monty Python

[MindNumbingOblivion]

Look! He's pining!

Re:Obligatory Monty Python

[wootest]

But not for the fjords.

Re:Obligatory Monty Python

[Master of Transhuman]

I'll take Ireland.

The Corrs are there (when they aren't in France, Germany, England, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Malaysia, Australia, Taiwan, Africa, Scotland, Switzerland, the US (RARELY!), Canada, Japan, New Zealand...)

Re:Obligatory Monty Python

[WWWWolf]

No no no. Right now, we're having trouble downloading libdvdcss from Norway. We must ping the fjords to see if the server is really dead.

People get this so easily mixed up...

</obvioushumor>

Re:Obligatory Monty Python

[wootest]

No, the løveli lakes are here in Sweden. I hear we've got a wonderful telephøne system as well.

Not fully usable, obviously

[Peter Cooper]

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.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[tylernt]

The whole "technology X has lots of bandwidth!" thing is silly anyway. DOCSIS (Cable Modems) go up to 10Mbps. Who has 10Mbps cable? Nobody. You're lucky to get 3Mbps for less than $100 a month. If you want higher speeds, you will pay through the nose.

So, customers buying this "100Mbps" service will probably get 10Mbps tops unless they can pay $1000 a month and have a first-born son to sell.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[saleenS281]

actually time warner offers 8Mbps in my area for 70$/month.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[Xzzy]

Not to mention the snappy upload speeds.. when you pay that $1000 a month, they'll upgrade from 124kbps to 384kbps at no additional charge. WOW!

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[timeOday]

Backbones just aren't there yet.

Now you know why they mentioned all that dark fiber in the summary, eh?

Bulking up the backbone is easy. It's the last mile that's hard. It's unwise to worry about the backbone, or allow it to restrict the last mile network.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[dk.r*nger]

A big European ISP like Demon only has 2Gbps going into the LINX.. enough for, wow, 20 customers to max out their bandwidth.

Yeah, there is a 50 times wider band. This means that those 20 customers will also be finished 50 times faster, freeing up bandwidth for the next batch of 20 customers.

Point: For the same content, nothing changes. Some customers will just have their content served faster. Just because your network is 50 times faster, you're not going to view 50 times more pages on CNN.com.

For new content, well, yes, new servers on new bandwidth will be needed. That's the same story as always.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[p0rnking]

"Who has 10Mbps cable? Nobody."

Cogeco Cable (in Ontario) provides 10Mbps cable for just over $50/month, and I get just under 7Mbps with Rogers for $45/month ...

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[Master of Transhuman]

"those 20 customers will also be finished 50 times faster"

You're assuming they're ever going to be finished. For some people (gamers),this is a bad assumption.

Unless they use Windows, then sooner or later it will crash and the next guy can get in.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[tylernt]

You guys are making me sad... check out my prices: http://cableone.net/internet/plans.asp

$100/mo for 4Mbps. Cableone is the only provider in my area, and I can't even get DSL. :(

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[sharkey]

Actually, DOCSIS 2.0 can reach up to 30Mbps, IIRC.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[snuf23]

Yep you should be sad. Time Warner upgraded the local cable speeds to 5Mbps. I've hit about 4.5Mbit on 3 connections to a usenet news server - which ain't half bad. My cost is $40/month if you have cable TV service, or $50/month if you don't.
Of course on Cable speeds vary with neighborhood congestion - you sure don't have dedicated bandwidth. In some areas throughput is worse than others. DSL starts here at about $30/month for 1.5Mbps
Upload speeds suck either way, with cable at 384kbps and DSL at 128kbps.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[koko775]

unless they use Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. Then they could probably fit 196 or so customers. At a large cost.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[Jimmy_B]

They may not "finish", but they won't max out the pipe either; games typically use a fixed amount of bandwidth and leave the rest alone.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[ahundy]

The point is that when the backbone does get up to speed Finnish citizens will be able to take advantage of it "immediately". The more countries that adopt this level of bandwidth the more incentive there is for backbone providers to roll out higher bandwidth networks and/or services. And while the rest of us are screwing about with DSL and cable the Fins have at their doorsteps a living high bandwidth laboratory that they can use to invent and innovate new products and services. Theres always some downtime between our adoption of new technologies and when we really begin to harness their powers. And in this case, the Finns and the Japs are well ahead of the rest of us in adoption. If their smart and creative enough this should give them the edge in product and service development that takes advantage of those networks thus bumping up their GNP. 'Cept of course the japanese only know how to copy and refine so i dont think they'll do much until the rest of us have them what to do. :) Either way as things stand if this were a race, and dont think its not, the Fins would currently Finnish First!

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[timmarhy]

hardly anyone is downloading at 100mbits flat out 24/7. the advantage of 100mbits is that when i DO download something i'll get it in seconds not hours. current backbones will handle the load just fine.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[Zedrick]

My ISP doesn't have any such limit (on my 100Mb connection). I usually take home around 100-150GB / week (BT, DC++ and Usenet).

No, I don't have time (or HD-space) to watch everything so I delete most stuff unseen, and yes - it's a huge waste of bandwidth. But I don't want to pay $35/month for nothing!

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[PhraudulentOne]

Yeah but if more and more content becomes Akamaized (or something similar), then a lot of the main download sites will be blazing fast, and won't use the upstream provider. Ofcourse this will only help for big sites at the present time, but common downloads won't be leaving the ISP. Using boxes like Akamai to download large quantities on one large central server make sense until every ISP can have 20Gbps backbone connections. We just put in a new 10Gbps backbone to replace our existing 1Gbps, but we only a few hundred Mbps to the Internet.

Re:Not fully usable, obviously

[epaton]

yeah but how many people could max out the connection, theres only so much content you can grab, there is a limited amount of distros, movies and porn not to mention disk space the advantage is while the contention ratio may be low the link is so fast that very few other people will be using it at the same time

Re:Most of them..

[rich_r]

Does it matter? I think not!

bandwidth cross borders?

[Raleel]

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

Re:bandwidth cross borders?

[proton]

You act as if finland itself has nothing interesting within its borders.

Its easy to imagina a wide variety of video applications that could easily be accomplished with this kind of service.

