24 Mb Consumer Broadband Launched

twilight30 writes to tell us The Guardian is reporting that broadband provider "Be" is providing customers with the option of a 24 megabits per second download speed connection. These speeds are roughly three times the closest local competitor and also allow 1.3 megabits per second upstream, roughly five times quicker than any other service provider. The service is being offered at £24 (US $42.84) per month. Hopefully this will become a trend of radically increasing consumer internet speeds.

Comments

24 Mb not 24 MB

[Frankie70]

Slashdot editors - please correct the title.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

but if they called it 6 mega nibbles it would generate more ad revenue.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Basehart]

While you're at it, 56 Mbits/sec would be ideal.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[at_slashdot]

Ideal for what? why 56 and not 52Mb/sec?

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[moro_666]

#1 56 mbits would be heaven ? nah, i dont really think so :) at first, if 3 users with 56Mbit lines would start to download from a server that sits in a rack behind a 100Mbit ethernet ... they would want to pull 56*3=168 Mbits out from the 100Mbit ethernet ... so they will just not be able to really use their bandwidth and the server will be jammed .... and for most of users, even 8Mbit is a huge overkill, cause people that dont download movies/cd-images/adult-movies/music each day, mostly have latency issues (they click and the browser doesnt react within a second, waaah) and the larger the bandwidth distributed over several users, the larger the latency (routers & co have their limits). ofcourse a big maximal downloadspeed is great but i dont think that the rest of the network isnt quite ready for it, it might not be such a good idea (most of our country's server hosting providers have 100Mbit ethernet/internet lines for the servers, so 4 british haxors can now jamm my server)

#2 i wonder how they can afford it ... the last time i checked the broadband companys themselves have to pay for each mbit they transit, so if they have a nice schoolful of haxxors who download stuff 24/7 then their downloaded/uploaded mbits will cost more than the 24 pounds that are charged ... ofcourse some users use less than that ... but still, it's still curious

#3 while they're at it, i'd even be lucky to get a 8mbit connection for 24 pounds over here

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

24Mb should be enough for everybody

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

But still, it should be 24 Mb/s, since merely having 24 Mb to use on your broadband won't let you browse many pages.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[gronofer]

At least the uplink capacity is higher than usual for ADSL, although still no match for the downlink.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

1 Gbps:

http://www.bjornerback.com/tomas/mattgrand

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to meet this lot back when they were calling themselves Avatar Broadband. The management staff have come over from Sweden where they were running B2 Bredband AB (Bredbandsbolaget), the second largest broadband service provider. They routinely offered 24MB based on ADSL2+ there, and are now giving it a go in the UK where all the current ISPs have to squeeze their existing ADSL kit. Be have no such legacy problem. Their business plan is predicated on hitting BT exchanges where there is a very high subscriber-density, thereby maximising their ROI per exchange.

Their network is based on a series of BT BES/WES 1000 circuits running from their connected exchanges back to a fibre ring between some of the major London PoPs. As they are connected into the major carrier hotels they can access some very, very low IP transit pricing from Tier 1 providers (Level3, TeliaSonera, etc.). Hence they can offer unlimited download as it doesn't really cost them that much per subscriber. Most people get nowhere near maxing their connection/download huge amounts of data anyway.

So, they have experience, a decent new network, and a compelling offering. What's not to like? (unless you live outside of London...)

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

100Mbit ethernet/internet lines for the servers, so 4 british haxors can now jamm my server

Yeah, wake me up when we can have 24Mbps UPSTREAM and 1.5Mb downstream at reasonabe cost and no more than 5:1 contention.

i wonder how they can afford it

To justify the rollout they need a certain number of subscribers over a certain period so the initial period could be something of a loss-leader to ramp up the numbers and get the DSLAM gear in place. They are first to market with with service in the UK, so they have a grace period to price competitively and grab a slice of the market.

Also remeber it's 24Mbps at 50:1 contention and transit isn't that expensive, less than 45 (GBP) per Mbps/Month for any serious capacity.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

while they're at it, i'd even be lucky to get a 8mbit connection for 24 pounds over here

Really? I recently got an email from Blueyonder to inform me that my formally 1Mb (Formally 512Kb) Cable was going to be increased to 4Mb, for the same price (£25 a month). If I want to, I can now upgrade to a 10Mb connection for ~ £50 a month.

Of course you have to be in a Blueyonder area (Haha, NTL suckers!) and naturally, I'm more interested in better upstream bandwidth (I think it'll be ~348Kb up, once I'm upgraded to 4Mb down). Still not a bad deal though.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[FudRucker]

am i correct on this?

it takes 8 bits to make 1 byte.

so if this little detail is not made known, it can be used as marketers to make an ISP's offerings sound better than it really is (the spinzone)...

so a 24 Megabit per second connection is a 3 megabyte per second connection, not bad but can be misleading to some that are unfamilier with this fact...

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

Did it occur to you that the person you replied to may not be in the UK?

Haha, NTL suckers!

NTL anounced their upgrade a few days before blue-yonder and all NTL users get 10Meg as standard. NTL still suck tho I'm not switching just yet. I agree with you on the upstream and if NTL start offering fiber, I'm there.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[jez9999]

Your tactic might be a bit screwed when the two companies merge.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[gronofer]

Yeah, I guessed after I posted that someone would point that out. But given that SDSL doesn't seem to be priced competitively (last time I checked), ADSL is often used in applications where uplink capacity is of interest.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Tango42]

All network speeds are given in bits/s not bytes/s so there's not room for confusion, really. You only need to know the difference what you look at download speeds which seem to be given in bytes/s.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Goose In Orbit]

I can now upgrade to a 10Mb connection for ~ £50 a month.

Odd - I'm paying £35 for mine. As I recall the £50 price point was for the old 4Mb/s link (now also being upgraded to 10 Mb/s) but I don't remember from the email we got whether the price will drop accordingly, or whether those users get faster upstream speeds for their extra

I think it'll be ~348Kb up, once I'm upgraded to 4Mb down

I've a feeling you'll be getting 256Kb/s (up from 128) as the old 2Mb/s (mine) and 4 Mb/s links are moving from 256 to 384. Still not nearly enough though...

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[CProgrammer98]

ALL providers quite the offered bandwidth in megaBITS per second... so I don' understand your argument. How can using the standard measuring units be confusing?

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Taevin]

As other posters have pointed out, bits/per second is the standard unit for bandwidth. What's truly misleading is when companies compare disparate products/services. My local cable ISP, Comcast, loves to bump up their highest speed and then compare it to the lowest level of service prodivided by local DSL providers.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be great for file sharing.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[websaber]

In my book it is really a 1.3 megabit connection. I know all the arguments about people downloading faster then uploading but it is really like digital zoom on cameras, totaly worhtless in every real life use except advertising.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[TheBeardIsRed]

The reason that often companies can afford high bandwidth rates is that they run both a hosting and an networking (read: upstream) division.

Most Tier 1/Tier 2 providers bill their bandwidth in 95th percentile billing which means put (over simply) that they only pay the highest direction of traffic. Hence, if i'm pushing 90Mb out of my datacenter for hosting, then i pay for 90Mb. If i'm pushing 90Mb out of my datacenter and 89Mb coming inbound for T1/DSL/Dialup clients and the like, i still pay the same amount. In effect, half of that bandwidth is free.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Svartalf]

56 Mbits would be, at that point, a major selling point for something P2P in a legitimate useage. At that point everyone's pipe is fat enough to provide reasonable download speeds for things like CD or DVD iso's- of course, the *AA's of the world would screw that up because they have to have their business models protected at all costs even if there's tons of legtimate uses of the technologies in question.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[jared_earle]

Living in Paris (that's "Paris, France" to you Americans), I have an account with Free.fr who, for 29.95 euros a month (about 20 quid or $9000 at current rates), provide me with 20Mbps down and 1Mbps up ADSL2+ and have been doing so for over a year. I also get TV over ADSL and a free IP phone (free calls to french landlines - ie. calling pizza hut or phoning work to tell them how ill you are from too much pizza) included in the price. There are no quotas or limits on useage.

Why do you *need* so much bandwidth? Well, they are trialling MPEG2 and MPEG4 HDTV-over-DSL and I want some of that action.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[cthulhu11]

[i]#2 i wonder how they can afford it[/i] Massive oversubscription, no doubt.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Lotharus]

You're an idiot (or at least your book is). (Pulling numbers out of my butt here) It's gotta be a good 90% of consumer internet usage is hugely asymmetric. That's why asymmetric consumer ISP services such as...oh, ALL of them (ADSL..Cable..Satellite..Even your 56kbps modem tops out at 33.6kbps upstream)...are so successful. "HTTP/1.0 GET /" doesn't need 24Mb/sec to get to the host (for all intents and purposes) faster than you can blink. Does the average consumer send the same number of bytes in e-mail that he receives? Does the average consumer serve web pages from home, or videocast, or perform other high-upstream-demanding activities? Even online gaming is (probably) asymmetric -- I'm no expert in the matter, but it seems to me that my computer needs to know information about everyone else in the game (in order to show them to me) but only needs to report information about me.

Case in point, if you're a Windows user, pull up your Network Connection properties. Look at the Packets Sent and Packets Received numbers. Which one is bigger?

And yes, I realize you may not be a typical consumer. I am not a typical consumer -- I host web pages, e-mail, and routinely tunnel Remote Desktop over ssh to my home connection. And I realize that I am fudging numbers and leaving out symmetric services (such as leased-line solutions like T1, although I don't consider most of those "consumer" services), but my point remains that it's not simply marketing hype as you suggest, and entirely useful in "real life."

Me me me

[Anonymous Coward]

I want. I want.

Re:Me me me

[SoloFlyer2]

I already have it... :)

This is being provided by almost every ISP in australia except Tel$tra
It is of course very distance dependant
Basically they just have ADSL2+ DLSAMs and they let you run at the maximum speed allowed by the ADSL 2+ specification, so you only get the maximum speed (24000/1000) if you are close enough to the DSLAM for it to work at that speed, since im quite far away from the DSLAM i only get about 5000/1000, but thats a hell of a lot faster than 1500/256, which is the maximum avaiable on Tel$tra DSLAMs

http://www.internode.on.net/adsl2/graph/index.htm A Nice Little Graph with distance/speed :)

Re:Me me me

[Achromatic1978]

Almost every ISP in Australia? No, it's not. It's being offered by under half a dozen. And it's being offered in a /fraction/ of the exchanges.

So while Telstra have their issues, let's not go exagerrating, hmm?

Oh, and the substituting of $ for s? Doesn't really advance the cause.

Re:Me me me

[SoloFlyer2]

Almost every ISP in Australia? No, it's not. It's being offered by under half a dozen.

unless you are talking about the dodgy backyarders they pretty much all offer it there may only be a handful of ISPs rolling out dslams, but they are allowing the smaller ISP's to access their dslams...instead of using telstras dslams, and at a better rates...

And it's being offered in a /fraction/ of the exchanges.

I never said anything about the amount of exchanges which were adsl2 enabled! but the picture you paint is far bleaker than reality... less than 50% of the exchanges in australia acutally have broadband at all, and of the ones that do most have dslams allowing adsl2... but then again they are fractions :)

So while Telstra have their issues, let's not go exagerrating, hmm?

I wasnt exagerrating... out of all the dslams in exchanges only telstra have continued to limit theirs to 1.5/256, and its not one of telstra MANY issues. its something which they actively perform they could stop doing it at anytime.

Oh, and the substituting of $ for s? Doesn't really advance the cause.

Replacing s with $ is my way of saying that i belive that telstra dont care about anything except making money for their executives and their shareholders and they arent even doing a good job of that...

Re:Me me me

[Achromatic1978]

less than 50% of the exchanges in australia acutally have broadband at all, and of the ones that do most have dslams allowing adsl2... but then again they are fractions :)

I read letters in the paper of people bitching about not getting broadband in the country.

Then I read letters in the paper of people living on the Mornington Peninsula, "55 km from Melbourne", rural, "Don't start me on living in the country and not able to get broadband, look at me!"

And then I look at me: I have the joy of living 25 km from Melbourne's CBD, on the east side, supposedly in affluent suburbs, blah blah blah. I can't get /any/ DSL. I can't get Optus cable. I got cable after convincing - and it took effort! - convincing Telstra that they'd cabled my street.

Replacing s with $ is my way of saying that i belive that telstra dont care about anything except making money for their executives and their shareholders and they arent even doing a good job of that...Thing is, as a (partially) public company, they are legally obligated to do exactly that, or ASIC/shareholders can tear them a new arse. But yeah, I know there's more to it than that.

Re:Me me me

[SoloFlyer2]

50% of exchanges being broadband enabled really isnt enought... Agreed...

this is really more telstra/goverments fault though...

If people other than telstra had been allowed to install dslams before recently we would have far better coverage as it is agile etc cant afford to install in too many new places where they wont have an instant customer base, and are therefore only installing where there is already dsl...

Since the ISPs have to recoop their costs (we are talking 6 figures or more) they will first install dslams where they have customers and there is only a telstra dslam, once they have done that they will start installing them in previously empty exchanges...

Re:Me me me

[Anonymous Coward]

nice to see you dropped the $'s

Hooray!

[CorruptMayor]

Now spammers have even more bandwidth to play with.
Now worms will hit with a harder punch.

Re:Hooray!

[Namronorman]

Doesn't most spam come from the United States? It sounds like this is a British ISP, so I really wouldn't worry about it that much if you truely are concerned.

Re:Hooray!

[CorruptMayor]

That's right. Spamming can only be done in the US. Not overseas, where bandwidth (apparently) is cheaper and more plentiful. And those spammers would never move. I mean, they have roots put down in the US! They wouldn't want to leave all their spammin' buddies behind.

Naw. They'll never, ever, EVER, go over to the UK or try to setup botnets in the UK. Crazy, crazy, mayor.

Re:Hooray!

[Achromatic1978]

Chill. He said 'most'. And you know what? He's actually right. Most spam /does/ come from the US, above and beyond location of the spammer at the keyboard. Where did he say that it doesn't come from elsewhere?

Re:Hooray!

[FidelCatsro]

Point of origin (point of Oregon would be a nice pun) , The spam will most likely be sent from Zombies through out the world , but look at where most of the companies are based .
There will be a hell of a lot of spam networks operating in places as diverse as China and Mozambique , but the companies that are paying the advertising bill are not usually from those countries .

OMG PORN

[Pinefresh]

that will totally revolutionise my porn habit!

Re:OMG PORN

[Jambon]

Remember: It is not the size of your pipeline that matters. It is how well you handle it.

Re:OMG PORN

[DurendalMac]

Pffft. That's nothing. When I lived in Moses Lake, WA, I got my porn on a residential fiber optic 100Mbps symmetrical pipe. I still have my webserver on it at a friend's place.

Re:OMG PORN

[IchBinEinPenguin]

I recomend you outsource the handling to someone else.


before you go blind.

Re:OMG PORN

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember: It is not the size of your pipeline that matters. It is how well you handle it.

No, size really does matter. If anyone tells you any different its because they feel bad for you.

correction....

[BarronVonGoerig]

Note from the administrators...BYTE THIS

Re:correction....

[mnlife]

not nice

pretty interesting deal

[muzik4machines]

i hope we will move toward that here in canada too, currently the fastest is 8Mbps cable and it cost about 80 canadian$

Re:pretty interesting deal

[Digital11]

So thats what, $5.73USD? I'm moving to Canada!

Re:pretty interesting deal

[Fox_1]

I have 10 Mb downstream in NS from the local cable company, costs me just 45$ (or 50% of my total cable bill). In 1997 I had 7Mb downstream in Halifax on DSL for 40$ a month. The tech really has been pretty much there for a long time, just now with all the music and vid downloads (Pop and Porn drives deployment) consumers actually want/need something faster then 2Mb. Besides aren't we getting the nationwide wireless network soon, that'll be at least 11Mb.

Re:pretty interesting deal

[Canadian_Daemon]

go check out the price of your USD. Yah, hows your economy doing these days? Oh right...hmmm, watch out for those hurricanes neighbour.

Wouldn't it be nice

[Kickboy12]

It'll probably be a while before major US ISP's start going to higher speeds. Kind of sucks.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice

[Ironsides]

It'll probably be a while before major US ISP's start going to higher speeds. Kind of sucks.

I'm not sure how much use a 24Mb connection is, considering that most websited don't have that much bandwidth to begin with. With the current backbones it's hard enough to use up 10Mb with only one site. Maybe when the backbones get up higher or server bandwith goes up, but not till then.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice

[timmarhy]

nonsense. how big do you think website are ffs? 1 meg at most for a front page? this demand is driven mostly for downloading music and movies (and yet riaa can't take the fucking hint how dense can they be) and the fact that cable and dsl aren't viable everywhere.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Negative. I know for a fact (yes I know I am posting AC, work might care) that the telco ISP I work for right here in the US will be rolling out 24 meg DSL next year. I understand that by not using my Slashdot ID or the telco's name this lacks credibility. Understood, all I can say is 24 meg DSL is comming, in the SE anyway *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*

Re:Wouldn't it be nice

[fodi]

I really hope you're trying to be stupid...