Finland first country to get video telephony anyone? Internet-only TV stations?

Re:bandwidth cross borders?

[twain]

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.

Re:bandwidth cross borders?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:bandwidth cross borders?

[chefren]

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.

Re:bandwidth cross borders?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funet network, used by universities in Finland (and had about 300,000 users in 2003), currently has a 10 Gbps connection to the outside world as shown in: http://www.csc.fi/suomi/funet/verkko.html.fi Eunet, a commercial provider for SMEs, has a 2.5 Gbps connection to Stockholm: http://www.eunet.fi/yritys/verkko/

Re:bandwidth cross borders?

[mooglez]

Internet-only we don't have, but we do have an isp that is providing Digital TV channels through ADSL lines, and they are later this year switching to providing HDTV channels through that same line. (for that they need to pump the speed up a notch tho)

the good thing with this isp is, that unlike others, they have to guarantee the speeds they advertice, for smooth tv watching.

Re:bandwidth cross borders?

[fedx]

One of the main reasons ISPs in countries like Finland, Japan and South Korea are able to run these huge pipes to residential homes and not have to worry about the size of their international feeds is because a lot of content that will be fetched will be local due to the native language of the country. As long as ISPs and co-los within the country are well connected (which is comparitively cheap to do), then users can get some real use out of these services. Here in Australia we suffer quite a bit because we're "English"-speaking, and most of our content is served up from the United States and english-speaking European natioans. Fortunately good local content is definitely on the rise.

Meanwhile in japan ....

[mxpengin]

I have this FTH service in japan since last month and is very nice ... my only complain is that is very hard to get high transmition rates with the service... only if you are using things in japan . The cost is about 80 dollars a month and television services can be used on demand ( for a fee of course ). A link in english to my provider .

Re:Meanwhile in japan ....

[patio11]

Same story here. I paid approximately USD$10 for the upgrade from 8 MB/s (the lowest my internet company would let me buy) to 50 MB/s but have never achieved download speeds in excess of 1 MB/s because I'm always limited by the other side's pipe. I suppose if I used file sharing software it would be more useful. On the other hand, it IS nice to saturate the connection for WoW patches :)

Re:Meanwhile in japan ....

[Sithgunner]

I'm also in Japan taking FTTH service. But for 60 US dollars a month with no phone or TV services but with a static IP.

Yes, you don't get as much bandwidth toward outside Japan, mainly because foreign server chokes on their bandwidth but from Japan to Japan, the highest achieved in my home is nearly 70mbps download with 40mbps upload, but with these amount of bandwidth there are many factors that can limit, like software and hardware, not by how the bandwidth is choked by other users.

I tried to have some bandwidth testings against 2 FTTH endpoints, the best ones are VTUN(through HTTP download) and NFS which achieves 30mbps, and OpenVPN, samba, MS file sharing all starts to choke up on direct connections to about 50% to 20% bandwidth capability... but that could just be my way Linux softwares are configured but I have no idea, since many users don't have such bandwidth and those component never will get heavily tested, and I can't find much information on web how to optimize for big bandwidth.

Re:Meanwhile in japan ....

[mxpengin]

yeap , i have the same basic fare , but you can have extra services over it :)

You can get nice transfer rates using some peer-to-peer software , but maybe the most i have reached is just 50% or less of theorical maximum.

Originally I wanted the ADSL service, but after I made the contract , the sent me a notice telling me that there was no "metal cable" from my home to the telephone office, so my only options were fiber or cable .... I tried the fiber :). For a reference I live in a small prefecture , in a city with 40 0000 inhabitants.

Re:Meanwhile in japan ....

[McFadden]

I'm also sitting in my Japanese apartment on my 100mbit (OCN B-FLETS) connection.

Sure it doesn't work quite so well for sites outside Japan, but for bittorrent with multiple sources routed from different geographic locations I can regularly download files at several megabytes (bytes not bits) per second. A full feature length Divx movie comes down in a matter of a few minutes.

Inside Japan its simply awesome. I downloaded a 7.5 megabyte application a few weeks ago, which appeared on my harddisk in its entirity before Firefox had even managed to pop up its download window.

Becuase....

[d2_m_viant]

....becuase we're talking about people who wear clogs getting more internet sex than US!

Re:Becuase....

[Spad]

Yeah, those Fins are famous for their clogs.

Re:Most of them..

[kmartshopper]

From my "observations," pirateers usually come from Europe and a handful come from Finland. What security measures will allow these citizens from not using it for illegal matters?

Kind of like asking how you know a politician will truly do his job if you vote for him and not fuck around at his camp more than half the time...

100Mb/s speed

[zuRNall]

having such a fat pipe in finland but slower speeds elsewhere is quite meaningless IMHO. It basically makes the whole country a big LAN. Also it will be interesting to see how they price this service given that internet access is now a commodity and pricing is so aggressive.

Re:100Mb/s speed

[KarmaMB84]

A couple dozen infected machines in Finland can now DOS attack multiple internet back bones simultaneously. GREAT.

Re:100Mb/s speed

[rbarreira]

So what? Even if there were no other countries with such speeds (which is false), it would be quite good for them...

Re:100Mb/s speed

[rbarreira]

Not to mention that you can download from multiple sources... Bah

Re:100Mb/s speed

[Zerikai]

Well, couple of dozen would be about the total population of Finland, right?

Re:100Mb/s speed

[KefabiMe]

A couple dozen infected machines in Finland can now DOS attack multiple internet back bones simultaneously. GREAT.

Yes. For the good of the Internet, everyone in America should nix DSL and cable and go back to POTS.

The problem is the last mile...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Footing the Bill.

[Dr. Transparent]

Have you been here long, or is this your first run-in with the slashdot hippie crowd?

Don't let it faze you, they're all like this. Best to just ignore them and go on with life. When you confront them they just congregate into a big herd and get even stupider.

Does make trolling pretty fun though.

Re:Most of them..

[Pop69]

I would suspect that you don't even know what's legal and what isn't in Finland.

That's what I'm getting _today_.

[mdn]

Well, not really. But I could be getting it if I wasn't too cheap.

100 MBit Internet access (both ways) is offered to apartment owners in a number of Swedish towns. This costs about 76 USD a month.

As I said before, I'm too cheap to pay for that, so I'm paying for a throttled version (10 MBit/s) of the same service putting me back about 40 USD a month.

The service has been offered for quite a few years by a company called Bredbandsbolaget. (The site is in a strange foreign language though. Be warned.)

Re:That's what I'm getting _today_.

[Inda]

76 USD? Both ways?!?! Please pass me a tissue because I think I'm going to cry.

I pay more than that for 3mbps here.

Re:That's what I'm getting _today_.

[richie2000]

I have a 10Mbps full duplex fiber at home paying 298SEK or around 40USD a month from Jämtkraft/ZedNet. At work, I have a 24/1Mbps ADSL with a static public IP from Bredbandsbolaget for roughly the same price. Both of them work just fine.

Re:That's what I'm getting _today_.

[Kadmium]

I'm paying about that amount for 256 kbit :-(

Skeptical

[WhiteWolf666]

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.

Re:Skeptical

[Zackbass]

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.

I believe Verizon FIOS is fully installed and available in one town and a section of another next to mine. I also drive past at least two Verizon trucks stringing up or splicing fiber every time I go out to town.

Verizon IS going full bore with fiber deployment, it's their main weapon against the cable companies that are quickly pulling away many of their customers. It's going to take a long time to get a sizeable population hooked up but they only have so many techs and trucks.

It's pretty funny actually, with all the problems we have with telecom businesses and monopolies competition with the cable companies has become a huge driver in my area at least and is yielding some great results.

Re:Skeptical

[Anonymous Coward]

We've had up to 24 Mbps (ADSL2+) in major metropolitan areas in Finland for a while now. It goes for as low as 63 euros per month, no traffic limits. Of course the upload is only 1 Mbps, but you can't have everything.

I would venture to say that if the technology came that allowed 100 Mbps over copper (or cable TV) and thus didn't require rolling out fiber everywhere, the operators over here would offer it.

And yes, Japan is lightyears ahead, I don't deny that. But they have the advantage of huge population density (Japan has 300+ people per square km, USA has 30 and Finland has 15). On the other hand, this just raises the question why companies in the USA don't provide good broadband connections to their customers, even in metropolitan areas, when Finland is able to do it with a lower population density..

And don't try with the "oh, but USA is so big!" angle. They *could* roll the service out in select areas or even all of them at once - every area would pay for itself, since it's just a matter of population density. What's the problem?

Re:Skeptical

[Mr. Arbusto]

Bandwidth is an interesting issue I'm diving into currently. I just got hired on by a telephone company who's primary mission is servicing rural markets and a lot of new developments are getting FTTP (Fiber to the Premisis) from the get go. Speeds are ~200MBit and it appears they are trying to expand the telephone network to include TV content, Internet and Telephone services. It is in the US now, but only in places that are being built new now.

It is a fluff piece. We've had the ability to do this for years anywhere where in the world, it just requires someone with the money to deploy it. The US will have it as soon more houses are built with FTTP, as parts of the grid are replaced with FTTP (very, very, very, very slow process) or if state PUC/PSC would realize that the telephone network isn't the only delivery method for communications and stop a lot of stupid regulation...but that is another argument entirely.

Just put in a 15 hour day, hope that makes some sense.

Re:Skeptical

[frizop]

The US government is paying FTTH deployers something to the extent of .80-.90$ on the dollar. Don't think that SBC is spending 10 billion dollars and not getting any of it back, and no it is not a 50 year investment. I recall SBC saying 10k new customers per week, so its not all that slow. It is just the ability of independent contracters deploying the stuff.

Re:Skeptical

[ms1234]

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

I have at home 512/512, my parents have 1/512. I've seen ads for 12Mbps and even 16Mbps. Do I need speeds like that? No. I'm usually on IRC, the surfing at low speeds is ok for me (if a site happens to load 5s faster it is no big deal for me). If I happen to actually download something big (like linux ISO files), I just start the download, put it in the background and do something else in between while it slowly comes down. What's the hurry?

Re:Skeptical

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for Finnish ISP. Connection speeds we offer:

ASDL: 0.5-8Mbit/s
SHDSL: 0.5-2Mbit/s
VDSL 2-wire: 4.6mbit/s
VDSL 4-wire: 2 x above, 9.2Mbit/s
ADSL2+ : 8-24.5Mbit/s (1Mbit upstream)
ADSL2+"+": 8-24.5Mbit/s (3Mbit upstream)
ADSL2x(?): 50Mbit (testing equipment)
Fiber: 10-1000Mbit/s

International connectivity is several Gbit/s, cannot give exact numbers but it has never been fully consumed.

This Teleste thing is not vaporware, there are also other small companies who offer very fast modems. Only problem is that they seem to focus on cellular/transmission market so IOS like IP features are not available. That sucks. Modem+router is not a good solution for private customers. Too expensive for us and too complicated for most of the customers.

Re:Skeptical

[dnaumov]

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?

They are obviously just saying that the vast majority of new consumer-level broadband connections opened in Finland right now are 2 MBps connections. In Finland, it's not a problem for the general consumer to get a 10 MBps internet connection at home or even 24MBps. Where I live (Tampere, Finland) a 8 MBit connection is 45 euro/month with a 24 MBit connection costing 63 euro/month.

Re:Skeptical

[mooglez]

I live in Finland, we have 8M cable connections currently available. i also work in a company that resells quite a lot of other isp's connections, and have not heard anything of this, or of the company mentioned in the article.

Re:Skeptical

[DarkSarin]

Do you use VOIP? IPTV? Video Conferencing? ANYTHING?

For you, surfing and IRC may be enough, but for many of us, the slower connection is hampering. I tend to download a LOT of linux distros to try out. This is slow and painful.

FWIW, if you use WinXP, some of the service packs are BIG, and require much time.

The idea is that we keep adding things that can be done over the internet, and soon, that will be the primary method of communication. Once that happens, bandwidth will be essential.