Re:Wouldn't it be nice

[DevoPhl]

With virtually no competition in the US broadband market, its unlikely we'll see anything like this soon. Right now, 3Mb/sec is running $40-50/month and is likely to stay there.

What I wished would happen is to see the 3Mb/sec costs come down to roughly $20/month but I realize this is unlikely to happen unless the government steps in and changes the way broadband Internet is done in the US. Right now Internet connectivity is considered a luxury item and thus, cannot be regulated. I seriously doubt we'll see a change here for at least 3 more years.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice

[znu]

Try a host that doesn't suck. I've got a site with Media Temple and when transferring data from that site to other well-connected hosts, I've seen transfer rates upwards of 8 MB/s. That's megabytes, not megabits. This is with a dedicated virtual hosting package that only costs $50/month (though admittedly there's a rather long commitment required to get that price) -- anyone operating anything beyond the level of a hobby site could afford that.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice

[BrokenHalo]

anyone operating anything beyond the level of a hobby site could afford that.

Like spammers, perhaps? I can see them being quick to take advantage of this kind of bandwidth, given a handful of zombied machines...

Australia first

[davisk]

Internode have offered this in Australia for some time. Wish it was available where I am, but i'm stuck on 12000/1000 with iinet (no, i don't work for either of them, but i've been a happy customer of both)

Re:Australia first

[Yakman]

Maybe they mean 24 megabyte/sec, after all the headline does say "24MB" not "24Mb". Unlikely :)

I'm on an exchange that is "Planned" for an Internode DSLAM (Glebe NSW), woo! Better than not being on the list at all. I can't wait to be paying $10/mo less for 16 times the speed. Well, 16 times is the max - but still.

Re:Australia first

[Luketh]

So have Adam Internet, which I'm running through (Rather be through internode though, I didn't get the call, however).

Weird that we should get the hook-up before any of the US providers.

Another odd thing is that Telstra isn't actually choosing to provide DSL2+ as part of its service. Their own BigPond service will stay at 10Mbps cable or whatever. They will allow other companies like Adam and Internode to install their own equipment in the telephone exchanges to allow for DSL2+ though.

I went from 64kbps (throttled from 1500k) to 24Mbps in a day... the human mind just can't comprehend on a scope like that. It's like Paris Hilton inventing a cure for cancer, and moreso, one that doesn't involve simply killing them with STDs instead.

Re:Australia first

[Elyscape]

There's one, big, fundamental difference in the services provided. Internode caps the amount of data you're allowed to download (15-60 gigs, depending on how much you pay). Meanwhile, Be has no download cap whatsoever. This, I think, makes Be's service significantly better.

Re:Australia first

[JuzzFunky]

I'm with Internode's 24Mb plan.
If you exceed your download limit your connection will be 'shaped'. You are never charged more than your usual monthly fee. As I understand it (and I am open to correction) Shaping involves slwoing your connection down if and only if their servers are under heavy load (ie. it is affecting other users). They do this to keep things fair for all of their users. I've been over my limit a number of times and have not noticed any slow down at all.
What I like about it is that they are very explicit about the limits of their service.

From the Be site: https://www.bethere.co.uk/beonline/acceptableUse.d o/
"If it's felt that any member's Internet activities are so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected, Be may give the member generating the excessive web traffic a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, should the levels of activity not immediately decrease after the warning, Be may terminate that member's services."

The reality of it all is that you will not find many people out there serving up content at 24Mb. Except for direct conections with Internode's mirrors and Gaming Servers (which make the whole thing worth while!) you'll be spending your time waiting for the Internet to catch up with you.

Re:Australia first

[mattjb0010]

This, I think, makes Be's service significantly better.

There's also a lot of local content (eg ABC) that doesn't count to the cap. Internode have a lot of nice things (including a wide range of Linux and BSD distros) on their mirror site. Further, Internode provision a lot of backhaul capacity, and their own direct links to the US via Southern Cross cable. The two good effects of having the cap: they are able to maintain better backhaul capacity, and this stays freer due to people not downloading as much. 15GB a month is a lot of traffic for me, anyway. Also, I need the speed for running X11 over ssh tunnels from Linux to OS X boxes.

Re:Australia first

[asumaboy]

Quality of the providers network and service has little to do with the fact there is no cap.

Contention anyone?

Re:Australia first

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they've already rolled out ADSL2+ in several South Australian suburbs, my exchange was about two months ago. I'm already on the ADSL2+ (24Mb/s plan) and it's very nice! IT doesn't really hit 24Mb/s, more like 10 - 12Mb/s, but the main bottleneck is the connection at the other end anyway. But you can have 5 - 8 downloads going at 150 KB/s each, so it's all good :)

ISPs all have download caps in Australia--unless you get an expensive unlimited plan--but at 30GB/month who gives a shit....other than porn addicts who really needs to download more than a GB a day?

Re:Australia first

[ColaMan]

Meanwhile, Be has no download cap whatsoever. This, I think, makes Be's service significantly better.

You're comparing apples to oranges a little here. Internode (in Australia) is crippled somewhat by the limited capacity and high cost of overseas links.

Be had better be prepared for the incredible amount of leeeeching. 24Mbps is no good if you'll only get that to the next system upstream at the Be office, with 5k/s to The Rest Of The World. As pretty much all relevant ISPs (that is, the ones that are still in business) have discovered, truly unlimited high-speed internet is not a good, sustainable business plan at the moment.

This is why Internode, for example, have plans that get shaped to 64kbps after your limit. They also have flatrate plans that (after a set amount) dynamically prioritise your packets depending on how much you've downloaded compared to everyone else online at the moment. These are more expensive (AUD100-200/month). Then you have the true, unlimited 'leased-line' style plans, which cost in the order of AUD500-1000 a month.

So I wonder how much backbone capacity Be has, and I also wonder how long it will be before they completely oversubscribe it to the point of end-users leaving. I give it 6 months, tops. Bookmark this post :-)

Re:Australia first

[Anonymous Coward]

They will allow other companies like Adam and Internode to install their own equipment in the telephone exchanges to allow for DSL2+ though.

After several years of legal challenges and competition regulation, yes, they do allow (or more like "have been forced to allow") this to happen.

Re:Australia first

[davisk]

It's worth pointing out that Australia has experimented with the uncapped, unlimited plans before, and they always end up adopting a fair use policy to restrict the people who hammer their link 24/7. I've been on those ISPs, and while it was nice to never have to watch how much i'm downloading, the overall service level on the capped/shaped plans has been much higher. I'd consider myself to be a heavy 'consumer' of bandwidth, and while on internode's prioritised plans, i never experienced a dip in available bandwidth, not from shaping, and not from oversubscription - regardless of how much i downloaded. let's face it, the vast majority of people who want to download 24/7, aren't doing it legitimately.

Re:Australia first

[TheSurfer]

Same in holland.

Some examples:
http://www.wanadoo.nl/adsl/info_adsl_family.html
http://www.leaseweb.com/index.php?p=dslprivate
http://www.speedxs.nl/index/products/adsl_detail?p id=207
http://www.caveo.nl/
http://tweakdsl.nl/adsl2/

Re:Australia first

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of uses for that data. My friend, for example, downloads music libraries for applications such as Sonar, etc, which are 9 DVD images big.

Sure it's illegal (I didn't say this was an example of legal use), but it's certainly not porn.

I hit my 15GB/month every month, easily. I mostly download TV shows and Movies with bittorrent. One show I download every week is battlestar galactica. I don't think season 2 is going to be shown in Australia, so it's the only way I can see it.

Re:Australia first

[dr_d_19]

So I wonder how much backbone capacity Be has, and I also wonder how long it will be before they completely oversubscribe it to the point of end-users leaving. I give it 6 months, tops. Bookmark this post :-)

No, don't. In Sweden, the major ISPs has provided 24/1Mb services for at least two years, and they have no caps and my download speed (I have some distance to the exchange, so I'm estimated to get a 10Mb download) can be as high as 800KB/s from most places (been tested from sourceforges mirror at SWITCH, Switzerland, that's across europe folks!).

Re:Australia first

[jrockway]

> The reality of it all is that you will not find many people out there serving up content at 24Mb. Except for direct conections with Internode's mirrors and Gaming Servers (which make the whole thing worth while!) you'll be spending your time waiting for the Internet to catch up with you.

This is not entirely true. If you ever happen to be downloading from an I2-connected site from another I2-connected site you'll get GREAT transfer rates. I once installed Debian on a machine at UIC (University of Illinois at Chicago) from the debian.uchicago.edu (at the University of Chicago, a few miles away) -- I got 100Mbps down the entire time, it was great. I tried downloading some ISOs on a few other machines on that switch (gigabit uplink) and I couldn't get any transfer rate less than the maximum 100Mbps down... it was amazing. If I had a gigabit card I could have downloaded a full Debian ISO in 6 seconds :)

That's damn cool, and I want that ability in my house. And I want gigabit uplink, too, because sometimes I need to shift big files in the other direction as well. What's with the limitation of upload bandwidth anyway... running the wire to my house costs them the same amount regardless of what direction the data's going! (Oh but then they can't sell hosting services. Well, too fucking bad. Sell me bandwidth.)

It's freaking 2005 and we're excited about 25Mbps? (Japan has 100MBps for years!)

Re:Australia first

[Bert64]

15GB a month isn`t much really, it`s quite easy to go over that in 1 day..
As for X11 over ssh, why not try NX (www.nomachine.com) - a compression technology for X that improves speed and latency over wan links.. i can run kde remotely at a useable speed from my home dsl (256kb upstream) to my system at work.

Re:Australia first

[jez9999]

As pretty much all relevant ISPs (that is, the ones that are still in business) have discovered, truly unlimited high-speed internet is not a good, sustainable business plan at the moment.

Not sure about that.

Re:Australia first

[Echnin]

Bah. My ISP has no caps. Not awesome speed, but acceptable: 3000/600 kbps or something like that. Upload is actually a theoretical 768 so real performance can go a little above 600. I use maybe 100 GB a month. The only other ISP here that ever had download caps had to remove them because of bad publicity and user feedback.

Re:Australia first

[poot_rootbeer]

Be has no download cap whatsoever. This, I think, makes Be's service significantly better.

Depends on how likely you think it is you'll exceed Internode's download cap. An email-and-web user, for example, would probably never come close to racking up 15GB in a month. A bittorent power user, on the other hand, would easily exceed that.

Re:Australia first

[Wrath0fb0b]

The comercial internet has always been a "sender pays" system at the middle ranks. Unless you a tier 1 provider you are going to be charged for every byte you inject into the network.

God help you if you try to introduce a "buyer pays" system!

Re:Australia first

[Anonymous Coward]

Not working for a telco I can't comment directly on the costs of overseas links from Oz. But, a couple of years back when I was in NZ, the only provider of note (at least to my locale) was Telecom NZ. Then their service wasn't speed capped but volume (at a crappy 1gb per month before per mb charges kicked in).

The point here, is that yes their b/w might be expensive to buy, but I was obtaining close on the theoretical maximum that my DSL connection would support - to sites outside of NZ. That leaves me to believe that whatever infrastructure they had, wasn't being fully utilized. So what would work better? One customer paying through the nose and not giving good ROI on your pipes, or more customers, paying less?

Link?

[RaffiRai]

Are we.. missing a link here?

In case anybody wants to read it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5294551-103 676,00.html

AC to avoid the whoring.

Re:In case anybody wants to read it...

[Anonymous Coward]

"AC to avoid the whoring."

Nah. You're still a whore!

I love bandwidth

[ReformedExCon]

But I also love service and stability and a broadband connection that is always available. My experience with English broadband is that it is run over deteriorating copper wires that were apparently laid when Alex Bell was experimenting with his telegraph machine, and which are frequently sliced into little segments by construction crews mangling the roads.

Sure they offer high speed access, but can they also offer guaranteed access?

If it does work out, my only wish was that I was able to get on that network. Limping along at 512kbps is not quite the exhilarating ride that it once was when I first switched from 56.6 dialup.

Re:I love bandwidth

[Lord Kano]

Limping along at 512kbps is not quite the exhilarating ride that it once was when I first switched from 56.6 dialup.

Quit yer bitchin'. In the US we never saw above 53K dialup.

8 Years ago I got ISDN and was paying over $120 per month for 128Kb connectivity.

LK

Re:I love bandwidth

[saitoh]

well, while they dont come out and "guarentee" access, they do compensate you for non-service days which is cool. If only my cable company did that...

quote:

>>>What happens if my service is disrupted?

We're committed to providing you with a service that has as few disruptions as possible.
In the unlikely event that you experience a loss of service caused by us for more than 5 consecutive days (for home members) and 24 consecutive hours (for office members), you will be compensated for each day's disruption, by a reduction in your monthly service fee equivalent to the amount you would have paid for service on those days.

In order to receive this reduction, you will need to notify us as soon as the service failure occurs and request the appropriate reduction by contacting member services when your service is restored. See our 'Standard terms and conditions' for more information.

Re:I love bandwidth

[ReformedExCon]

"caused by us" is the key phrase there. If something horrific happens on their end, they will reduce your next month's bill by the pro-rated amount. Better than nothing, but not that far from it.

It doesn't cover anything in the middle, so any network problems that occur outside their doors are automatically not their problem. The infrastructure itself (when I was over there) is a mess, and there isn't much an ISP can do about that. There really isn't a good, direct relationship between an ISP and a subscriber. The subscriber is at the mercy of the wire-owners which are typically not the ISPs themselves.

Re:I love bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience with English broadband is that it is run over deteriorating copper wires that were apparently laid when Alex Bell was experimenting with his telegraph machine, and which are frequently sliced into little segments by construction crews mangling the roads.

The fact that you refer to it as English broadband rather than British broadband leads me to believe that you are an American that hasn't actually spent a lot of time in this country at all. Natives don't talk that way, and Yanks who spend more than a month over here don't either. So really, when you speak "in your experience", it's not worth much, is it?

I, on the other hand, have lived here all my life, and my experience is that I haven't had an interruption to my cable broadband service, which I use all day practically every day, in well over a year, probably over two years.

Re:I love bandwidth

[hajejan]

Sounds like you need Zen. I've been with them for a year now. Excellent customer service, low contention, and high speeds at reasonable prices. see also http://www.adslguide.org.uk/

Unlimited Use

[LordMyren]

Wasnt it not all that long ago the UK was charging per-minute? It seemed unlimited use dialup was always very rare. Something in the back of my mind buzzes about phone use & taxes or something, but I dunno.

Congradz though, that sounds truly excellent. I'm glad to see someone going above 768k upstream. Thats the barrier I thought would never be crossed.

-Myren

Re:Unlimited Use

[saitoh]

might be, one of the strings attached is:

"To subscribe customers must have a BT phone line"

although I'm not sure what plans BT has to offer, I know that culturally it seems to have been the norm in the market place to have per-min charges on the phone instead of a flat rate per month.

Re:Unlimited Use

[brain159]

UK local telephone calls were not free/unmetered. (there may be some service arrangements which change this now, I've not kept up with that). This meant that going modem-to-modem cost money. Because of some flexibility/complication in the UK phone system, there's a bunch of dialling codes which are non-geographic - 0845 numbers were originally "local rate" (but now the effective cost of a real local call has dropped, whereas the rate to call these has not), 0800s are free to the caller, etc.

(This means that customer services sort of numbers are either 0845, or 0870 "national rate" lines - they cost more to call, aren't typically included in cellphone package minutes, and creates a token revenue stream for the company you're calling while you're on hold!)

In the super-early-days, you paid your ISP and then paid to dial in to their 0845 local-rate POP line.

Then Freeserve (now Wanadoo) and co turned up - they realised that if you worked with a telecoms company, you could receive a slice of the per-minute fee that users paid for calling in to your 0845 number. Thus did Pay-As-You-Go dialup arrive in the UK; you paid your phone bill, the ISP took their cut from that - no monthly fee. (note: unlike netzero and similar in the US, there was no adbar or weirdy crap - straight PPP dialup.)

Some technical change happened which made it possible for ISPs to offer flat-rate access, without them having to pay the high costs of letting heavy users dial in to real 0800 lines for ages on end. I'm not entirely sure what this change is, but it was reliant wholly on you having a BT landline (it was some hack with trick numbers in the local exchanges, turning the call into data earlier or somesuch.). Now, you could go back to paying a monthly fee, but not pay for your calls (as the access number was now free to call).

Aaah yes, must clarify the whole "having a BT phoneline" thing. It's *not* a given in the UK that the RJblah phone jack in someone's house is necessarily hooked up to the local BT phone exchange (or wiring cabinet, or whatever). In the UK, the cable TV companies also provide telephone service over their own kit - right down to running new copper in to your house and adding a new socket. When they launched this, they offered cheaper call prices than BT (and you could port your number the way the developed world can with cellphone numbers), and eventually got round to offering PAYG and Unmetered dialup roughly when BT customers got it (but you have to use the Cable company as your ISP to have Unmetered Dialup). Nowadays the UK broadband services say "must have a BT line" because the cable companies won't/can't/don't DSLify their POTS loops (they don't need to, they offer cable modem broadband). If you really want DSL, you can have a BT landline alongside a Cable-company one, or in place of it.