Re:Skeptical

[PhraudulentOne]

Yeah VDSL2, ADSL2+, etc, etc exist right now, and there are a lot of DSLAMs that support the new standards. The reason why they weren't magically rolled out as soon as they were released is because there weren't a lot of decent modems that made use of the new chipsets - also, everything cost a lot of $$$$. There are now more choices and so you will see ISPs rolling them out. We are rolling out ADSL2+/VDSL shortly with new Occam gear, but there is no way we would have done that in '04. I imagine this Finland service is a new DOCSIS 3.0-based service. S.Korea and Japan have been able to get mega speeds because they deployed fibre early on (at least that's what I understand they did). Americans ran copper and Japan ran fibre. Now they have a more capable infrastructure. This isn't possible in the USA at this time, as the required funds would be astronomical - and you guys piss away too much money on military anyway (haha, sorry, had to take a dig at that one..).

I really don't know why we can't get better upstream speeds (not as a customer, but as an ISP). It doesn't cost a lot to update from 1Gbps pipes to 10Gbps pipes. It should soon be quite normal for small ISPs to have 2Gbps instead of a few hundred Mbps.

Re:Skeptical

[turbosk]

"I tend to download a LOT of linux distros to try out."

ummm, what's "a LOT"? one a day? one a week? are you installing these things and trying them out so fast that an overnight download is cramping your style? criminy.

"if you use WinXP, some of the service packs are BIG, and require much time."

umm, how many service packs for XP are you going to download? I'm aware of two, and if you get the second one, you don't need the first one, making a grand total of....one. Overnight should be plenty fast enough for you, bucko.

"soon, [internet] will be the primary method of communication. Once that happens, bandwidth will be essential."

Bandwidth was essential when we were using 300 baud modems. Nothing has changed, everything is relative, including your perceived need for speed.

Did you have a point, or were you just bored?

Re:Skeptical

[DarkSarin]

I might ask you the same (about being bored). I've checked recently and the overwhelming number of responses to my posts have come from you.

Get a life.

FWIW, you didn't even look at what I said about VOIP and similar bandwidth hungry applications. Do you use them? If not, then you can't complain that no one needs more bandwidth than you and expect to be taken seriously. I honestly need a lot of bandwidth because I use VOIP. I use VOIP to save myself money. WHen your internet+phone drops from $100+ to $70 (and a fixed amount at that), then you realize that VOIP is a good thing. My bill for the two would be even lower but my ISP stinks and is highly overpriced.

Always first...

[ylikone]

in cell phone technology/prolification and sauna's. Now internet access. /has visited Finland 3 times in my life... parents were both born there

Bredbands Bolaget

[Anonymous Coward]

Well i have a 100Mbit connection, with full duplex mind you. It's great i can transfer stuff from my friends with about 10 Mb per second, a DVD wont take long hehe. I have had it for two years now and it works like a charm, so we in Sweden were first to roll out 100 Mbit fullscale in the network and did I say that my ISP Bredbands bolaget ROCKS!!!
(http://www.bredbandsbolaget.se/

Re:Bredbands Bolaget

[rbarreira]

Geez, transferring a DVD in about 8 minutes...

Anyway, it's a good thing that you guys have such connections... With dc++ I often download from swedish people at very high speeds, even though my upload speed sucks (I'm in Portugal). One can almost feel the hard drive melting ;)

almost forgot

[ylikone]

first in producing top-quality free OS (via Linus but anyways)

Re:almost forgot

[ylikone]

and Sentenced... and Children of Bodom... and about 10 others.

Not a chance

[papasui]

There's no way this going to be widespread in one year, it's at least 3 years out if anyone decides to really adopt it. It would require completly abandoning existing CMTS systems (Cable modem termination system) and adopting and entirely different technology. Docsis 3.0 is the future of cable, this could possibly get some use as a secondary system for businesses where a fiber build isn't possible but not as a replacement to current cable modems. Hell the support contracts alone will likely take several years to expire for current MSOs. IACNE (I am a cable network engineer).

Re:Not a chance

[papasui]

Sorry to respond to myself but I should have added in my previous comment that I'm refering to this technology being adopted in the USA.

US in 2006 too!

[nsrCZ]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1839128 ,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532

100mbit is here

[isecore]

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.

Re:100mbit is here

[Anonymous Coward]

At least one company in Finland is also offering 100 mbit/s - and they install it in most areas in Helsinki if enough homes in the same building order it (12 is the minimum IIRCC). The price is 45 euros a month (approx the same in USD).

Re:100mbit is here

[ockegheim]

Just curious- what does this let you do on today's internet that I couldn't do on my 1.5Mbps connection? Only a few sites I visit seem to be able to serve at this rate. Does anyone do high quality video, for example, and is the internet infrastructure between their place and your place able to cope with such a high bandwidth?

Re:100mbit is here

[ricewar]

I have a 10/10mb link here in Helsinki, Finland. It's great for example BitTorrent, which is able to utilise the bandwidth very well. And the huge upstream link guarantees a nice dl ratio. =)

Re:What is the upload speed

[Tod DeBie]

300 baud?

Very true

[Robotron23]

This gentleman speaks the truth! Mod up.

I'm curious as to the mass market appeal this technology possesses. I mean one need have around 5 or 6 Mbps to get an ultra low (>20) ping in game servers reasonably close to home. Also, one can get songs off of iTunes often in under a minute with just a 2 Mbps connection.

Then again, regardless of the blistering speeds this technology (if it ever arrives on Oceanic shores) it will be marketed like crazy. When broadband became seriously commercial in about 2000 the prices were high. Now however, you can get a 1/2 Mbp connection for a fractional amount above your standard 56k connection.

Thus, our current 1/2 - 6Mbps connections could be rendered seemingly obselete by marketers, thus allowing telecommunication companys to make some good cash off of high charges for 50, 80, 100, 200 Mbp connections, a repeat of 2000-2004. It should be profitable, as Joe Sixpack isn't going to be downloading stuff from bittorrent all day long at max speeds...only your niche market geeks would partake in that.

But yeah, as the parent said, this topic is wishful thinking by some anomymous manufacturer. Its not quite hit the "flying car" speculation yet, but its almost certain 100Mbps is quite a long way off anyhow.

Re:Very true

[khedron the jester]

It should be profitable, as Joe Sixpack isn't going to be downloading stuff from bittorrent all day long at max speeds...only your niche market geeks would partake in that.

Actually, in the school I go to even the 'rudeboys' partake in BitTorrent. Offering high speed connections at low prices will only increase the amount downloaded and therefore the cost to the ISPs.

In Japan...

[hawado]

100Mbit is common in homes. Although i am limeted by my distance from the main, I still see 80 - 90 MBit up and down using Bit Torrent.
And wow, Googles home page opens so much quicker.
I do like it as I can watch Atom films and news broadcasts nice and quick.

Re:Most of them..

[Eric604]

Exactly. You only said it completly reversed.

Re:RMS

[saleenS281]

*disclaimer*
I'm not an RMS fan, nor do I claim to be an expert on his ways.

That said, I do believe people defend him because he has the belief that people are good inside, and that they want to help society, or at least they should. People should contribute to society for the greater good, not personal gain, that's basically his motto from what I gather.

Not only that, he's obviously a software genious to boot.

Not much of news.

[Z00L00K]

I was offered 100Mbps fdx two years ago, but I turned it down since my equipment was only able to handle 10Mbps and the pricing was considerably higher for the 100Mbps.

Another item to consider is also the fact that it is often the other end or the network that is the limit.

Unlikely

[the eric conspiracy]

Or do you think the already deeply entrenched U.S. politics are going to keep this technology from ever reaching us?

Nah. There is a lot of ultrabroadband activity in progress in the US already. Cablevision is beta testing 20 Mb/s service in Metro NY, and Verizon is deploying FIOS which is offering up to 30 Mbps, with future plans for 100 Mbps. Plus the FCC has stated that their #1 goal is to increase broadband use in the US.

Right now I have 10 Mbps over cable and find it to be pretty good in terms of raw speed. I am not sure that additional throughput would make a lot of difference to me, and be worth any additional expense.

100Mbps fiber is available in the US

[DurendalMac]

Depending on where you live. I used to live in Moses Lake, WA, which has 100Mbps residential fiber. It's so fucking SWEET! I live in Ellensburg, WA now with a shitty 3Mbps cable connection. You can tell the difference. Oh well, I put my webserver in a friend's house, and the upload is virtually 100Mbps! As long as I don't saturate the hell out of that pipe, the ISP wont cap it. I only wish I had a better server (350mhz G3 with a 8gig U2 SCSI RAID...).

100Mbps?

[jsse]

I don't know the rest of the world, but Hong Kong has 1G bps home broadband , now, by using IEEE 802.3z Gigabit Ethernet, over Fiber directly to home users.

Don't wait for 100Mbps, 1000Mbps is there already. :)

But won't they just cap the max throughput?

[imuffin]

My cable modem gets exactly 6 mbit/sec down, not because of technology limitations, but because the service provider caps it there. Roadrunner does this too. And they cap the upstream bandwidth significantly lower. If they're already artificially capping the speed below the technological limitations, what's the point of a system that's capable of being faster?

--
watch funny commercials

Re:But won't they just cap the max throughput?

[Punboy]

More customers on less hardware.

Re:What is the upload speed

[OrangeGoo]

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:

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. :P

Good for Bittorrent users worldwide

[Danathar]

Every upgrade around the world for broadband helps EVERYBODY who uses Bittorrent (due to increased upload speeds)...so....I root (no pun) for ANY upgrade for everybody :)

This just in...

[elmus]

Linus moves home...

SBC Says 20Mbps Within a Year Here

[Master of Transhuman]

I upgraded to 3Mbps recently (and I don't seem to be getting it but that's another story), and the rep told me they're running fiber everywhere to offer 20Mbps within the next twelve months. We'll see.

I doubt we'll see 100Mbps here until there's fiber to the curb. At $250,000 or whatever it is per quarter mile, that could take a while.

Re:SBC Says 20Mbps Within a Year Here

[Punboy]

Supposedly, the FCC is looking at cutting that cost significantly by working with the local PUD to have them lay the cables, essentially for free.

News?

[Suhas]

We have had 100 MBPS Broadband available almnost all over Tokyo and Osaka in Japan for over an year now.

Re:News?

[Master of Transhuman]

Hey! At least it's not a DUPE!

Oh, wait, there's always tomorrow...

Assembly NOT in football stadium

[Soulfarmer]

I have never been at the parties, but I still know that they are not held in a stadium, but an Icehockey-arena in Helsinki. I wonder where that football stadium thing came from...

Re:Assembly NOT in football stadium

[dreadknought]

I have never gone to the parties either, as much as I'd love to. I don't know where I got that misunderstanding, but looking at some pictures, you appear to be correct.

Re:TW Cable

[Overzeetop]

Man, I am sooooo glad that the FCC has decided that you and the telcos shouldn't have to share your infrastructure. It would totally defeat your artificial price-point plans. And that would be un-American.

Wireless!

[rwade]

802.11g connection + Empty Pringles Can

Re:What is the upload speed

[Mozk]

Yes, it's not the K that makes a difference. :P

Whenever I see kb in a program, I always wonder if it's kilobits or if the author thinks it means kilobytes. Same with KB for that matter.

Not new!

[roony]

People - Japan has been offering 100mb fiber connections to the house as of 3 yrs ago. Its now only $50 USD per month. That 100mb up and down with 5 Global IP's ADSL here is at 50mb VDSL is at 50mb Cable is at 40mb

Too many places don't even have regular broadband

[GuitarNeophyte]

We just got within range of broadband internet within the last year. Even if they do bring some places up to those high speeds, I think they'll need to get the current areas more saturated to the point that enough people would be willing to pay for those speeds before the companies could afford to bring those technologies to the common household.

Luke
----
Teach your Aunt Susie about technology: ChristianNerds.com

Some Bandwidth is Cheap

[rwade]

Sure you will find a lot of bandwidth that is really cheap. However, those pipes may be between Gunnison, CO and Boulder. Meanwhile the pipes moving from big metro area to big metro area are filling up/full while pushing up prices.