(this is all from memory, at time of posting it's about 6am in the UK and I need some sleep. I've not put in a specific timescale since I'd be guessing entirely - Unmetered dialup has been around here a good few years now, easily.)

Re:Unlimited Use

[nogginthenog]

Nah, I was using unmetered dialup for years. I paid a flat fee of GBP 9.99 a month.

Re:Unlimited Use

[Kazzahdrane]

I pay £10.50 a month for my BT phone line. I also get 2Mb ADSL (limited to 30Gb!) from BT which costs me ~£30 a month. Suffice to say I'll be taking Be up on their offer if it comes to my city any time soon.

Re:Unlimited Use

[LiquidCoooled]

The phone line is a requirement because a large percentage of the population have just phone service from a cable company and have no copper wires from the BT phone exchange.

Re:Unlimited Use

[thelem]

Having a BT phone line is a requirement of all ADSL packages in the UK at the moment, because your ADSL connection uses that link at least until the local exchange.

Unmetered (not per minute) dialup access has been available in the UK for many years - it was first provided in 1999 (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/290229.stm), although it took a couple of years to become widely available and reliable. In the early days, none of the ISPs had enough modems to support their customers, so if you were trying to dial in between 6pm and midnight, you would usually have to redial several times until you got a free modem.

Re:Unlimited Use

[thelem]

ISPs can offer unmetered access because the then regulator OfTel forced BT to offer unmetered packages to the ISPs, first called "SurfTime" but later improved and called "FRIACO" (Flat Rate Internet Access Call Origination).

You need a BT line because OfTel never thought it was necessary to force the cable companies to provide these tariffs and it wasn't in the cable companies interests to provide them (much better to get people to signup to their own internet providers). In fact, at one point ntl were offering unmetered internet access included in the cost of the phone line.

A Trend Indeed!

[nich0las]

I would hope that trend spills into the US! (a link would have helped me get my facts right) The last time I heard about connections in the UK it was about 60 pounds for a one meg line! I would certainly hope that US providers would be willing to give me 24 Mb for only $42! Instead of 3Mb for $40!

Re:A Trend Indeed!

[RotateLeftByte]

I have just upgrded my ADSL connection to 2Mb/Unlimited downloads and it costs approx £17.00($30.00) per month including all taxes.

Re:A Trend Indeed!

[arkhan_jg]

Which ISP? I'm on 1Mb unlimited with pipex for £24 inc, and it's a nice service, but most of the cheaper ones are capped.

Re:A Trend Indeed!

[anthony_dipierro]

I would certainly hope that US providers would be willing to give me 24 Mb for only $42!

How 'bout 15 Mbps for $49.95/month? OK, maybe it's not available where you are, but how widespread is the Be service?

Re:A Trend Indeed!

[Xarius]

The last time I heard about connections in the UK it was about 60 pounds for a one meg line!

You're completely right there, if you're talking quarterly. Although it sounds expensive, bear in mind we get PAID more as well as things being more expensive.

Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay more than that for Adelphia, and everything about them sucks, including the speed.

ummmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

theyve had various companies offering this speed in Australia for more than 6 months now....

REALLY REALLY HIGH Speeeed

[oxnyx]

Of course saddly it would take a real big torrent to fill that kind of download stream. I remeber upgrading to DSL after a few years on 56kbps and the biggest probelm was that most of the net still came in at about the same speed due to back bone. Good new that the last mile is becoming much closer to the max speed with huge cable replacments.

Not gonna happen here...

[mwilli]

It would be nice if this would be implemented here in the states, but the corporate entities that provide teh high speed internet access are quite greedy and, if/when they manage to provide that kind of bandwith, it would cost tremendously more than $43 a month.

Re:Not gonna happen here...

[jbellows_20]

...but the corporate entities that provide teh high speed internet access are quite greedy

That's why the infrastructure needs to be done by the city. Where I live the city has done just that and everyone has the opportunity to receive 10Mbps for only $40. Now I know that this cost is more per megabit than the article talks about. But still, when compared to what cable and telcos offer, it's a great price.

Re:Not gonna happen here...

[ReformedExCon]

"It would be nice if this would be implemented here in the states, but the corporate entities that provide teh high speed internet access are quite greedy and, if/when they manage to provide that kind of bandwith, it would cost tremendously more than $43 a month."

That wouldn't be the case if the U.S. government saw fit to fund such a program. If the internet is a good thing, as I hope we can all agree, then getting it into the homes of every citizen ought to be a goal that we can all rally around. If companies are unwilling to bring forth broadband services to uncompetitive areas, the government can use a combination of carrots and sticks to goad private enterprises into those areas.

Is it a little bit Socialist? Yeah, sure. But legislated and managed effectively, it can be economically implemented with very little raise in costs (taxes) to the average citizen. Since we are talking about the UK in this article, we can look at their NHS program and see how much more services are provided at a lower average cost than the same services in the U.S. Government funding doesn't need to be some mysterious, mismanaged black hole. It only seems that way because we elect leaders who are more interested in getting pork barrel spending for their home districts rather than helping the entire country.

Re:Not gonna happen here...

[TheGSRGuy]

I could see this being used more for small businesses right now, not consumers. A small engineering firm with say, 20 employees, could get a lot of use from this moving big CAD files to and from customers. Even branch offices of larger companies could use it for some wicked-fast VPN connections to a corporate server.

Re:Not gonna happen here...

[Anonymous Coward]

"It would be nice if this would be implemented here in the states"

If you live in the right areas of CA you can get FIOS.
FIOS is 15/2 for 29.95 or 30/3 for 39.95 ( according to verizon salesmen)
if you happen to be in a FIOS service area and have fiber running down your street.

It may not be nationwide. but it disproves the "it would cost tremendously more than $43 a month. " statement.

Re:Not gonna happen here...

[jrockway]

True; I pay $75 for 1.5/384! Living in a backwaters country like the US kind of sucks at times. (And I live in the third largest city in the country, less than a mile from downtown.)

Re:Not gonna happen here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, $75.. That's almost exactly what you have to pay here to get symmetric 100 Mbps! :-S

Re:Not gonna happen here...

[anthony_dipierro]

That wouldn't be the case if the U.S. government saw fit to fund such a program. If the internet is a good thing, as I hope we can all agree, then getting it into the homes of every citizen ought to be a goal that we can all rally around.

The internet is a good thing, but the average citizen doesn't need 25Mbps. I use the internet a whole lot, and I get along fine with 768K. I also pay nothing in income taxes in part due to the recent tax cuts. How many Brits can say that?

I'll happily keep my 768K connection at $15/month rather than have to pay taxes to government to give everyone 25Mbps.

Is it a little bit Socialist? Yeah, sure. But legislated and managed effectively, it can be economically implemented with very little raise in costs (taxes) to the average citizen.

Yeah, but you want it to be run by the government, so it's not going to be legislated and managed effectively. The U.S. government runs one of the most inefficient monopolies in the world.

If it really can be economically implemented with very little raise in costs to the average citizen, why don't you start a non-profit organization to provide it to the average citizen? Even cheapos like me would pay $20-25 a month for 25Mbps, probably a little bit more if it was to help out a non-profit. There's no need for the government to get involved beyond how it already does. If enough people want it, the private industry (including non-profits) will provide it. Right now, enough people don't want it. I don't even want it.

Re:Not gonna happen here...

[ArtStone]

Not necessarily.

The way the business model has evolved - recognizing that there are exceptions to every generalization - is that the sender of IP traffic is paying most of the cost of the network traffic. This occurs in terms of paying "transit fees" for delivering the traffic, or peering arrangements where the party sending the more traffic pays more of the circuit cost.

So your local Phone/Cable company really doesn't much care how much you download. However, they -are- paying the transit costs for what you upload - so they keep the upload speeds relatively low. That's the number to keep your eye on.

wohooo!!!

[Dragon Rojo]

now i can waste less time downloading pr0n and spend more watching it.

Re:wohooo!!!

[Basehart]

There should be an equation similar to Moore's law which determines how technological advances facilitate the distribution and consumption of porn.

How about Hill's law (as in Benny):

Hill's Law

(hillz lâ) (n.) The observation made by Benny Hill (RIP), co-founder of Hill's Angels, that the number of porn images that could be downloaded in one sitting had doubled every day since the internet was invented by Al Gore. Hill predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but porn downloads still doubled approximately every 18 days, and this is the current definition of Hill's Law, which Hill himself has blessed. Most experts, including Hill himself, expect Hill's Law to hold for at least another two very tiring decades.

Can they really deliver?

[Perseid]

It's not unusual, even in my own personal observation, to see an ISP advertise higher rates than they can realistically provide on a regular basis. I mean, how many people with Charter 3Mb get far less than that?

Time will tell. It might be time to move to the UK and endure the kidney pie for a while.

Re:Can they really deliver?

[ohjethuth]

From the website:
"The actual bandwidth that you will receive is based on three factors: the length of the wire that connects your premises with the BT exchange, the quality of the copper, and signal interference from other users or devices. If the quality of the copper is perfect, and there is no line noise, you will receive 24 megs up to a kilometre from the exchange. If your line is two kilometres long then you can expect to receive up to 15 megs. Your bandwidth will decrease further as line length increases, and we do not offer our service if you are further than 5.5 kilometres from the exchange. While bandwidths are not guaranteed, we do offer the highest bandwidth available using ADSL2+ to your premises."

It seems that they're covering their arses on this topic, and rightly so. Plus, i think their quoted speeds are that of the ATM circuits, so i'm guessing a 'perfect line' of 24Mb will get you a TCP/IP throughput of about 21Mb, ish?

Re:Can they really deliver?

[dave420]

It's straight-up illegal to offer an internet service in the UK, and lie (even slightly) about its performance. Tiscali got in trouble for that, when they called their 128kb/s service "broadband". BT and others called up the ITC (who regulate the UK TV commercials), and Tiscali had to pull its adverts.

And if you think Kidney pie is all we have to offer over here, you and your hormone-drenched beef are very mistaken ;)

24Mb/s Broadband

[mrclark13]

While this is without a doubt good news, I don't really see that happening in the U.S. very soon. After all, why should the big tel-co's spend more to upgrade their infrastructure when broadband growth is slowing? I personally hope that isn't the case, but I don't really see it being otherwise.

Re:24Mb/s Broadband

[anthony_dipierro]

You don't see what happening in the US any time soon? 25Mbps? 30Mbps is happening in the US today. It's a bit pricey, but 15Mbps is less than $50/month, and you get a faster upstream bandwidth than the Be service (2Mbps vs. 1.3Mbps).

Verizon Fios

[ixtapolapoquetl]

In the DC/Maryland Suburbs you can get 15Mbps for $44.99. I have 2Mbps upstream with it, so I think a part of the story is incorrect... Fios would be faster upstream. Though I understand not a lot of people have Fios available to them.

<Homer>Suckers.</Homer> :)

Re:Verizon Fios

[sommie]

Which Maryland suburbs would that be?

Re:Verizon Fios

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of the story? The whole thing is incorrect.

FIOS goes up to 30 Mbps (5 Mbps upstream), that's way faster all around than this new "fastest ever" service.

Re:Verizon Fios

[Gunzour]

I have it in Bethesda.

Re:Verizon Fios

[arabenau]

5/2 for 34.95 in suburban philly. kicks butt over comcast, especially when your neighbor is torrenting dead shows 24x7

But are servers even fast enough for that?

[TheCarlMau]

Are servers even fast enough for that? For an impractical example, having 1mb/s line and trying to connect to a 28kb/s server makes having that 1mb/s pretty much useless. The same could be, I guess, true in this case.

(Although I'm not sure if I know what I'm talking about!)

Re:But are servers even fast enough for that?

[Mattygfunk1]

Are servers even fast enough for that?

Yes, generally. Most servers hosted in a datacenter (95% at a guess) are connected to either 10MB or 100MB ethernet.

__
Laugh Daily video clips for adults

Re:But are servers even fast enough for that?

[Have Blue]

A 100Mbps line is enough to feed four clients of this service; that's not enough. Server-side traffic shaping is going to become very popular over the next few years.

Re:But are servers even fast enough for that?

[flithm]

In case you're curious most datacenters are connected to the Big Guys (tm) via something from the OC3 to OC192 range, tiny ones may use DS3 (T3), and bigger ones are most likely using one of the 10 gigabit class technologies.

In case you're curious:

OC3 = 155.52 Mb/s
OC192 = 9.95 Gb/s

The Big Guys (tm) are likely running many banks of parallel OC192's to service the smaller guys, with the larger connections being served by OC256 or even OC768's (40 Gb/s).

An interesting point of note is that an OC768 connection is actually quite a bit faster than even PC3200 DDR SDRAM!!!

Re:But are servers even fast enough for that?

[Jugalator]

It depends on their geographical location and load/capacity. I'm often noticing I'm capping at anywhere between 50 and 200 KB/s across the Atlantic on US servers, rarely going above that, but nationally I seem to much easier be able to get my full 1 MB/s up/down. This is on 10 Mbps optic fiber, I guess DSL have other limiting factors in addition, like copper line quality and distance from your station.

Re:But are servers even fast enough for that?

[Jugalator]

By the way, exceptions can be powerful datacenters like Microsoft's Akamai servers which I often get at least 400 KB/s from, Sun's servers, Oracle's, and some others I've tried and regularly regardless time of day get very fast downloads for going through so many routers even across the Atlantic. They may sometimes silently redirect me to European routers though.

Re:But are servers even fast enough for that?

[LiquidCoooled]

Of course it doesnt mean that.
The internal network in our office runs at 100Mbps.
Theres a lot more than 4 machines connected to it at any one time.

Its only ever an issue if its physically processing some large query or internally shuffling some files around.

Re:But are servers even fast enough for that?

[anthony_dipierro]

A 100Mbps line is enough to feed four clients of this service

It can transfer to the next hop for four clients of the service simultaneously at the full bandwidth. But unless your service requires continuous streaming of data at 25Mbps, this isn't going to be reached. Of course, unless you're serving UDP data or really huge files which allow TCP to ramp up to full speed, it's not going to make much difference anyway.

I agree this is going to cause a need for server-side traffic shaping but not to be able to feed more clients. After all, TCP already handles that (and handles it just as well with server-side bottlenecks as client-side ones). The problem is that the vast majority of clients with a 100Mbps line have to pay for the bandwidth they use, either per gig transferred or based on the highest bandwidth served (knocking off some percentage of the top for peaks). One person on a 25 meg connection decides to download a bunch of huge files, and suddenly you're out a whole bunch of money.

It's also going to probably raise the need for a TCP connection with faster ramp up. It might even be smart to start raising end-to-end MTU. The latter is probably going to be hard. I don't think ethernet can handle more than 1500 bytes in a packet. But the former might already be part of IPv6. If so, that might just be the killer app that finally gets everyone to switch.

Re:But are servers even fast enough for that?

[gl4ss]

you'd be surprised about on how fast connections some linux mirrors(even debian repos) sit on!

what's good about having a fast conn is that it's not your connection that's limiting it.. and your other surfing, playing, etc doesn't get hampered as much if you run large downloads or updating in the background.

(I only got 8mbit connection now, though I could get 24mbit if I wanted but I didn't think it would be worth the extra - this is in Finland)

That's enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like they're ready for customized television over there. Time to upgrade your television servers: OHUK.

I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[G3ckoG33k]

This IS old news... I have had this service for three years, but in Sweden.

The cool thing, apart from the bandwidth is that it comes directly through the telephone jacket. No need for new cables.

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[MetalBlade]

I agree with G3ckoG33k. This is very old news.

I've had 10/10 Mbit _fiber_ for more years than I can remember, and I have lots of friends with both 24/1 and 100/100 Mbit.
Right now I pay 30 per month for 10Mbit, I think the price for 100Mbit is 60 per month.

The cool thing about my connection is that the fiber goes all the way to your basement, then TP cables from there up to your switch, then to your computer. The only network knowledge you need to have is how to use DHCP since you get 5 dynamic public IP addresses.

I really hate when a site such as /. comes up with news that is this old. Sure there are lots of people who had no idea of this, but I think that the people who post the news should be more up-to-date.

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[poopdeville]

Is there a bandwidth cap? What country is this? Do they accept foreigners?

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[Fastball]

Yeah, I guess by the time I'm done downloading the news, you've been finished with it for three years.

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[Caine]

Is there a bandwidth cap? What country is this? Do they accept foreigners?

No. Sweden. Yes, quite a lot of them.

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I could never reach such speed. In fact, the maximum I got was around 8Mbps, and a shitty 0.8Mbps upload. Bredbandsbolaget sucks.

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[myspys]

Also worth pointing out is that Bredbandsbolget (www.bredbandsbolaget.se) has started to deploy 1000 Mbit installations, the first (and only?) is available in Lund (south Sweden)

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[zqad]

No, that's quite wrong.You've mistaken B2 Bredband (publ) (Bredbandbolaget) with Bredband2, a firm owned by labs2. http://www.labs2.com/pr/press2004113001.html for those of you who read swedish.

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[myspys]

My bad, same founder though (Jonas Birgersson)

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[MattBurke]

It is by no means old news.

Here in the UK, bandwidth is not cheap. I pay around £45/month (That's 66 Euros) for an uncapped 2Mbit ADSL line with 256Kbit up, including line rental. That's a bloody good deal over here.

They are offering a product that's 50 times faster than the average broadband connection for a tiny price. That's BIG news here. I'm just disappointed it'll probably never reach where I live - capability for speeds over 2Mbit are limited to a very few heavily populated areas such as London, London and London.

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

We only accept foreigners who are going to live on welfare!

People who want to work for money are NOT welcome!

A big plus if you wear your dirty laundry on the head, then you are immediateley accepted....

Just another native Swede - taxed to death.

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[poopdeville]

Check. Check. I have some undies I haven't washed in a while.

Would I be expected to learn Swedish?

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[@madeus]

Agreed, I work for a UK telco and major provider and despite how high broadband uptake is here it's shocking how far behind our European neighbours the UK is technologically in high speed network provision. This is not helped by often ineffective government regulation - which often make things worse rather than better for customers - and the incumbent British Telecom who have kept the UK back technologically through lack of development - it will be some decades yet before we are free of them.

The market is rapidly changing in the UK but we still pay more money for less bandwidth that other western nations (the flip side is, we can hire network engineers from across Europe who have already built VDSL / ADSL 2.0 networks and have practical experience of the equipment). Though connectivity is cheaper in the US than it is in the UK (as is pretty much everything), technologically the situation little better.

Asia and main land Europe have had speeds in excess of this (at cheaper prices) for year, so it's a bit insular of those of us in the US and the 51st state to think of this as 'new'. Though I should say in fairness a lot as hinged on some countries and companies waiting for standards to be ratified and equipment to be certified as compliant before allowing them to be rolled out.

TBH I'm amazed some places have managed to roll out VDSL and ADSL 2.0 solutions though, getting the current generation of equipment to work properly (without falling over or falling foul of one of umpteen 'undocumented features').

This news is also over hyped as Be announced this a while ago, there are actually plenty of people offering the same service though (and none are actually live products in the UK yet). All be did was jump the gun and announce it the day before the standard had been accepted (which they weren't supposed to, but did anyway so they could claim they were "first" - even if they didn't actually roll out the technology first).

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Practicly everyone in Sweden has English as a second language. Those that don't have it as a third...

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[Tim Browse]

£45/month? Hmmm...are you sure that's a good deal? My BT line rental is about £2/month, and you can get that ADSL service (2Mb/256k/uncapped) from, e.g. Eclipse, for £30/month. So I'm not sure how £45/month is a 'bloody good deal'..?

Even including my BT dialing plan charge, it only comes to £40/month.

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[MattBurke]

OK I thought I paid more than I do for line rental.

I don't use the phone line for anything other than DSL. Therefore I pay BT £10.50 per month. You can't get it cheaper according to their website. My DSL is £30/month with Zen but although you can get a few quid cheaper it's had about 10 minutes of downtime in 3 years and always delivers a full 2Mbit when I want it. Well worth the extra couple of quid.

You can get cheaper bandwidth on paper through NTL/Telewest if you already subscribe to cable tv, but the quality of the connection is pathetic compared to a decent DSL connection.

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

No it is not old news, the news item isn't about Sweden, it is about an ISP IN THE UK

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[dave420]

This article is about getting this service in the UK. I'm perfectly sure EVERYONE on slashdot knows you get thousands of gigabytes a second in Sweden, as any time broadband is mentioned on slashdot, some Swede pops his/her head up and spouts on about how much fibre they have up their ass. I'm not being rude here - I love the idea of a cat5 on the wall and 100/100, but not every nation is the same. Not being partly in the arctic circle probably has something to do with it, but I'm unsure ;)

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have missed the bit where it says "UK" and not Sweden; this is news for the UK. The entire world knows that Swedish people have dual fibre optic lines just going to the doorbell, nevermind the computer...

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[rikkus-x]

GBP 2 a month line rental? I thought their cheapest was GBP 11. Or were you exaggerating?

Rik

Re:I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[Tim Browse]

That's from my last bill. As I said, if I include the calling plan (which seems to be compulsory the last time I checked, so you may as well call it line rental) it comes to about £10.50 or something (hence £40/month in total).

WAAAAA Haaaa HAaaaa SOB!! SOB!!

[JohnnyGTO]

I pay that much for the crap COX calls broadband! waaaaaaaaaa....

I mean what does it take to get an american company to do something progressive and customer oriented???

I guess I shouldn't bad mouth them to muc^%%%#*>23fFFFhgv%$#( carrier lost....

Lack of info in the blurb...

[Donniedarkness]

First of all, the blurb is lacking a link to the article that it mentions:

http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/computers/story/0,1 587,1525508,00.html/

Next up, for those of you who can't tell, this is UK-only.

Now, here's my question: Is this service really all it's cracked up to be? Anyone know anyone else on it?

Re:Lack of info in the blurb...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's for real.

I ordered mine 9 days ago, expecting activation within the next week. I'll keep you posted...

You can get this in Utah too...

[Acius]

Parts of Utah now have a 15 Mbit SYMMETRIC connection available, which is enough to make any torrenting geek happy (one ISP doing this is here). That's $44/mo, and they're doing 30 Mbit symmetric for $109/mo (although technically that's a "business" package). Mostly, I'm happy to see a non-stupid upstream finally available in a home package (and looks like they don't bother blocking port 80, either).

Re:You can get this in Utah too...

[OverlordQ]

Yea, but you're capped at 100 Gigs.

Re:You can get this in Utah too...

[Acius]

Yeah, and if you're downloading 3-4 DVD's worth of stuff a day this can get annoying. If you go over, it's $10 for every extra 10 gigabytes per month. Painful, but meh.

Re:You can get this in Utah too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for bringing that up and pissing me off all over again. Have you ever seen a map of the UTOPIA fiber optic network coverage? There's a big sinking hole named 'Salt Lake City' with people enjoying 15 Mbit symmetric all around it. And I still have to deal with Qwest.

Re:You can get this in Utah too...

[Petrushka]

... a 15 Mbit SYMMETRIC connection available, which is enough to make any torrenting geek happy (one ISP doing this is here). That's $44/mo ...

Heh. Here in New Zealand, even a 256 Kb/128 Kb connection capped at 1 GB/month costs more than that: about US$28, plus another US$28 for using the same company for a land-line telephone connection. Ain't monopolies great.

Re:You can get this in Utah too...

[Fastball]

Yeah, and if you're downloading 3-4 DVD's worth of stuff a day

Acius, meet Sun. Sun, this is Acius--no, don't burn him. UV rays are like kryptonite to him. We must take this slowly...

Re:You can get this in Utah too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you with Xmission right now? Can you recommend them over Comcast? I've been considering switching. And how's the latency?

Re:You can get this in Utah too...

[typical]

Okay, I could see maybe serving this stuff up. I could maybe see someone doing a research project consuming this much data. But who is going to suck down 3-4 DVDs a day? I can see doing so for maybe a couple of days at a stretch, but maintaing that continuously? There just isn't enough time to *consume* that much data using existing devices. Even if you're sucking down MPEG2 DVDs, you still have to watch the things, and presumably you have a job or school or something filling most of your day, and you do things like read email or webbrowse some of the time.

Yah, so....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www22.verizon.com/FiOSforhome/channels/FiOS /root/package.aspx/

Real speed

[robvangelder]

I get suspicious of the reported speeds.

I wonder how an ISP can really talk about Internet speeds. The Internet speed is outside of their control. One day you might get 24Mb but the next 12Mb. Some sites might not even have 24Mb!

What the ISP reports is very likely "your place to ISP" speeds, not "your place to deadbeef.com"

I know that when I dial-up 56k, I'm pretty likely to get 56k no matter where I surf.
As my bandwidth increases (256Kb, 2Mb, 24Mb), it gets less and less likely I'm going to get that service to any one site.

Another thing to consider is that ISPs typically don't give you dedicated 24Mb.
You get 24Mb on the "your place to ISP" line, then you and all other customers share the "ISP to internet" line.
ISPs work out peak usage and ensure no customer gets capped - or at least, the good ones do.

So while you might get 24Mb to the ISP, it'll depend a lot on time of day, internet conditions, destination site, etc..

Until an industry accepted standard/metric index appears, these reported speeds are the best we've got to go on.

Re:Real speed

[Ninjy]

They offer bandwidth. They make no claims whatsoever with regard to throughput.

Internode

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm currently synching at 8Mbit/second on an Internode DSLAM. I've only got an ADSL1 modem though, so I need get an ADSL2+ one (Billion 7402 VGP, probably) for better speeds. I'm hoping for around 10-12Mb/s with that modem, which will be sweet :)

15GB/month download quota is killing me though :(

24 Mb Consumer Broadband Launched

[JanHolbo]

Where I live in Denmark (Fredericia to the Danes and those who know where that is) We are getting Fiber to Home which will give us pretty fast internet at fairly low prices considering the Danish Market. 1/1 Mbits for DKK 149 (USD 23,50) 10/10 MBits for DKK 299 (USD 47,00 20/20 MBits for DKK 599 (USD 74,00) All a monthly fee And we will get Voice over IP and Cable TV on the same fiber. Customers are already being connected (although I am not sure at which speeds)

Re:24 Mb Consumer Broadband Launched

[JanHolbo]

link (in Danish I am afraid :/) www.trefiber.dk

Re:24 Mb Consumer Broadband Launched

[guardian653dave]

Oh shut up..

Us poor folks in the US who invented the internet and all the goodies couldn't get 10 mbit up/down for $47 a month.. hell we be lucky to get 3 mbits for the same price... I have Charter 3 mbit/256 kbit cable, and the only reason its even $47 a month (internet alone) is because we got a deal that also included digital cable (more money for them..) Don't ask the standalone price as they keep changing (aka more) the damn price >_<

Then again this is the same place who convince people to rent ring tones for $10 a month...

24 Mb, 24 MB, or whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Letter to Cox Communications - you suck!

Re:24 Mb, 24 MB, or whatever

[staed]

you suck cox? :)

Ok, I'm running for president.

[crhylove]

This is my campaign: Nationwide Broadband Internet Access as part of our national infrastructure, like the highways. I'm only 28, but it will probably take 7 years to get enough publicity to actually run.

Other issues will be met on a case by case basis, however, I will also stop government handouts to corporations that already make billions.

These are my two platforms. I'm running on the green ticket, just because the other two parties don't represent me at all and Ralph Nader has been at times a personal hero for me. In addition, the other two parties seem completely beholden to the corporations that are getting government handouts.

I'm setting up a website now, I'll post the URL in a bit.

rhY

Re:Ok, I'm running for president.

[crhylove]

Here is the URL:
http://www.leperkhanz.com/president.html

and a link for the forums for discussion:
http://www.leperkhanz.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=34

and my campaign platform:
"I strongly believe in the rights of man as set forth in our constitution and bill of rights. I feel they have eroded somewhat with the passage of time and the progress of technology. I feel it is vital to renew some of our individual rights in the face of technology as set forth by our founding fathers. There are several ways to do this including but not limited to:

Improving our national infrastructure, not just our IT infrastructure (which seems non-existent, at the moment), but also improving our military by more effectively budgeting resources, and improving our education and medical systems. Currently there seems to be a lot of scalping and corporate bullying of the american tax payer particularly in the medical industry, and there are many countries already ahead of us on this issue.

Improving our patent and copyright system. As a musician and a fan of computer technology, I have seen first hand since the BBS years to today the holes and problems faced by artists, scientists and other "IP" type fields in the face of new technology. There needs to be a system in place that compensates intellectual proprieters while also empowering the rest of society. Specifically, in the field of science, information should be widely available in the areas that effect human health and progress, yet we still need a system that supports those pioneers in their fields. Imagine if Tesla or Edison had been supported more by tax money in their day, how much farther we as a species would be today.

Improving our education and electoral systems. The only way to a truly healthy democracy is through an informed and educated electorate. This is the primary reason the US led the way by mandating educations for all of our children. Currently our education system, and indeed our entire information system seem guided by corporate and monetary interests, rather than educational interests. The rights to the best texts in each subject should be bought by the government and resold AT COST with YEARLY UPDATES for each field. Paying $200 for books that may or may not improve on last years edition is stifling our national abilities to educate ourselves, from the college level down to the kindergarten level. Also many of the ways and structures for teaching have been shown inefficient by scientific studies and need to be updated. There is also in inherent bias in texts sold by a money making organization which may be downplaying important information specifically in the interest of making more money. God knows there was a LOT of mis-information and dis-information in my own education, because my books were dated. There was no land bridge that Native Americans crossed over from Asia on. Genetic studies have put this theory completely to rest. This is just one small example. Schools still teach basic, and who uses basic? Schools should teach C. It's just smarter and better, and will help future potential programmers already know the language they will most likely work with. Also at this point computer programming and information technology should be a class that is more important than any of the other ones. Putting together a team of top educators and computer experts, I'm sure we could achieve a curriculum far more useful for ALL students than "World History" or "PE".

It is my honor to be an american, and one of this generation that has already achieved so much. Let's help catapult the future generations by insuring a strict return to our inaliable rights and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

-rhY September 2005

Re:Ok, I'm running for president.

[bluGill]

Nationwide Broadband Internet Access as part of our national infrastructure, like the highways.

I will also stop government handouts to corporations that already make billions.

Those two goals conflict. Only corporations that already make billions have the ability to roll out nationwide broadband. Unless you want to spend twice as much to have government do it.

Don't forget that you need to work with congress. Most congressmen (from both parties) are interested in getting re-elected, and thus they are more concerned with bringing the pork home to the local billion dollar company(s) that provides jobs in their area. You can either send that pork on, or find that congress overrides your vetoes and the pork isn't cut.

Of course you need to get the vote. I'll be honest: you won't get my vote. I vote libertarian a lot because I'm all for getting rid of the pork, and they might do it while most just talk about it. Your nationwide broadband looks like more pork to me, so I refuse.

Re:Ok, I'm running for president.

[crhylove]

I don't see how by saving American tax payers billions and empowering a generation with any and every type of information is a pork project. A couple thousand wifi towers and some fiber is going to look trivial compared to the latest pork d'jour that is being offered up daily. Besides, making it a priority for the entire government and naming anyone that stands in your way, especially if you've been voted in on that platform is totally plausible. If it is popular with the american people and congressman snow-job is in the way, I don't have a problem letting CNN know that congressman snow-job is in the way, and insuring he is not re-elected.

rhY

Re:Ok, I'm running for president.

[bluGill]

A few thousand WiFi towers might suffice for a tiny country like Holland to get high speed internet to everyone. It is however not enough to give just those with ocean front property in the US high speed. (even if you don't count Alaska and Hawaii)

I don't see how installing broadband every home is saving taxpayers billions. I see it costing billions.

Presidents do not have near the power you think. Anything a president does will make something mad - even if it wasn't his fault. (People are mad at Bush for not sending troops to New Orleans, even though he was refused permission to send them!) As a Third party president you will have it harder - the two major parties stick together, and they will both work together to make sure you don't get things done. Whine on CNN, and you will appear as a whiner, not a leader, and not only will you not get anything done, but you will loose the next election.

Don't forget that while you are attacking someone in congress, they are attacking back. People who don't have good social and debate skills don't get elected, so you are dealing with masters of this. (You might be a master, but you are against other masters) Everything you try can backfire on you, and they will be trying to make that happen.

ALL of the pork that the government does is popular with someone. 37% of the budget is Social Security, Midicare, and other retirement. 21% for other social programs. Don't even think about cutting either one, because the retirees vote in enough numbers that no congressmen who wants to be re-elected will touch any plan to cut them. Military is 22%, and no congressmen will touch any cuts here if there is anything military in their state - lest their state be cut. Interest on the debt is 7%, don't touch that if you want the US to survive as a strong country. Physical, human, and community development is 10%, nobody will touch that because some of it goes to their community. 3% is law enforcement and general government, not much to touch here, much of it supports the other above, so this cannot be cut without touching the other programs. (source IRS

If you want me to believe that you will actually cut pork from the budget, then you need to propose specific areas to cut it. All politicians propose to cut pork, because it a good sound bite. When it comes down to it though, someone wants each part. Cut anything significant and you make enough people mad that you don't get elected - you may not care, but congress does.

In short: you are following the same no content formula that all politicians do to get elected. Because you are not doing it as part of a major party you will not be elected - in fact most people will not even know your name until they see it on the ballot form.

Fact of Life in Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

Download caps are a fact of life in Australia. All ISP's have them, because we have to pay lots of money for international data.

Internode does offer flatrate at ADSL2+ speeds, but you are prioritised during periods of high network usage (depending on a 7 day rolling total of downloads).