I was contemplating this recently

[LowbrowDeluxe]

In regards to an episode of Charlie Rose discussing Japan's recent expansions. Link to my eventual comedtary:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/devilindupriest/1 02743.html#cutid1/

Already in Sweden

[LeftOfCentre]

Bredbandsbolaget in Sweden has offered 100 MBit connections for some time. The price works out to about $75 USD per month.

Re:Motorola is helping Singapore with the same tec

[xlr8ed]

Moto has been partnering with U.S. Cable companies for years

Hong Kong: 1000Mbps ~ $215/month

[ButterDog]

We have 1000Mbps plans (Chinese) here already What's the big deal about Finland getting 100Mbps?

Re:What is the upload speed

[Tekzel]

Thanks for the clarification, I knew there was a capital in there somewhere for bytes instead of bits. I knew someone would smack me around if I was wrong on the details.

Utah already has this coming

[sharpone]

I'm sure its been across slashdot before, but Utopia (http://www.utopianet.org/) is currently under construction in Utah cities, and you can already have service installed in some Orem neighborhoods. According to the FAQ (http://www.utopianet.org/faq/faq3.e.htm) speeds will be asyncronous 100mbps to residential, and 1gbps to businesses. I happen to live in one of the cities which is currently having fiber pulled, and have attended several of the monthly public meetings and it is definitely not "vaporware". I think that this type of metropolitan connectivity will be the norm throughout the civilized world, when other cities see what it will do for them, as far as bringing business and strengthening the local economy.

Why bother?

[eldawg]

Why bother with 100 Mbit when 1 Gbit service is already being offered.

Re:What is the upload speed

[entrylevel]

God, if you're gonna be a nit-picking schmuck, do it right. It's the B that differs in capitalization. The K is always uppercase.

They can only afford to have 300 subscribers :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I looked at the pipes going between Finland and Europe, there was only a 3Gb/s line in place. Is the Finland-only bandwidth?

Cablevision is already rolling it out in the US

[menace690]

My cable provider, Cablevision, has already started rolling this out. Here's the press release. http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050627/nym155.html?.v= 11

I'm plenty pissed at ComCast right now. 21.0KB/sec

[crovira]

For a fucking cable company, and when I used to be able to receive/download (send/upload always sucked) huge files.

But this is on par with dial up.

I am NOT spending $60USD/month for this. If it wasn't too late to get in touch with a human being, I'd let them know that dollar for dollar, they aren't worth it and they CAN be replaced.

Re:What is the upload speed

[mrholyschmidt]

Um no :) 300 baud is roughly equivilent to 300 bits per second (300bps).

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.

DOCSIS 3 (Re:Not a chance )

[isdnip]

Mod the parent up! The original story is a puff piece, designed, I suspect, to help the company sell stock.

The cable industry has standards for cable modems, called DOCSIS. DOCSIS 1.x speeds are basically up to 30 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps (more often less) upstream. That's common now. DOCSIS 2.0 speed goes to 40/30. That's in production now, being phased in. DOCSIS 3.0 is basically outlined but not yet final -- no products until 2006 or later -- and it combines TV channels (analog bandwidth) in order to give more (digital) bandwidth. It will go over 100 Mbps.

So it's coming to the US, but not in the form described in the original post. Standards are critical. DOCSIS compatibility means you can buy $75 cable modems and your cable company can buy its head end CMTSs from multiple vendors, interchangeably. Think "Ethernet". Proprietary technology means vendor lock-in, high prices, and obsolescence. So it's not going anywhere.

BTW, upstream speeds in the US are limited by the "low split" used in cable, where upstream is below 42 MHz in order to have Channel 2 (54-60 MHz) on the downstream. FCC rules require cable systems to carry TV broadcasters on their own channel, if they request. European TV doesn't have much VHF left at all, and European cable splits higher, so the upstream is good to about 68 MHz. That helps. But there is still enough upstream bandwidth in American cable systems, with DOCSIS 2 or later, to more than satisfy consumer demand. DOCSIS 1 gets by by having fewer subscribers share each upstream than each downstream (typically 4 upstream ports per downstream port on the CMTS).

Re:Bredbandsbolaget

[Carl Drougge]

It would be nice if BBB didn't suck so much for people without fastighetsnät (whatever that is in english). I used to have 13Mbit symmetrical VDSL, but BBB never offered that (I got it because I already had it when they merged with my ISP). And now they've "upgraded" me to 10/1. (Yes, they called it an upgrade!)

I'm just waiting for them to take my static IP too, because surely as a Consumer I don't need it.

(Who me, bitter?)

Re:What is the upload speed

[OrangeGoo]

Wrong. The SI prefix for 10^3 is kilo, with a symbol of lowercase 'k'. It's been that way for quite a long time. The letters aren't capitalized until 10^6, mega, M.

Re:What is the upload speed

[OrangeGoo]

Well shoot. Didn't mean it to sound like I was being snobbish. :P Your point is certainly correct, though. :)

Re:You miss a key point.

[einstienbc]

I have it all figured out:

Step 1: Use loans from local banks to build a fast and cheap internet service provider, then provide service to those banks.

Step 2: Expand using Step 1 until you cover a large area. Buy out Comcast and Verizon and other major players with loans and the massive amounts of service fees.

Step 3: Cover america with your services. When banks ask for payments tell them to fuck off and if they threaten equipment reposession, remind them who allows their online banking to occur.

Step 4: Profit! And rule the world!

Re:Why Not?

[drpimp]

Of course I was being funny, and yes I know speed does not determine latency. You could have the fastest connection on the planet only to be bottlenecked somewhere along the net. Good point though about the media, 100Mbps is all a selling point mostly. But if it makes my downloads faster, that is really all I care about.

Too bad ...

[vlad_petric]

dark fiber doesn't have the right to vote.

Yay

[ConsoleDeamon]

Yes then im finally able to uppgrade from my crappy 10mbit/2mbit adsl2 line. I love this country :)

s/in Finland/by a Finnish manufacturer/

[Timo_TM]

RTFA.

Small-cap Finnish broadband equipment manufacturer Teleste -- said it would early next year bring to the market its ethernet-to-home product, which will give consumers access to 100Mb/s speed.

No finnish cable tv operator has yet announced it would by such a product.

Presentation about this thing at http://www.goodmood.net/teleste_vg_preview/pres2/T eleste_2.html

In Post-Soviet Russia...