Re:Fact of Life in Australia

[mcbridematt]

Actually, local data arguably costs more if your're not in anti-compeditive agreements with your buddies (*cough* Telstra Optus AAPT MCI *cought*). In fact, some consumer ISPs are [apparently] bigger than one of that group (AAPT) but they are still forking out lots of money per month because the "Group Of Four" (as its known in the industry) is only interested in locking out the superior competition.

Some smaller ISPs absorb the high per megabyte costs of pushing data down Telstra ADSL ports to unmeter traffic going through peering exchanges such as PIPE Networks or WAIX because it simply costs them less (and gets customers).

In fact, three major ISPs (beside the four) - Internode, Comindico and Primus already have a backbone on the west coast of the U.S and Internode and Primus are already talking about video (and Internode just needs that for a full triple-play service) to the home completely over their backbones. (If International bandwidth was such an issue they probably wouldn't be talking about that).

disclaimer: Happy Internode customer stuck on Telstra Wholesale 512/128k port. Thank you Ziggy and Alston for screwing Australia over. Thank you Sol for stating the bloddy obvious, that being Ziggy and Alston should've spent $3bn in the past few years. See the 56 page admission of guilt and other stupid things

P.S Unlike the U.S Australia is not covered all over in HFC/Cable networks for DOCSIS - two telcos discovered in the mid-1990s that no one watches subscription TV and stopped rolling out new cable.

Re:Fact of Life in Australia

[drsmithy]

P.S Unlike the U.S Australia is not covered all over in HFC/Cable networks for DOCSIS - two telcos discovered in the mid-1990s that no one watches subscription TV and stopped rolling out new cable.

I think you'll find it's not so much that people don't watch pay TV (although given the cost, I can understand why many don't) - more that satellite can deliver the same service cheaper and easier. For example, my apartment in Toowong, Brisbane (only about 5-6km from the CBD) was "wired" for Foxtel - but the actual signal (for the whole 70-odd unit complex) comes from a single satellite dish on the roof.

Re:Fact of Life in Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

anti-compeditive

I see this ridiculous affliction has spread to our antipodean posters.

Stop spelling like you have a cold and use the Queens English, there's a good chap.

Mbs Upstream

[neildiamond]

All I care is the upstream speed at this point. Right now I have roughly 1.5 Mbs with FiOS (which I recommend you looking at VERY carefully before calling Verizon to install it as they try to rip out your copper telephone lines). P2P rarely goes above 1 Mb up or down so what is the point of the additional bandwidth anyway. OTOH I would love more upstream bandwidth to host Shoutcast or whatever.

More info: (and where's the catch?)

[saitoh]

(shamefully yanked from their Tell Me More page, read below for my thoughts on their definition of unlimited usage and how they define it and their process)

Features

* Up to 24 meg download speed
* Up to 1.3 meg upload speed
* Unlimited Internet access
* No download caps
* Free high specification wireless Be Box modem

Options

* Be static IP
* Be home email and webspace, coming soon (click here for more info)
* More coming soon

Be Box modem

* ADSL 2+ enabled
* 4 port 10/100 megs Ethernet switch (1 port reserved for future use)
* 54 megs 802.11 b/g wireless interface
* 2 voice over broadband ports (future use)
* 1 analog back-up (future use)
* OS Independent (Ethernet)

Requirements

* A rampant thirst for speed
* BT phone line
* A device capable of communicating via TCP/IP (like a Windows PC, Mac, Xbox with Live...)
* An Ethernet port for a wire connection to the Be Box
* A 802.11b or 802.11g compatible network adapter for wireless connection to the Be Box
* Windows 98SE / Mac OS 8.6 or higher

Getting Be

* Place your order online
* If your order is accepted, your BT phone line will physically be connecting to our network in your local exchange (this usually takes about 2 - 4 weeks)
* You will be sent our welcome pack, including our Be Box modem and your line will be activated
* Follow our DIY instant broadband instructions in your welcome pack and you will be ready to go

-------------

Now, this looks rather straight forward, and I keep wondering "wheres the catch?" My only guess would be that either they are using fiber to make this economical for them on the business end, or they are going to throttle/mercilessly prosecute illegal activities which take place on their network, thus reducing load... I wouldnt expect any company to state the later, but the former might have been touted as a feature. So I went digging and came across their TOS policy (conviently linked under the "is this really unlimited" section of the FAQ (note #11):

So what can Be's services not be used for?

1. Unlawful, fraudulent, criminal or otherwise illegal activities
2. Sending, receiving, publishing, posting, distributing, disseminating, encouraging the receipt of, uploading, downloading or using any material which is offensive, abusive, defamatory, indecent, obscene, unlawful, harassing or menacing or a breach of the copyright, trademark, intellectual property, confidence, privacy or any other rights of any person
3. Commercial purposes (unless you are a home member who is working from home as a sole trader in business on your own account or an office member in which case see below for limits on certain types of commercial use)
4. Sending or uploading unsolicited emails, advertising or promotional materials, offering to sell any goods or services, or conducting or forwarding surveys, contests or chain letters except that home members working from home as a sole trader in business on their own account or office members are permitted to send marketing communications in accordance with the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 if sent in batches of no more than fifty (50) emails at any time, each indiv

Re:More info: (and where's the catch?)

[fgl]

I'd want to get a number. Without it all you have is the airy fairy warning email (or whatever) & you have to throttle back (I prefer the ideal of "that which is not expressly forbidden is mandatory" Just like the laws of physics.)

I want a company that says "unlimited" to mean unlimited.

I also live in a country where the pinnacle of broadband is a 2mb connection, upstream limited to 128kbps 128!!! The usage tends to be capped at 1Gb per month. with each additional 10Gb of throughput an additional $10.

I live in New Zealand, hardly a 3rd world nation. But we suck when it comes to broadband.

Re:More info: (and where's the catch?)

[gronofer]

You are right, "unlimited" bandwidth that isn't unlimited should draw an advertising standards complaint (if such complaining hasn't already failed previously).

I've lived in NZ, but before the ADSL era. If I wasn't already familiar with its bandwidth problems I would have assumed that a cap of 1GB was a typo, or a joke. I could use that in one day. The extra cost of bandwidth is like an extra tax on the cost of living in NZ.

Re:More info: (and where's the catch?)

[gronofer]

If bandwidth is down to $1 per GB now (about 0.385GPB at current exchange rates) then it's perhaps not such a big factor as it used to be. I seem to remember a $1 per MB figure in the distant past.

Re:More info: (and where's the catch?)

[Anonymous Coward]

                * Up to 24 meg download speed
                * Up to 1.3 meg upload speed


More advertising lies. Megabits measure capacity, not speed.

These are high-capacity links, but we know nothing of their speed. They could Fedex you a 250 GB hard disk every day and that'd be 24 Mbps average, but the latency would obviously be far too poor for playing Counterstrike.

the upstream blues

[Paladin144]

I'm glad to see that this service offers an upstream that's greater than the competition, but look at the relation between the upload speed and download speed. 1.3 Mb/s vs. 24 Mb/s? What the hell. It's even more lopsided than it is for me. Can't we get a decent upload stream?

Does anybody know of a cable company (or even DSL) that offers parity or at least near-parity between up & down-stream speeds? I mean, without having to invest in a T1, of course.

I feel like I got a case of the upstream blues. Uploading speed is vastly underrated, in my opinion. Many multiplayer games thrive with high upload speeds, and any bittorrent user knows that uploading is what makes the world go 'round. And what if I want to run an FTP site or host my own website - am I forever constrained to pedestrian speeds? Is there any momentum for increased upload speeds, or am I the only one who feels constrained upspeed pain (CPS)?

Isn't there a support group I could join or something? ::sobs::

Re:the upstream blues

[NerveGas]

> Many multiplayer games thrive with high upload speeds,

    Actually, the latency is a much more important factor.

> and any bittorrent user knows that uploading is what makes
> the world go 'round.

    Providers don't *want* you seeding bit torrents at high speed. More in one second...

> And what if I want to run an FTP site or host my own website

    Then they want you to pay for the service.

    Believe it or not, bandwidth isn't free for the providers. These providers have to *massively* over-sell their bandwidth to be able to make money. If you don't believe me, look into how much it will cost you to get a hundred megabits of solid, guaranteed bandwidth - then factor in lots of equipment, and realize that if you're letting people blow 24 mbits/second on bit torrents, all that money will only cover *four* customers.

    If the companies say "Sure, I'll give you huge upload speeds, let you run any services you want, and blow all of your bandwidth 24 hrs/day", then they're going to lose money, and eventually go out of business.

steve

  - am I forever constrained to pedestrian speeds?

Re:the upstream blues

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeding torrents or running an rsync mirror doesn't automatically mean the connection is going to be maxed 24/7.

> look into how much it will cost you to get a hundred megabits of solid, guaranteed bandwidth

My providers are all out of 'solid, guaranteed bandwidth', I have to make do with normal everyday transit :-o I can't buy it as cheap as Be because the cartel^w Tier-1 providers only deal with other telcos. How much do you think they will be paying per Mbps?

> then factor in lots of equipment, and realize that if you're letting people
> blow 24 mbits/second on bit torrents, all that money will only cover *four* customers.

You forgot about the 20:1 (minimum - usually 50:1 for consumer DSL) contention ratio, because Be don't mention it in their FAQ doesn't mean it isn't there. The main expense is the DSLAM and the connection back to the POP, bandwidth is relatively cheap after that.

Re:the upstream blues

[NerveGas]

My providers are all out of 'solid, guaranteed bandwidth'

    Really? I'll bet they're not, they just want a lot of money for it. Call them up and tell them that you want a T1 or T3 from them, and I'll bet that they'll be happy to oblige. Decent providers will guarantee that you'll get full bandwidth. If they actually are out of bandwidth, that's a scary thought.

because the cartel^w Tier-1 providers only deal with other telcos. How much do you think they will be paying per Mbps?

    Why would they pay per megabit, when they can just hand traffic off to the destination networks through a non-transit peering arrangement?

      The provider that I uses has (relatively) dirt-cheap prices on bandwidth (GUARANTEED bandwidth), because they have peering arrangements with virtually every network that's large enough to be of any concern. They don't pay someone else to use as an upstream, they just send it over their own network to the peering facility, and hand it off. Transit for that bandwidth, however, depends on the medium in question - telco services, like t1, t3, etc. are heavily regulated, and there are minimum prices set by the FCC.

You forgot about the 20:1 (minimum - usually 50:1 for consumer DSL) contention ratio

    No, I didn't, I made a point that if every user really used their full bandwidth, the provider simply wouldn't be able to handle it. In fact, if you had read a few lines more of my post, you would have seen my statement that they massively over-subscribe their bandwidth.

steve

That's quite a jump...

[internetdarwin]

Seriously though, at what point is TOO much broadband? Belive me, I'm the usualy the first advovate of new technologies and ever increasing speeds, however for my current "consumer" needs I have a 6Mb download and 768Mb upstream (Comcast Cable) and even what I used to have it download 24/7 I would rarely max it or sustain it, and still done. Truthfully, the only reason I even have the 6Mb is because it came with the 768 up. Thats what I really pay for, is the pressious upstream.

Along with whatever these 24Mb consumers may want to download, you have to also consider what they don't know they are downloading or transimting, and ever so faster speeds now (think: spam) now, you can have a single machine on Be's network spam what used to take 10 "traditional" (think slower botneted) computers on slower connections. While you can't blame Be for empowering consumers with their services (in fact I salivate at the very thought of a world of real time application delivery and centralized goodness. VRML anyone? I can wait untill I can impracticaly fly though the internet! Watch out garbage files, here I come!)

Also:
Do they offer bussness serivices? because that's a HELL of a lot cheaper than a T1, or 16 of them for that matter.

Re:That's quite a jump...

[NerveGas]

> Seriously though, at what point is TOO much broadband?

    When it's faster than your hard drive.

    When I rsync data to a remote backup server over my "measly" 768k upstream connection, how long do you think it takes when there's 5 or 10 gigs of new, uncompressable data? And I can't even think about touching my DV work, there's just no way...

steve

I want it, but it requires a "Be Box"

[Philip K Dickhead]

And I am just not ready for Yellow Tab to be running my machinery, even if it does come with two rows of green LEDs, running down the front of the thing!

I got burned bad enough on Rhapsody for Intel, DR2. I can't even find the boot floppy for that thing, anymore.

Why didn't Jean Luc Ponty tell us this was wat the damned thing was for, anyways? Too busy playing violin on the Starship Enterprise, I guess.I always thought that rendering a quicktime Rubic's cube was just not functional enough to justify Be.

they forgot the "Up to" 24M(b)

[riprjak]

This is ADSL2+, so the speeds are UP TO 24Mb. I notice the koolaid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H article doesnt make mention of the "Up to" part, and am amused that a slashdot editor drank said koolaid in the first place.

So, unless you were wise enough to purchase the house next to the exchange (and the cables run directly), you arent going to get even near this speed. In fact, the falloff in speed is quite rapid.

I have ADSL2+ at home (here in Adelaide, Australia) and said home is 3.2 km from the exchange as the crow flies (plus or minus GPS error), probably longer by cable; and Im getting 7.5Mb down and 1.0 Mbit up (1.0 is the upstream limit locally). In my particular situation, the difference between ADSL 2 and ADSL 2+ would be pretty negligible.

On a separate note, I wonder if they realise that their "Be Boxes" (from TFA which wasnt even liked in the beginning) might be mistaken for old school computers :)

Just my $0.02 AUD.
err!
jak.

Re:they forgot the "Up to" 24M(b)

[Jafar00]

The "Up to" is a very important point.
Here in Paris we have neuf telecom promoting "Up to" 20Mb/1Mb for 14.90 Euros. I know 5 others with neuf's connection and apart from one who gets ~8Mb, we all get between 1Mb and ~1.7Mb in reality. I've been waiting nearly a year for them to upgrade the exchange or something so I can go faster but I'm not holding my breath.

Re:they forgot the "Up to" 24M(b)

[animeshpathak]

... and said home is 3.2 km from the exchange as the crow flies (plus or minus GPS error), ...

Wow.. I didn't know crows used GPS :-)

-A

Re:they forgot the "Up to" 24M(b)

[Mr. Arbusto]

As a side note, ADSL2 isn't just a deliver platform for internet, but the local telco CenturyTel, uses it as a IPTV platform and is actually rolling it out live in february. Since videos streams of reasonable quality require ~20Mb, I'm not so skeptical.

Re:they forgot the "Up to" 24M(b)

[Creepy]

all DSL is "Up to," so it's really redundant if you know the technology. Typically, you get something near what you pay for, however, which is in contrast to cable where you can get wildly various speeds depending on time of day.

I lived on over-saturated cable for 2 years before switching to Speakeasy for sanity's sake (I was getting 56-100k at peak hours with massive lag), but I pay double what I did for cable. The fastest offered service in my state is 6M/768, but the cheapest I can find that speed in my area is $140US. Even 6M/256 with a dynamic IP can't be had for less than $65.

I don't expect much to change, as the phone companies now have a firm leash on the pricing structure by a recent FCC ruling. Want to set up ADSL2+? How about $99/month for a leased line for that? Maybe it won't be that way, but I can't see anyone taking that gamble, so the US will continue to be years behind the rest of the world. With the slow moving (and in some cases, nearly bankrupt) phone and cable companies in control of growth, I don't expect speeds above 6Mbps anytime soon - maybe in 10 years we'll get ADSL2+.

It's symbiotic

[rincebrain]

The best part, for me at least, about this pipe is that it offers decent upstream.

This will, in turn, increase the general level of KB/s that people cap their upstream to.

This will, in turn, result in faster torrents. :D

And probably not even that

[mister_tim]

I've already moderated in this thread, but what they hey...

This is based on ADSL2+, same as the service offered by Internode, iiNet or Adam in Australia. Internode really led the way and were the first to roll out DSLAMs that would offer up to 24 Mbps download speeds and about 1 Mbps upload. iiNet, although they offer ADSL2+, limit it to 12 Mbps download.

Now, I suspect the reason for this is that while 24Mbps is the theoretical maximum download speed over ADSL2+, you're only going to get that speed if you have a perfect line and live really close to the exchange. If you're even 2km away, then you're speed is going to drop a fair bit: granted, you'll still get about 15Mbps, but not the 24Mbps advertised. My guess is that iiNet just finds it easier to guarantee 12Mbps rather than trying to explain that, "well, you might get 24Mpbs, but there's all these other factors and we can't guarantee it, and no, we don't know exactly what speed you'll end up with."

There was a really good graph on this here, which shows deteriorating performance as you move further from the exchange.

The other thing about this that really interests me is that Australia was derided and we complained for so long about how far behind the rest of the world we were when it came to broadband, but it now looks like we're really catching up - maybe in large part as we have good companies like Internode who are very tech-minded, still small enough to focus on service rather than just the almighty buck, and who actually want to provide good services to people.

Re:And probably not even that

[astromog]

Do you think you could convince them to start offering services in NZ?

Re:And probably not even that

[Hammer]

Has been around in Sweden for a year or two, I sit 3-400 metres from the local exchange, Rock'n'Roll baby!