[fionbio]

Here in Moscow, Russia I 100Mbps home connections are quite widespread. Well, they are actually provided by fiber + cat5 going to individual apartments. It's not overly reliable, so failures do occur sometimes, and sometimes network is somewhat overloaded, but usually it's quite tolerable. Actually you can get download speed of 3-5 Mbytes/s from many Russian sites (and up to about 1 Mbyte/s from American sites) at night. I'm paying about $30 (converted from RUR) for 6 Gb/month prepayed limit, which is quite enough for me.

Oh come ON

[CrystalFalcon]

Sweden has had 100 MBit (full duplex) home Internet connections for a long time, at least since four years. The news here is that some homes are getting full gigabit connections, also full duplex, servers allowed.

What's the next story up, something about DSL and cable penetration (which are also 20th century technology)?

Oh

[CrystalFalcon]

Ah, so the news was 100Mbit modulation over DSL, not that there were 100Mbit connections to homes. I stand corrected...

Affordable FiberOptic?

[GeorgiaTech]

Has anyone tried Verizon Fios? It boasts 15megabits down/ 2 megabits up over fiber optic for $50 a month. If it were in my area I'd definitely get it to host my site, http://www.themodwiki.org/ as it is running on a slower connection currently.

hah

[typidemon]

The story about the little boy who put his finger int he dyke takes on a whole new meaning =0

Already testing in New York.

[Gldm]

Optimum Online is already testing a 100mbps system to see if they're going to roll it out. Right now they're only running it around 50mbps. I believe the pilot project is in Smithtown, out on Long Island.

Upgrade?!?!!?

[mcrbids]

I've been using the same 10 Mb hub for my home network since the mid-90s. Would this mean I have to upgrade?

Does size matter?

[macpeep]

People commonly under-estimate the size of Finland. It's actually larger than most people think: about 1200 km from north to south (750 miles), which is roughly equal to the distance from San Francisco to Seattle. The area is 338000 sq km (130000 sq miles), which is larger than all other US states but Alaska, Texas, California and Montana. Put another way, Finland is twice the size of Florida.

Many people seem to think that a country that is twice the size as another would naturally take twice as long to deploy a new technology. In reality, however, a country twice as big would also have twice as many people to do the job. After all, it's not like the guy in New York has to fly to Los Angeles to deploy broadband Internet once he is finished in New York. The problem is solved in parallel - not serially.

You might think that population density changs this. But that too would seem to be wrong at closer inspection. With only half the population density, you would also have only half as many homes to deploy broadband to. The amount of homes per installation guy is what really matters.

Of course in reality, the people who live in the middle of nowhere will be at a disadvantage since it is less likely that a company puts in a lot of time, effort and money to deploy cables in the middle of US Alaska or Finnish Lapland.

So finally, let's examine the population densities:

Finland's population density is 13 people per square km. The USA's is 27 (and for comparison, France has 106 and the UK has 383).

Um....?

[Atario]

Aren't all connections shared, at some point? Isn't that more or less the definition of the Internet?

Those DSL lines all go somewhere, you know, and I'm betting each one doesn't get its own T3...

Cable companies magical?

[Atario]

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.

And yet, the cable companies managed to do just that in pretty short order. Why is Fiber To The Premises any different?

The Electrical Technology is Asymmetric!

[billstewart]

The most popular residential data services in the US, ADSL and Cable Modem, are both fundamentally asymmetric. The way the bandwidth is allocated, the way you distinguish signal from noise, the way the network controls who gets to transmit on what line and how collisions get resolved or avoided, and which end gets the expensive complex equipment vs. the cheap consumer-grade equipment are different in the two directions.

That doesn't mean that symmetric technologies aren't available (though the equipment is usually more expensive), or that the CLECs aren't picking what equipment to use based on what market they think they're selling to, because obviously they are, or that they aren't using them rudely or stupidly, but they really are asymmetric technologies. For a given amount of equipment cost, they could sell you a symmetric circuit (at least for DSL), but the downstream bandwidth would be slower than if they'd spent the same money on an asymmetric circuit, and residential consumers care a lot more about downstream speeds.

Monthly bandwidth caps aren't a technical issue - they're pure greed, and they seem to have originated with Telstra in Australia, who were always the Developed World's Most Clueless-for-data-users Telco, and because most other cable modem companes are also clueless and evil, their idea spread like wildfire around the cable industry. One of the Aussie telcos used to have a separate cap or pricing for Aussie vs. foreign content, because the overseas cables were still somewhat overpriced, while domestic bandwidth was much less of a problem (and most of it was local to two cities anyway.)

Anti-Server policies are a more complex case. Sure, some of it's because cable modem companies are suicidally clueless and think that they're better off selling to Couch Potatoes who treat the Internet like TV with different shows rather than to Real Users who create interesting content that other people want to download. But a lot of it dates to the early history of the industry. They didn't have traffic-shaping mechanisms, so a user really *could* swamp their block's total upstream, and the trial network in Fremont CA had equipment problems for a while, so a user could *really* *easily* swamp their block's total upstream, and PacBell (the local telco, who sold DSL service) did a bunch of dishonest but devastatingly effective "Web Hog" commercials about how if you were foolish enough to buy cable modem service instead of DSL, you'd couldn't depend on it and you'd have to do all your real use way after midnight when the network was quiet enough to work. Also, if you remember the popular-press issues of the time, the obvious thing that could generate enough upstream traffic to trash the network was a web server that had suddenly become popular, especially a (*gasp*) pr0n server, and they were trying to present a family-friendly sales pitch about how getting your kids on the network was really important if you wanted to keep up with the Joneses (and the Chens and the Kumars...), so if their network got bogged down by a pr0n server, it would be really bad PR for them. And since they couldn't manage bandwidth adequately anyway, they chose to ban servers instead, and to prevent users from treating that as damage and routing around it, they chose to ban anything that looked even vaguely server-like (including mail servers that *receive* mail, but have "server" in the name and are obviously for business.)

A M00se pinged my sister once

[billstewart]

Hey, M00se pings can be pretty painful, y'know....