Re:And probably not even that

[BurnFEST]

People have asked them that already and they have said they have no interest offering their services outside of Australia.

Re:And probably not even that

[Anonymous Coward]

we complained for so long about how far behind the rest of the world we were when it came to broadband

We still have quotas, don't forget :)

Re:And probably not even that

[Yakman]

We still have quotas, don't forget :)

I can't think of a legitimate way to consistently download 30GB a month, unless you're downloading Linux ISOs every day - and even those are probably on the ISPs "free" mirrors .

Re:And probably not even that

[AussieVamp2]

Streaming media? That would do it pretty fast, I would think, if you use that a lot.

Re:And probably not even that

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo, I download 50 gigs a week. Not legitimately, of course.

Re:And probably not even that

[yarbo]

pornography

Re:And probably not even that

[Proc6]

I hate comments like that.

That is the worst reasoning in the world to use against broadband. So what if there's no application for it now? The idea would be to get 24Mb to be commonplace then see how the internet changes. We all might be surprised to find out what's possible when that is the norm. Let's not sit at 512k and assume it's as good as it will ever need to be.

Re:And probably not even that

[werewolf1031]

I can't think of a legitimate way to consistently download 30GB a month

Nice job, genius. The point isn't that "hey, I can download [x]GB/month", but rather, when you do need to download a large file, it's very, very quick; you don't have to let your PC run unattended for hours on end to download a few GB on those occasions.

Plus it's great for gaming. :)

Re:And probably not even that

[linhux]

Just stream some medium-quality video a few hours a day (ie. replace your TV), and you're all set.

Re:And probably not even that

[rjshields]

Yeah, and 640k should be enough for everybody. What if I want to spend all day making VOIP calls or video conferencing? That 30GB will be used up quite fast.

Re:And probably not even that

[Dwonis]

I can't think of a legitimate way to consistently download 30GB a month...

Then you're just not very creative.

Re:And probably not even that

[Anonymous Coward]

Not internode, but iinet own ihug. They are trying to get you faster speeds. But the issue in NZ is that iinet/ihug can't put their own DSLAMs in the exchange, they have to lease the bitstream from telecom and telecom won't provide faster a bitstream faster than 2mbits. Telecom needs their arse kicked. And hard.

You should complain to the telecom ombudsman. Until enough people write to regulators helen won't do any kicking.

Re:And probably not even that

[Anonymous Coward]

you're speed is going to drop

"your".

Re:And probably not even that

[matt21811]

Actually, you could make one continuous month long VOIP telephone call and not use more than 4 gig.

A video call is a lot harder to judge.

Re:And probably not even that

[Anonymous Coward]

I've already moderated in this thread, but what they hey...
[sarcasm]
Yea that is like giving 5 people a christmas gift then taking it away from them. Don't you realize peoples lives are affected by Karma! by having someone loose Karma when they are trying to gain it can alter their lives in mysterious way!
All real moderators must mod you down for this inhumane action.
[/sarcasm]

**Attention Moderators when I write stuff in between the [sarcasm] and [/sarcasm] blocks it means I am not serious and be sarcastic some people don't do this so never moderate down just because some jerk like me tells you to.

Re:And probably not even that

[zootm]

Bravo. The point here is that the applications will be built on top of the technology, not the other way around. The bandwidth isn't used because it isn't commonplace — I'm sure people will think of plenty of legitimate uses once it is.

Re:And probably not even that

[leathered]

Exactly, and to keep it legitimate all the pornography I download is open source.

Re:And probably not even that

[Dogtanian]

Exactly, and to keep it legitimate all the pornography I download is open source.

Does this mean RMS/ESR/Linus Torvalds three-way action?

Thanks, but I'll stick to downloading my ripped-off copyrighted stuff :)

Re:And probably not even that

[toofast]

ping -f -s 64000 somehost.com &
ping -f -s 64000 someotherhost.com &
ping -f -s 64000 someotherotherhost.com &
ping -f -s 64000 someotherotherotherhost.com &

Run this for a few hours and it should be good to consume a few bits.

Re:And probably not even that

[Tony Hoyle]

30GB is easy - it's only 1GB a day, or equivalent of around 12KB/s.

I've conistently used 50-75GB just downloading/email/browsing/sending off test builds/etc.

I wouldn't join an ISP with a quota less than 150GB.

Re:And probably not even that

[Talez]

Internode still haven't reached double digits in the number of working exchanges.

Delays, excuses, and Simon Hackett bashing Telstra; that's all I ever see from Internode.

Re:And probably not even that

[Talez]

Ha!

At the rate Internode roll out exchanges you can expect your first 4 exchanges in 2007 and the next 6 in late 2008.

Re:And probably not even that

[WhiteWolf666]

Or, what if I signed up for those online movie services like starz on demand, or other similar upcoming services?

What about Tivo & Netflix's rumored offering?

Build the bandwidth, and they will come!

Re:And probably not even that

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of a legitimate way to consistently download 30GB a month

8 hours a day of monitoring something through a webcam will give you 6KB/frame * 6 frames/sec * 36000 seconds/hour * 8 hours/day * 30 days/month = 30 GB/month.

Yes, you can use better compression but it will be nice to have better frame rate. It's also perfectly reasonable to have several webcams running.

Re:And probably not even that

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

And this is insightful how, exactly?

As an example, I work from home at the end of an ADSL line. Being able to take a copy of a dataset (varies in size, but let's say 4Gb once compressed) for testing is useful. You don't have to do that too many times to use up 30Gb.

Re:And probably not even that

[Anonymous Coward]

But what if I want to download pr0n 24/7?

Re:And probably not even that

[BrokenHalo]

Let's not sit at 512k and assume it's as good as it will ever need to be.

512k?

As if. Luxury... ;-)

Re:And probably not even that

[LWATCDR]

I could. Your ISOs are just one example. I like to back up my computer at work to my server at home every night while I am asleep. I also back up my website over night.
Download home movies of my nieces and nephews, and grab a few podcasts.
You may not know of reason to use 30 gigs in a month but some of us do.

Re:And probably not even that

[poot_rootbeer]

Australia was derided and we complained for so long about how far behind the rest of the world we were when it came to broadband, but it now looks like we're really catching up

Is this service only available in and around the major metropolitan areas, or out in the middle of nowhere also?

One of the primary arguments I hear about the relatively slow and/or expensive rollout of broadband internet in the United States is that it's such a geographically expansive country, in particular compared to the denser populations of places like Europe or Japan. I wonder if other countries with major cities but also large sparsely-populated areas, like Australia and Canada, tend to experience the same issues.

Re:And probably not even that

[Sketch]

512K is obviously not enough. But 640K should be enough for everyone.

Re:And probably not even that

[Tezprice]

I can't think of a legitimate way to consistently download 30GB a month, unless you're downloading Linux ISOs every day - and even those are probably on the ISPs "free" mirrors .

Screw legitimate.

Re:And probably not even that

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of a legitimate way to consistently download 30GB a month

Think raw uncompressed video, or DV. DV is somewhat compressed, and takes 12 GB per hour of footage. If you are editing someone else's recordings, it would be nice to pull down a few hours of video from a server, instead of getting tapes via snail-mail.

I am not speaking hypothetically here. I was on the video team for a week long conference. That amounted to about a terabyte (a thousand GB, you know) of DV. Producing the DVD after the event, with people and footage spread accross several continents, would have been so much easier if everybody had 25 mb/s.

If everybody could pull raw DV straight over Internet, more people would do so. No need for extra compression, which is slow and degrades quality. Just send your fresh recording straight from the cam!

Some early adopter consumers have HD video cameras already. They can't get real-time compression of their footage any time soon. Besides, HDV is quite compressed already. If they want to stream HD, it'd better be the raw MPEG2-PES from the camera.
With HD, certain things can be done with even lower production values than in SD: Because of the higher resolution, there is less need for close-ups, and an unmanned static camera will do.

Re:And probably not even that

[Anonymous Coward]

Download Oracle eval software, Redhat, Suse Linux, Solaris distributions including
opensolaris every 2 weeks.

Well I've filled 140Gb of disk so far...

I now have 2 8Mb lines!

Re:And probably not even that

[aslate]

I was linked to this site by a mate a few weeks ago, and i'm very interested. I currently pay Pipex about that for a (great) 1Mbit service, although i'm currently getting 2. I'm in a trial area, i can get it, but i don't want to be the first person through and then switch back as the service was shit, so i'm waiting till after the trial period to look at this.

As for your point on the speeds, they make it pretty clear that 24Mbit is a maximum and state how and why you might get less, as well as by just how much you might expect it to drop. They're not hiding behind the limits of the technology and the "up to" and they're not capping it.

Re:And probably not even that

[timbo234]

we complained for so long about how far behind the rest of the world we were when it came to broadband, but it now looks like we're really catching up

Apparently New Zealand has had this for years which shows that once again we are just catching up thanks to Telstra's monopoly. And no Telstra your usual 'we have to charge so much for data because Australia is so remote' arguments don't work here - New Zealand is even more remote from the rest of the world and has an even smaller population to support the infrastructure.

Be Box vs BeBox

[MysteriousMystery]

They reffered to the cable modem as a Be Box, sounds very similar to the title given out to the original BeOS systems which was known as a BeBox. Just another way to confuse everyone but the super geeky.

Re:Be Box vs BeBox

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't only the super geeky know BeOS as BeBox, or at all?

Maybe they're trying to confuse the geeks!

1. confuse geeks
2. confuse norms
3. ????
4. PROFIT!!!

Re:Be Box vs BeBox

[dave420]

ONLY the super geeky even know what a BeBox is, so they're not confusing the target audience. ;)

But you forgot about...

[teknomage1]

Doesn't most spam come from the United States? It sounds like this is a British ISP, so I really wouldn't worry about it that much if you truely are concerned.

"You forgot about Poland!"

The West is so far behind...

[Rocketship Underpant]

Here in Japan, I have 55 megabit fiber DSL. I'm still getting used to it. I can multiple download files at 1 MB/sec (that's megabyte, not megabit), and that's when there's a bottleneck at the other end. :)

Re:The West is so far behind...

[iyliki]

I thought USA was more like east of you guys? ;)

As mentioned earlier, here in the west (Sweden/Europ), 100 mbit symmetric is available for those who consider themselves to need it.

Re:The West is so far behind...

[achurch]

Here in Japan, I have 55 megabit fiber DSL.

That's all? I'm sitting here in Yokohama with an ONU in my kitchen, and wget doing things like this:

--15:16:09-- http://www.jp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/lin ux-2.6.13.tar.bz2
[snip]
15:16:13 (8.67 MB/s) - `linux-2.6.13.tar.bz2' saved [38372729/38372729]

Yum. Somebody slashdot me so I can finally find out how much upstream bandwidth I have--so far all I've been able to do is max out everyone else's downstream . . .

Re:The West is so far behind...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about hosting a few linux iso torrents for the less fortunate geeks out there? Google for rtorrent. Thank you.

Re:The West is so far behind...

[bruthasj]

Ugh. How long do we have to put up with these snobby statements about how the west is so far behind? Look, pal, I live in the "east" -> Taiwan and I "only" have an 8Mbps ADSL setup. Your title would be better phrased: "Look world, you suck. See my 55 Mbps!"

And I also somehow doubt 55 Mbps is everywhere in Japan as you make it sound to be.

Waiting for someone that works at an internet backbone provider to say .. "Japan is *so* behind, look at my Gigabit 10xOC-3 trunk!"

Re:The West is so far behind...

[atriusofbricia]

You suck. :)

Re:The West is so far behind...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha ha! All your bandwidth are belong to us!!!

Re:The West is so far behind...

[Rocketship Underpant]

"And I also somehow doubt 55 Mbps is everywhere in Japan as you make it sound to be."

It's offered by Yahoo Broadband, available nation-wide as far as I know. Other DSL companies here have similar packages. I'm not even in one of Japan's biggest cities.

Re:The West is so far behind...

[jez9999]

How about 'I live in the "east" and I have to go thru the Great Firewall of China! And that's still a great deal in my city!'

Re:The West is so far behind...

[mxpengin]

Actually I have the 100 Mbit service with Optic fiber .. although I dont live in a big city (fukui , japan) I can get it for 50 usd a month
my provider.

But Japan wins hands down

[Tarq666]

I recently upgraded my old 20Mbps cable connection to a 100Mbps fibre optic connection. The main reason for the switch was the price; about ¥4000/month (approx. US$40) for the cable and under ¥3000/month for fibre optic. The upload bandwidth is around 10Mbps as well I think. Connection speed is one of the things that keeps me in this country.

Re:But Japan wins hands down

[Rustdragon]

Which service are you currently using? YahooBB has a 100Mbps but it requires you to get their TV package. I haven't seen 100Mbps for 4000 yen yet. I use JCOM cable connection at 33Mbps down and 3Mbps up. I guess it's pretty fast compared to the US. Let me know what service you use.

Re:But Japan wins hands down

[Tarq666]

I'm in Osaka, and got a deal with USEN, no other requirements (like joining their radio etc).

"Hopefully"?

[Will_Malverson]

Hopefully this will become a trend of radically increasing consumer internet speeds.

Yeah, hopefully a trend like that will start. I mean, my Internet connection speed has only gone from 2400bps in 1993 to 1.5Mbps today -- that's only one doubling every 16 or so months!

Radically increasing speeds?

[Blakey Rat]

These articles have been coming out for years, and it's always just a "limited deployment" in some state/county/area of the world I've never heard of and I've never been to, and it never ends up where I live. I'm assuming it's the same for most people. Broadband power was supposed to be nationwide by now, then Verizon's fiber to the home... I've had the same DSL line since 1998, and it's never changed in any way, and this announcement probably isn't going to do much to get Verizon off their duff and upgrading.

Not the only one in the uk

[grahamsz]

Blueyonder are rolling out a 10Mbit service, and they are one of the biggest uk broadband isps.

http://www.telewest.co.uk/websales/service.do?id=2

It's weird how the US used to lead the world. I remember in 98 being stuck on a 56k dialup while the americans all had cable modems. Now i'm in the US on a 3mbit microwave link and wishing i could get uk style connectivity :(

Re:Not the only one in the uk

[agarrett]

Not quite the biggest coverage wise, I hasten to correct.
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/images/custommap s/blueyonder_300504.png compared to http://www.samknows.com/broadband/images/custommap s/enabled-exch-290804.png
I'd love cable, but will be restricted to a maximum of 2048/256 until BT / LLUing companies pull their thumbs out, or I move into a city.

Re:Not the only one in the uk

[Tet]

Blueyonder are rolling out a 10Mbit service, and they are one of the biggest uk broadband isps.

My ISP does 2Mb/s pretty much everywhere throughout the UK, 8Mb/s for those exchanges that can handle it (for the same price as 2Mb/s, too!), and they announced a 24Mb/s service back in June, but again that's restricted to those exchanges that support it. My exchange is due for an 8Mb/s upgrade in the next couple of months, so I suspect it'll be a while before I get to see 24Mb/s :-(

Re:Not the only one in the uk

[Anonymous Coward]

It's weird how the US used to lead the world. I remember in 98 being stuck on a 56k dialup while the americans all had cable modems. Now i'm in the US on a 3mbit microwave link and wishing i could get uk style connectivity :(

Repeat after me: The grass is always greener on the other side.

The US never 'all had cable modems'. They were, and still are common there, but they still aren't ubiquitous. I've also been to UK, and I can tell you most places there you are gouged for broadband, or they'll offer what appear to be great rates, but that's just an 'access fee' and you have to pay for bandwidth on top...

So just remember: The grass is always greener on the other side.

I'd be happier with.

[Brad1138]

I'd be happier with 2-4 Mb for about $10-20/month.

Re:I'd be happier with.

[Anonymous Coward]

Huzzah!!

FIOS

[diitante]

My 15/2Mb FIOS line is great but I clearly run up against servers that have less bandwidth than I do. I cant imagine more speed giving me any more benefit at this point. M

I W A N T S T A T I C I P

[3770]

All I want is a static IP

Tokyo 100Mb

[tokyopimpdaddy]

I'm so lucky to be living in a modest but modern apartment here in Tokyo and get to enjoy 100Mb 'Fibre' (Hikari fibre by TEPCO), which I have running consistantly at over 40Mb down, 10Mb up, thus Bittorrent loves me. That 100Mb of course being best effort, and we all know there are many reasons why you'll never really get that.)

This is pretty common in Tokyo. Even the ADSL here is by standard well over 40Mb (though speed obviously comes in a lot below that in real life. Hell, my mobile phone has a 2.4Mb download.

OK, so bragging over, all I can say is that it can be done, and done cheaply. My Hikari Fibre is included in the rent, and none of the solutions here in Japan are expensive - 20USD a month or so. When I came to Japan originally in 1996 it was a totally different story - dial up was more expensive than the UK and access points were pretty screwed up outside of Tokyo. When I returned in 1999, ISDN flat rate was there, and by 2001, ADSL was ramping up incredibly, even in my then decrepit old place.