Lots of bandwidth, no caps needed

[billstewart]

Finland's pretty heavily wired to Sweden and mainland Europe. And if they're all trying to suck down content from outside Finland at the same time, that just means they hit bottlenecks on the international on inter-city links instead of the last kilometer link; they're still sharing as much bandwidth. Also, many of the reasons you'd want links that fast are because the ISPs want to sell you television (in case you RTFA), which from a data standpoint is locally generated and probably broadcast-mode (even if the TV show itself is imported), rather than coming from international links.

If the ISPs aren't stuipd, this will also make it easier for people to provide content, including Finnish-language and international-market material. (Of course, it also doesn't hurt performance if they run a major file-sharing server in Finland for Finnish users to access :-)

Great!

[msormune]

It will allow thousands of Finnish homes to download many Linux distribution ISO images every day! Because that is what p2p networks are used for, right? Seriously folks, who REALLY needs over 256kbps line at home for anything useful? No, porn and warez do not count.

30 vs 100 MBPS

[dumbskull]

I dont really see the point. I was using a 6 MBPS, now moved up to 30 MBPS wireless connection here -> courtesy My ISP , but i am not sure i have gained any major speed advantage because of this. And now 100 MBPS, without the back bone of the servers increasing accordingly.

Go Figure

[ksemlerK]

Go figure. Here I am in the states stuck on a 31.2 Kbps connection. Nothing else is available in my area, or within 14 miles of me.

Sweden

[flubbergust]

ComHem (the biggest cable provider in Sweden) said they were going to start with tests this fall with this technology. Their equipment comes from Cisco and as far as I know they would use Docsis 3.0 but I know that its not ready yet so I havent got a clue how they will do it.

Re: SFW?

[lymph]

Thank you for blocking my streets with cats and cones so you can upload pr0n 10mbps faster. Wow! BFD!

How fast do you REALLY need a relay? Jesus people, put it in perspective! I really don't need 100mgps access to my residential home. WTF is wrong with 2.5mgps? Can your 1.4 mhz(avg) computer even handle this? What's the issue? Americans are slow? Europe has something we don't? Who gives a FythgFck~!

my drive is very hard right now!

UK "broadband"

[Patrick.R]

Why roll 8mb when other European countries are already pushing to 20mb?

In the UK, "broadband" starts at 128kb... while in France, providers move their customers from 4mb to 8mb or 16mb, sometimes for free.

Re: Not fully unusable either

[llauren]

Well, that's why you have Erlang's queue theories. The idea is that not all users should have a sustained need to 100 Mbps (yes i know Bittorrent is a thorn in the model). You can put a whole bunch of 100 Mbps users behind a 1 Gbps uplink, provided they behave, and everybody will feel they have a tremendous network experience.

~rL

Re:What is the upload speed

[slye]

Whenever I see kb in a program As far as I'm concerned, kb in a program let me think about a keyboard. And, btw, sometimes my kb is blo

Economics of high speed consumer pipes.

[chris_7d0h]

It's pretty obvious that enabling high speeds for customers is pretty cheap once the initial cost (drawing the fiber to the house holds) has been covered and the traffic is mostly within the local ISP's network.

In my country some ISPs cover the initial fiber investment either by community tax "dollars" or by tying up consumers to the specific ISP for a few year (e.g. 3 years) after the fiber is in place. These 100 MBit pipes we have are for within the ISP network. Outside the network the speed cap is at 10 MBit and so the ISP has put instruments in place to be able to make money.

Having 100 MBit constrained mostly to the ISP network might not be such a bad thing, especially since the ISP usually has direct fiber connections to major traffic hubs (such as central caches and large file dumps for the most popular sites). Also big files (such as apt or rpm or ISO repositories) are often plentiful witin the network and even the P2P community has a lot of peers within the network as well. So all in all, most stuff is available at a high speed.

If one goes outside the local ISP network and the country, the speeds almost never reaches even 10MBit. Right now, the average speed to the US is something around 3-4 MBit (and doubling every 1.5 years it seems).

As more and more get fiber, the ISPs will hopefully come up with more reasonable peering fees, allowing more traffic to flow between the networks at low cost.

Point is that today high speed internet access can be profitable for ISPs while at the same time providing good service per $ to consumers. Unfortunately it seems that only startups will be able to get the fiber initiative rolling in countries having a history of major telco or cable domination (as was our situation and the US at present).

Upload speed is zero!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Upload speed it zero. They devote everything to the download, that's why it's so fast.

Re:Upload speed is zero!

[andre_racicot]

If your upload speed were zero, you couldn't be posting on /.

You need to send packets to receive packets. It's how TCP/IP works. Read up on OSI, you'll understand.

Can you beat this?

[h2d2]

I have 15/5Mbps Verizon FIOS at home... that's a direct fiber line to the house, not the CO or the curb, but to the HOUSE. And the line will soon carry digital tv signals with capacity for thousands of channels and come with an MS-powered DVR box capable of recording six streams simultaneously. And both theoratically (and in practical) the net bandwidth can be increased upto 10Gbps.

Beat that Finland!

Sweden rules

[z80]

This has been around in Sweden for like 3-4 years now.

Re:Why Not?

[rufty_tufty]

[puts on pedantic hat]
speed _does_ have an effect on latency. i.e. since that 1K packet can be serialised faster then low ping times are essential.
This is why the stock exchanges have uber fast networks, not because they need the speed, certainly not because they need the bandwidth but because they like the idea that latency is as low as possible so that new data is availiable asap and bids happen asap. Also possibly they may have money to burn.
Obviously as well low latency can be achieved by fast links as for a given load there is less chance of you having to queue for access to shared medium. This is one reason why a common IP routing algorithm relied upon ping times for determining routes rather than any measure of speed.
[takes off pedantic hat and looks for drink]

Sorry for the rant, I used to work for Nortel and we had these things drummed into us constantly as part of the network planning gubbins.

IT WAS A JOKE.

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Wow... I thought it would be obvious!

Re:IT WAS A JOKE.

[andre_racicot]

Well IT WASN'T THAT OBVIOUS!

After reading smartass comment after smartass comment, it gets difficult to discern when people are kidding, or talking out of their glory holes.