Some things in Japan are archaic (government, banks etc. (really, ATMs which close at 7pm...)), but the bandwidth here does prove it's the companies holding this up elsewhere, for whatever reasons. I guess they're hoping to string out their plant (copper cable/switch etc.) life as long as they can, because hey, tomorrow it'll be cheaper to upgrade right? I think here it was a case of national pride - late to 'the internet' party in the mid- to late 90's, and with rival neighbours Korea beating them, I think NTT finally got told to 'sort it out'. You have to love that 'close state relationship'!

Re:Tokyo 100Mb

[blosphere]

But PLEASE tell me which ISP gives you multiple real IP addresses and doesn't force you to do NAT if you want to hook up multiple devices. And I cannot use PPPoE on computers...

YahooBB has strict 1 ip policy, even for their SOHO deal, which I find really weird.

I'm seriously thinking putting a new ISP up (done that once already, getting a LIR status and some transit isn't such a big deal. IGP&EGP can do with cisco & juniper and basic servers I run already) so that people with clue can boot NAT from their homelans if they wish.

Re:Tokyo 100Mb

[xlv]

Some things in Japan are archaic (government, banks etc. (really, ATMs which close at 7pm...)),

Even if 7pm is a little early, the first thing that popped in my mind was Chris Rock's ATM comment in his latest HBO special:

Drugs are illegal, but ATM machines are open twenty four hours a day. Twenty four hours a day! For who?! Who the fuck is it open for?! Have you ever taken out three hundred dollars at four o'clock in the morning for something positive? Shit, when you press that machine at four o'clock in the morning I think a psychiatrist should pop up on the screen an go "C'mon man, save your money man. Don't buy drugs, buy some rims!" -- Chris Rock, Never Scared

Re:Tokyo 100Mb

[deaddrunk]

Quite handy for that "oh fuck I spent all my money on beer" moment at 3am when you need taxi fare.

Re:Tokyo 100Mb

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh... what if you need to run out to get some medicine?

Re:Tokyo 100Mb

[Sugar Moose]

Have you seen the next thing that NTT DoCoMo is coming out with? They just tested their newest wireless network. To quote the article:

Officials from NTT DoCoMo say the phones could receive data at 100 megabits per second on the move and at up to a gigabit per second while static. At this rate, an entire DVD could be downloaded within a minute.

Re:Tokyo 100Mb

[GauteL]

"all I can say is that it can be done, and done cheaply"

That may be so in Tokyo where the population density is absolutely massive. Whether it can be done cheaply enough in the more sparsly populated areas in the west remains to be seen.

There is a reason why high population centers get these things way before the rest and I don't know if there are any more extreme population center than Tokyo.

You asked for it... You got it!

[Anonymous Coward]

127.0.0.1

There you go, man! All yours.

Re:You asked for it... You got it!

[3770]

Great, thanks.

I already set up a server and now I'm challenging all the script kiddies to take control of the computer on that IP and erase all hard drives.

Free legacy

[boa13]

Nice to see the Free business model (offer all the bandwidth a phone line can support and a multi-purpose, multi-service "box" for a flat, low monthly fee) taking over the world! When Free started with their idea in late 1999, their were considered fools by the rest of the French industry, and actually had to build their own DSLAM and Freeboxes, since nobody would do it for them. Now the Freebox is in its fourth major version (fifth soon?), Free is the second ISP in France and every ISP here offers some kind of unimaginative rip-off (Livebox, NeufBox, CBox...), trying to match the excellent price/service ratio offered by Free. Not bad for a independant company funded, not by rich industry conglomerates, but by porn money!

By the way, the service offered by Be in the U.K. is still more expansive than what Free offers in France (35 euros vs. 30 euros), and while they do mention services such as phone and TV, they don't say if they're going to be included in the flat monthly fee, like Free does. Somehow I doubt it. Maybe their customer service won't suck, though.

More information on the Freebox (in French, but with pictures): http://www.f-b-x.net/

Still 100$ for 64kbps

[MrJones]

so, this topic is just killing me :(

Banks in Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even know where to begin with this. Japanese banks have me frustrated like nothing else. I just want to withdraw some money, how hard could it be to leave the ATMs on 24 hours a day? And you say 7pm is when the ATMs shut down. That's when they close totally, but at 5pm half the transactions suddenly stop working. Need to deposit your monthly salary which for some reason is still paid in cash in a little envelope? Sorry, gotta carry that wad with you everywhere until tomorrow. Oh, tomorrow is a weekend? Well, just hope no one mugs you between now and then!

That said, Shinsei Ginko is an up and coming bank in the Tokyo area that is starting to get some ATM penetration in the Metro stations themselves. So far they've got one 24hr ATM set up in my home station and I'm seeing them spread all over the city. Hopefully this puts some real pressure for other banks to get on the ball and start offering around-the-clock ATM service (full service, thank you very much). Hell, I wouldn't mind if Shinsei Ginko put some other dinosaurs out of business. Tokyo-Mitsubishi can die. Mitsui-Sumitomo can die. All the old guard banks can just wither on the vine, if it means the newer banks bring forth better service.

All I want for Chirstmas...

[Mechcozmo]

All I want for Christmas is twice as much bandwidth
All I want for Christmas is twice as much bandwidth
That's what I asked Saint Nick for!
(Please Santa! I want more than 400Kbps up! Serving pictures 50KB at a time hurts my teeth!)

i want.

[TenLow]

I'm paying $60 a month for 6.0/1.0. Imagine the porn that would be avalible at those speeds.

Example

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.totalillusions.net/forum/index.php?show topic=328&st=0

Hope they block port 25, or kill zombied customers

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... 15Mbit symmetric? xmission.com you say? I'm off to senderbase... I think my /etc/mail/access needs tweaking.

Universal multicasting

[TeXMaster]

#1 56 mbits would be heaven ? nah, i dont really think so :) at first, if 3 users with 56Mbit lines would start to download from a server that sits in a rack behind a 100Mbit ethernet ... they would want to pull 56*3=168 Mbits out from the 100Mbit ethernet ... so they will just not be able to really use their bandwidth and the server will be jammed .... and for most of users, even 8Mbit is a huge overkill, cause people that dont download movies/cd-images/adult-movies/music each day, mostly have latency issues (they click and the browser doesnt react within a second, waaah) and the larger the bandwidth distributed over several users, the larger the latency (routers & co have their limits). ofcourse a big maximal downloadspeed is great but i dont think that the rest of the network isnt quite ready for it, it might not be such a good idea (most of our country's server hosting providers have 100Mbit ethernet/internet lines for the servers, so 4 british haxors can now jamm my server)

I was having thoughts along the same lines. While the backbones of the internet might still be safely many orders of magnitude wider channels that such theoritecial limits reachable by end-users (and even if it's not 24 but 12 to 20)), and thus be safe from clogging the way you describe for servers, it's sensible to remark that some servers may find themselves at a pretty bad shortage of upload bandwidth.

A possible solution is of course provider-side proxies, but this runs the risk of making the Internet "out-datish", "stale-ish", especially when the proxies are hidden and the user won't even know he's not getting fresh contents. Ok, this could be solved with intelligent proxies, but still it wouldn't solve the problem for very dynamic, yet bandwidth-intensive, applications.

So we need some new form of distributed content providing. While specific forms like BitTorrent are a nice step in that direction, I don't see them as the mean for common use (web pages, moderate multimedia content).

I was directing my thoughts towards something more low-level, maybe even at a TCP/IP level. For example, universal multicasting.

Multicasting is currently implemented in a way that is pretty much a remainder of the way radio and TV broadcasting work: the emitter is somewhat agnostic of who is going to receive, and the receivers can freely attach/detach from the 'channel', without any knowledge of who else is listening.

While that's probably the safest way to implement TCP/IP transmission to multiple destination addresses, it has several shortcomings. Some are provider dependent (it's not widespread, and some providers only have provider-local multicasting), some are structural (the number of multicasting addresses is quite small).

So a cross-provider, generally available multicasting capability (would it be possible to allow any IP to be a multicasting IP, for example?) might be the solution.

This would have enormous benefits for lots of applications, and enormously reduce bandwidth waste from lots of Internet usage. Actually, I was surprised when I found out it wasn't like this.

Re:Universal multicasting

[jacksonj04]

Smart-proxies aren't needed to deal with dynamic pages, the responsibility lies with the web developer to return the correct headers.

Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Expires: -1

If the proxy follows the spec, it should not cache pages returned with those headers. If it does, you need a new proxy.

Re:Universal multicasting

[BrokenHalo]

some servers may find themselves at a pretty bad shortage of upload bandwidth.

I suspect that "some" might be very inclusive. My expensive but not very good (this is Australia) ADSL connection is more than adequate for a lot of the servers I hit. Sourceforge forums are a very good example of this, to name but one...

Re:Universal multicasting

[sploxx]

While that's probably the safest way to implement TCP/IP tansmission to multiple destination addresses, it has several shortcomings. Some are provider dependent (it's not widespread, and some providers only have provider-local multicasting), some are structural (the number of multicasting addresses is quite small).

I'm trying again and again to do what you do here - trying to infect others with the multicast meme :-)
But, seriously, the next generation IP protocol IPv6 makes multicast, AFAIK, mandatory. So we need it and a lot of the P2P applications are no longer neccessary. And that'd be good!

the rate of consumer grade internet service

[layer3switch]

as the rate of consumer grade internet access service goes up, the price goes down in relative fashion. However why is that commericial internet access service is no where insight going down?

Shouldn't it be logical to provide fibers to colo cage or cabinet or corporate OC-11 fiber to business at similar downtrend of price rate as consumer grade? I mean, after all, consumers with fat pipe need to access web services and etc on backend's fatter pipe as well.

I feel like the industry is going ass backward...

Bigger bandwidth + Growing Broadband Users, in my mind, does not equal to Faster Internet Access without equal or greater Web Service bandwidth on backend.

Ancient news

[Anonymous Coward]

24M connections have been available in Finland for almost a year now. The USA lags once more in technology as usual.

1.3Mbit is 5x quicker than any other???

[Anonymous Coward]

These speeds are roughly three times the closest local competitor and also allow 1.3 megabits per second upstream, roughly five times quicker than any other service provider.
Odd, with my ISP, I have about 1 Mbit upstream (and yes, I have tested it, just yesterday actually), so can someone please explain how 1.3 Mbit > 5*1 Mbit??

I signed up...

[gsdali]

... before the launch; there was a discount offer 4 pounds off a month for life. The biggest plus to this service is that it is the first one of them that offers a cheap Static IP option (if they offer one at all). So whatever the speed benefits the cost of my broadband comes down and the fats upstream means checking my home email becomes less of a chore.

Now for Brazil...

[hdante]

Use ADSL/cable in Brazil to get amazing 256 kbps. The fastest services are around 1 Mbps. Let's see some prices for this really advanced service:

- cable modem, 1200 kbps: R$ 149,90
- adsl, 1000kbps: R$ 178,90

Now for some math: the average monthly income for a Brazilian is R$ 800,00. I don't know how much is the average income in England, but I'll assume it is £1600,00. That means the ~1Mbps "fast" internet costs here 0.19AI (average incomes) and in England, the 5-25 Mbps broadband costs 0.015AI. If one averages ADSL2+ at around 8000 Mpbs, we get, in England, a price of 0.0019AI/Mbps, while in Brazil, we get 0.19AI/Mbps, 100 times the value found for England.

Unfortunately, this post has no conclusion.

Lack of broadband in the US

[MrEcho.net]

Im about 5 miles away from major OC lines running up the I-15 here in soCali.
I cant even get T1 or ISDN out here on this phone system, that is how screwed up verizon is.
I would be willing to pay $100 a month for 1.5Mb service, no joke.
Our whole "broadband" service in the USA is a joke.

The major telco's dont want to give up there cheep lines that they use for their phone services.
While they still change an arm and a leg for basic phone service.
I really wished the FCC would crack down on these ISPs and the lines that they own.
WE really need better internet connections here in the US.

Re:Lack of broadband in the US

[Technician]

I really wished the FCC would crack down on these ISPs and the lines that they own.


Have you seen your phone bill lately? The FCC won't do much until the subscribers start canceling service in large numbers.

The landline is just another way to pay taxes. Anybody rich enough to have a phone can pay taxes.

100Mbps in Japan for 17pounds per month

[Falcon040]

I'm living in a residential zone in Japan in Niigata, pretty near to the edge of the countryside really... Anyhow, I've got a 100Mbps fiber that only costs me 17pounds per month. Account with the company 'Nifty'. Can watch TV channels on it regularly while VoIP and video phoning back to UK.

For my 1Mbps line back in the UK, its more expensive.

Its a pity the UK is so far behind.
Japan and Korea know where the future is, and the goverment has organised a very competitive system, there are so many companies trying to offer the service.

BTW, the fiber comes in through the rough on telegraph-like lines, the same way as the power in Japan. So no expensive costs digging holes!

Re:100Mbps in Japan for 17pounds per month

[Falcon040]

that should have read "the fiber comes in through the roof"! Ah, been in Japan too long! ...Actually, paid nothing for the first 6 months too, didn't mention that either ;) Beat that!

Re:100Mbps in Japan for 17pounds per month

[Louis Guerin]

I have 100 megabit full-duplex, unmetered, no-ports-barred internet at home, for KRW31,000 - a shade under US$30 - per month. They try to poison my dns to make me proxy through them, but that's trivial to workaround.

I've clocked 7.3 megabytes/sec inbound (from a server located about 20km away), and about 3.8 megabytes/sec outbound, so I suspect it actually IS what it says. I also run 50-100G outbound traffic per day, so I can say with some certainty that it really is unmetered.

Oh ... and I get a static IP too.

It's a beautiful thing.

L

Re:100Mbps in Japan for 17pounds per month

[rich_r]

Wow.
Korea?

Re:100Mbps in Japan for 17pounds per month

[timecop]

Yes, after you are done fitting yourself into 1.5m x 6m apartment, and filling it with furniture and your computers, then you can have unlimited 100mbit broadband for $10 a month from "nifty".

That's real fucking NIFTY.

Re:100Mbps in Japan for 17pounds per month

[shanen]

I feel like changing the subject to "Bah, humbug!" Or maybe that's from studying a Japanese translation of part of Dicken's book about Scrooge? Anyway, just tossing in another data point for Japan. I'm a grandfathered oldtimer with the 1.5/256 ADSL, but I've never felt like my bandwidth was cramped. I've had it for some years already. Streaming video is slightly limited, but the available servers for that are also limited. Including the phone line, I'm paying about $50/month, but the price differences for the next few speed increments (up to about 12M) are quite nominal.

Three reasons I don't upgrade:

1. Fast enough and cheap enough, as noted.
2. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
3. I own the modem/router, and newer connections usually rent it.

Re:100Mbps in Japan for 17pounds per month

[kklein]

I live in Makuhari, Chiba Prefecture (about 40min from the center of Tokyo, where Tokyo Disneyland, Marine Stadium, and Makuhari Messe are, in addition to just about every multinational under the sun), and I can't get fiber to save my life... Well, I guess I could, but we'd have to pay a LOT more than that (we've checked over and over). The "24Mb ADSL" line we have was running at about 640k when we first moved in and after I complained enough and proved to the idiotic phone staff that I did actually know what was up with their service, we finally got a guy to come out and look at it. He was awesome. He spent all day tracing lines, looking at network maps, talking games with me, etc., and was able to get the connection up to about 12Mb. Still not what we're paying for, but given the pricing not really enough of a slowdown to justify going to the next level down. He said most people just don't even notice or know how to check and that sales will sell anyone any speed they want, regardless of what the network and/or building wiring can support. So although the parent is getting great service here, and it's awesome that he's getting it all the way out in Niigata, the simple fact of the matter is that there is a huge difference between marketing and reality. Just FYI, for all the times on Slashdot you see people blathering on about how fast everything is in Korea and Japan (parent and anyone actually living here excluded, of course).

Well Duh !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You just figure that out?

That's up there with "righty tighty, lefty loosey"

Then wrote it up on /. no less.

Tard

Still not the fastest! (30 mbps)

[v1r3n]

Still not the fastest! http://www.starhub.com/online/maxonline/index.html Singapore broadband providers are offering 30mps for quite sometime now. price is USD 70+ p.m.

Re:Still not the fastest! (30 mbps)

[Anonymous Coward]

Swedish ISP bredbandsbolaget is offering 100MBit (symmetric) for roughly US$85.
If you can stand lower speeds, like 10MBit, the price is around US$45. This
is all direct Ethernet; if you go for ADSL 24Mbit/1Mbit for US$53.

Be not a great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, 3 people in the office here applied for Be.

They've all now cancelled.

Be's customer support is even worse than the two current "high speed" DSL offenders - Bulldog and Easynet/UKOnline. One of my friends had his MAC transition code lost three times, and just gave up and cancelled. The other two never heard back from Customer Support despite repeated attempts calling them for information. Their connection date came and went, no joy.

Apparently Be have managed to connect one person at least, and he got 18mbit. That could have been a PR stunt for the DSL Forums though.

So...good news for the locals

[Sithgunner]

Everytime this kinda **Mb service is available news, I don't understand why it's important worldwide...
The article didn't even mention where this is all about except telling the currency.

Parts of Asia has 100Mb at $30-$60 a month for some time now.

Re:So...good news for the locals

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it's important to me because i'm a slashdot reading UK citizen and didn't know of the existence of this product until /. covered it. It's important to you US-ians to hammer home just how far behind you are falling behind the rest of the world.

Re:So...good news for the locals

[Sithgunner]

I think these should be read in local newspapers etc.
I'm Asian.

Oh sh17!

[mcrbids]

Most consumer Internet connections are manned by consumers, who are often blissfully unaware of the fact that their (Win XP/Home) computers need to be patched, protected by Antivirus software, Anti-Spyware, and further protected not only by Windows firewall, but also a dedicated hardware firewall.

In short, the formula goes like this:

$consumerNetworkConnection * $bandwidth = $spamAndVirusVolume;

Fast pipes are good, but are they going to do what it takes to prevent their consumer users (with bandwidth pipes rivaling or exceeding many responsible commercial providers) from doing a "dumfuk" and blasting the planet with the latest worm/trojan/virus?

"Be"?

[FluffyWithTeeth]

The company "Be", and a "Be Box"?

Don't Be Inc still own the trademarks to said names? I know they kept them when they were bought by Sony, or has the company completely dissolved into stocks now, and lost its trademarks?

Less demand for hosting services?

[wizrd_nml]

At this rate of growth I see hosting services losing a lot of customers. Especially shared hosting.

The big problem with this service

[commodoresloat]

It requires the end user to run BeOS.

I hope the Be Box is running BeOS

[Steven Reddie]

They say they include a Be Box, a VoIP box. Surely BeOS is inside, or will this remove all memory of Be, Inc. from our minds?

Shows how far behind the UK is

[mikehunt]

I live in Sweden and can already get 24Mb down and 8Mb up for
around 60 USD per month, or 24Mb down and 1Mb up for 48 USD.
With this, you also get 4 dynamic IP addresses, 5 x 50MB email
addresses and 100MB of homepage space. Cable modem included!

This has been available here on my cable service in Stockholm
for the last 9 months.

Re:Shows how far behind the UK is

[Englabenny]

Yes, what I was about to say. However, Lund seems to have come a bit longer along than that place far up north, Lunds Stadsnät offers 24 Mbit for 33 €/month (295 kr)

Re:Shows how far behind the UK is

[mikehunt]

I know, and some sad people here in Stockholm have
100Mb/s from Bredbandsbolaget. Still, I'm happy except
for the fact that winter is well on the way. :-(

Distance from exchange and upload

[BestNicksRTaken]

I'd be surprised if anyone managed 24Mbps, you'd probably have to be within an inch of the exchange!

I can't even get 8Mb/400Kbps because I'm like 7 miles from the exchange in a not particularly rural area. Probably because the UK has fuck all cable infrastructure so everyone has to re-use BT's copper crap for ADSL.

512/256Kbps is going well though, nearer to 600Kbps/300Kbps, but sure ain't the old 4Mb/384Kbps I used to get in the States....

What's the upload on 24Mbps - gotta be 1Mbps at least surely, or are they being stupid with that?

I was talking to a friend from Holland who says they pretty much already have 10Mbps syncronous to every house and will have 100Mbps async in 5 years, or maybe even gigabit over cable when HDTV on-demand comes around.

And France is rolling out 24Mbps ADSL2 next month apparently.

Of course thanks to the RIAA/MPAA we will have no P2P or BitTorrents to download and the only use for the bandwidth will be Linux ISO's and those annoying websites that insist on a 4Mb Flash intro.

Oh god...Is this what it's all come to?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously.

We used to have dupes and MS bashing. We could talk about Linux and the state of OS's. Sure it was stupid and obvious Microsoft bashing...but at least we could discuss things and sometimes have a rational discussion. We all learned things we wouldn't have elsewhere...and thought about things from a different perspective. Often in the mass of comments I'd find something to consider, even if was only a "+2 Interesting".

But now it seems every article is 3 weeks old at best, and nothing more than a blatant attempt at banner ad revenue and page hits. Why? Is this how it is now?

Katz is gone. Michael is gone.
But now we have Zonk?!

There are a lot of very smart and diverse people on Slashdot. A lot of people from different walks of life and different experiences.

Maybe I'm drunk or high off my rocker. But please don't let the experience go for the sake of 1 or 2 cents per impression.

This site is nothing without the commenters. Let's take it back, and return it to what it once was.

Re: Heres an adslguide article on the story...

[Cronky]

From http://www.adslguide.org.uk/newsarchive.asp?item=2 396

"The service activation is £24 and is offered via a shared LLU line, meaning your existing BT telephone line remains unaltered, but Be will unbundle the DSL part of the line to connect it to their own hardware at the exchange. The LLU element will mean the service is limited in availability to those exchanges where Be has installed its own kit. The maximum speeds quoted are actually the ATM speeds of the line, so maximum TCP/IP throughput on a perfect line would be around 21.5Mbps downstream and 1.1Mbps upstream. Also it is worth bearing in mind that ADSL2+ is very distance dependent, i.e. that speeds approaching the maximum are only likely on a line less than 1km long. If your line can manage 2Mbps under existing BT limits, then switching to ADSL2+ is likely to give a significant speed boost. For those only getting 1Mbps and 0.5Mbps, the biggest difference is likely to be the upstream speed."

It's not a first...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is already available in the Netherlands for about 6 months (offered by a company called Versatel). In practice, it's not 24 mbit (so I hear.. I was on such an account for half an hour and only saw speeds of about 800 KB/sec), and I'm sure this story won't be much different.

Yes, Uk broadband speeds are increasing

[StrawberryFrog]

Hopefully this will become a trend of radically increasing consumer internet speeds.

Well yes. The UK broadband industry is quite competitive, most of the main players have very similar packages with regard to price and performance - as soon as one ups the ante, the others follow suit. My current provider (Telewest) have just announced that they are rolling out the upgrading the 2Mb package that I have to 10Mb, I guess in order to catch up with niche players like Bulldog and Be.

Re:Yes, Uk broadband speeds are increasing

[sprintstar]

I have Telewest broadband too, they are upping my 1Mb package to 4Mb FOC (they are upping the upload speed too). There is no download limit. It really rocks, I have been very happy indeed with the service. I remember when I started off with a 56k modem on freeserve, really not that long ago. It was soooo slow!

Great News

[WillieManillie]

This is good to hear. Many, way too many, places in the US can only dream of having such speeds. Good luck.

Intermode not focusing on dollars??!

[Anonymous Coward]

If intermode is more interested in providing service than making money, I know one broadband provider that will NOT get my investment money.

Last I checked, Australia was not a socialist state, why would a company not be interested in making money?

Re:Intermode not focusing on dollars??!

[kakofb]

They're not on the stock exchange, so it's not really possible for you to invest in them - even if you wanted to. Get your head out of your arse. ZOMG THER NOT RAPING EVERYBODY 2 GET MONEY WHATS RONG WITH THEM COMMIE SCUM!!1!11!1!!1 Telecommunications here in Australia is complete crap, and it's really good that companies like Internode are taking it upon themselves to do something about it. They're spending millions, and they'll get it back in time - but they're nowhere near as profit-driven as the [I] government owned [/i] Telstra.

Re:Intermode not focusing on dollars??!

[mister_tim]

Of course they're interested in the dollars, but they're also giving good service and expanding in areas that larger ISPs aren't. To me, this syas that they are taking risks and providing services and settling for less profit, as compared (say) to some of the largest telcos that only offer services where they can be assured of the maximum profit, and skimp on customer service in order to boost the bottom line.

Hmm

[t_allardyce]

As we all know, the entire global consumer broadband industry is totally reliant on P2P file sharing to fuel it. Where are the video streams (that anyone wants to watch)? Where is this amazing 'rich multimedia content' (i don't count an embedded midi file). People watch dodgy streams like the winamp TV library (full of p0rn, ripped TV shows, music videos and home-made TV shows. There's also a few news feeds. After that its P2P which must account for even more than the geek software download bandwidth. I guess theres iTunes which is catching on but its in the ISP's best interests to make sure that there's enough pr0n, 0days, is0s & mp3z and of course torrentz to keep their customers wanting more and more broadband. OK OK, I know its useful for other things - emailing large attachments and getting work done but we all know the real reasons.

How about 1gbit per household?

[isudoru]

Yeah, that's 1gbit for 100 households to share. But in southern Sweden, Lund to be more specific, Labs2 offers 1gbit per household for just about $109 a month.
You can read more below, but there aren't any good English sources other than forums.

Google
http://www.labs2.se/pr/press2004113001.html

I am on 24mbps for $50 a month, but there are cheaper alternatives, such as Adamos 28mbps for $44/month.

Be is the second provider to roll this out

[rich_r]

Bulldog being the first. And with LLU, they won't be the last. I can't be the only person to ponder buying a used dslam off ebay in order to "pimp my line" (tm!)

I'd love cheap Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

The prices that all you lot get are really making me jealous. The fastest speed I can get as a home user in Gibraltar is 512/128 and that costs me £58 a month (over $100). Hopefully things will improve.

ADSL in Portugal

[Viriatus]

Here in Portugal the fastest service has 16 Mb download but with only 512Kb upload. And beside that we can only download 80 Gb per month. The price is 84,90 euros. The tecnology used is ADSl2+. I'm using a 2Mb/256Kb line and pay 22,5 euros. http://acesso.clix.pt/internet/adsl_16megas_precos .html

Damn it

[LanMan04]

I pay that much ($39.99) in Virginia (US) for Cox Communications cable modem service, which is about 2.6Mbs downstream all the time. Maybe 300Kbps upstream. Sigh.....

Be Slashdotted already

[jolyonr]

Seeing as they've been slashdoted already, and not even with a direct link (a second-tier slashdotting via the Guardian article) - how do we expect them to be able to cope with the bandwidth requirements of hordes of users running at 24Mbps. Not impressed! Jolyon

Be's PR agency must love you

[FishandChips]

Hmmn, another "news item" that's really just a PR puff from the marketing flaks. You need to stick to real news, guys, and avoid the free publicity crack even if our national press can't get off the stuff.

In the UK, independent operators have been able to install equipment allowing such speeds in only a tiny, tiny number of telephone exchanges. That's because the exchanges are controlled by the local monopoly, British Telecom, which has fought tooth and nail to make it as difficult as possible for third parties to move into their turf. So, 24-meg connections will only be available to a very, very small number of well-heeled consumers fortunate enough to live near an enabled exchange. The standard speed on a BT connection is limited to 512/256, now being upgraded gradually to 2megs/256. And if you throw increasingly stringent usage caps into the mix, broadband in the UK is not cheaper either.

Second, the last company to offer fast adsl, Bulldog, got itself into such a mess that it's been the subject of hundreds of complaints to the regulator, mostly from folks who after signing up found that they had no telephone phone service at all let alone adsl as well.

So these are not serious, well-funded operations - more wide boys on the make with all the problems that swiftly arise from under-investment, lack of capacity and taking on too many users to service properly. Why? Because any first-league player is going to keep well clear, knowing that the road to installation and expansion nationwide is very thoroughly blocked by British Telecom. Technically, BT aren't entitled to do this, of course. But that means nothing. Among big corporations, the UK isn't known as "treasure island" by accident. Our regulators here make a dead wombat look vigorous. Indeed, if they were ever asked to check over Microsoft, they would almost certainly conclude that it wasn't a monopoly and its prices were extremely reasonable.

Looks like Rip-off Britain again

[blown.penguin]

In France you can get a 20Mbps ADSL2 connection for 14.85 euros a month, roughly half of the price of the Be offering hear in the UK. Check See here if your French is up to it!

Too bad you can't actually use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Because as soon as you do start downloading at that rate, they'll suspend your account or firewall your packets into oblivion.

Our cable companies do the same thing on this side of the Lake. Deceptive marketing is the same around the world.

OS Independent?

[gronofer]

I wonder why the emphasise "OS Independent" in one sentence and require "Windows 98SE / Mac OS 8.6 or higher" in an other. Do those OSes even cover "Xbox with Live", that they also mention?

Re:OS Independent?

[suwain_2]

The box said 'Requires Windows 98 or better,' so I got Linux.

Re:OS Independent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because some people are thick/clueless and need it spelling out for them that "Yes, it will work with your computer". Anybody using any other OS should be able to understand the words "OS Independant".

What about Cable?

[el_womble]

I'm in the broadband backwater that is the UK. Until this anouncement we were supposed to be pleased when they let consumers have 4Mbps - never mind 24Mbps. I'm a cable modem user, and I pay £20 a month for 1Mbps - apparently I'm getting upgraded for free to 4Mbit in the next few months, and 2Mb subscribers are getting beefed up to 10Mbps. After this announcment, and a quick read throught the other comments (I want to live in Tokyo), I'm left thinking thats not enough.

Does anyone else know whats stopping Telewest from rolling out an ADSL killer (where available)?

The UK has cable too you know, and other realities

[GuyFawkes]

I was on one of the very first ADSL exchanges in the UK, 512 kbit down / 128 up, can't remember what it cost but it wasn't "cheap", except compared with the old days of 1.5 p (UK pounds 0.015) per minute 56k slodem.

(As a "funny" aside some years before when 28k was the norm and I had some cash burning a hole in my pocket, I met a guy named mark who had just started an ISP, him, one part time secretary, one SG box and one half empty rack cabinet, I can remember considering the idea of offering to match his capital investment for a 45% share, and rejecting it because of the 1.5 pennies per minute phone costs, "it will never fly" was my percieved wisdom.... he is still around today, one of the biggest independent ISP's in the UK, Eclipse.......)

ADSL was based upon the necessity of a BT land line, no matter who you bought the ADSL service from, about a year in I wanted to change the billing name on the phone bill, BT said no problem, we'll just cancel your ADSL and set you up a new account, should only be off line for a day or two and that will be 60 UK pounds....

I told them to take a hike and joined Eurobell / Telewest cable, for free.

Initially the same speeds, in theory, no setup fee, also no contention ratio, so whatever speed was advertised, you got.

When we moved house a year later our cable came with us, internet and telephone connections and numbers, simply moved with us, instantly.

In the interim we've ramped up from the initial 512, though 1 mbit, 2 mbit, to 4 mbit today.

No contention, no caps, no throttling, no "transparent" (but not) proxies, no IP changes, no downtime. 50 Uk pounds a month.

Just had a letter from them yesterday, they're upping me from 4 mbit to 10 mbit, not merely no charge, but they are reducing the monthly cost from 50 UK pounds to 35 Uk pounds.

OK, not as good as Japan and Korea, but they are getting there, and this is my prediction.

BT have infrastructure problems, whereas the cable companies have bandwidth coming out of their asses.

What will happen is the cable companies will be first to upgrade by making their services symetrical, up/down the same speed... at that point "if you build it they will come" world + dog on cable will start running their own servers...

Sure, you will have people hosting porn dvd iso's and people hosting photoshop 8, but you will also have people hosting their existing websites, static engine websites, steam engine websites, devon river websites, dartmoor websites, river fishing websites, custom car websites, etc etc etc, and on those websites they'll have high quality video clips, mebbe 500 megabyte, hopefully divx, or maybe just customised debian live cd's, and then, my friends, it will take off...

Just the cable company itself will have enough customers to drive this internally within their own network.....

BT users on ADSL3plusplusplus will be able to access this data, but not serve it, so they will be voting with their feet and wallets...

now is the time to start stockpiling all those run cold, run silent, run cheap cobalt RAQ pizza boxes that are coming out of farms... lost of home users are going to find them ideal in a year or two.

wrong not 24 quid a month

[che.kai-jei]

24 quid connection fee.

said ot be ten pounds more expensive than normal so around 50-60 pounds judg8ing by their london centrism.
plus 5-7 pounds month BT [read: Ma bELL line rental as well]
its fucking useless to me.

i dont have phone line i use voip for everything sop what would the use of having an opportunity to buy their voip add-on to their service if they force you to but a POTS line from Ma Bell/BT?

and i even if i were to start payiong for p*i*r*a*te* d/o/c/s/i/s connection i would still be better off iwth what i

Frist Punter

[Insipid Trunculance]

Better Yet, Read the Blog of their first customer Stefan.More info about Broadband in the UK is available here.

ADSL2+ and VDSL2

[Cato]

ADSL2+ does drop in speed as you get further out, but there's also the prospect of remote DSLAMs (fed by fibre from the exchange) that end up shortening your local loop (line from the DSLAM to you) - these are already used, partly as a way of reaching more remote areas for telephone service and more recently upgraded to handle DSL. Sometimes known as FTTN (Fibre to the Neighbourhood/Node) since fibre is used to link the remote DSLAMs to the central office (exchange building). Being deployed by SBC in the US.

A variant of this model is to deploy a smaller DSLAM closer to the subscriber's building (probably 500-1000 feet) you will even be able to get VDSL2, which gives you up to 100 Mbps - this is FTTC (Fibre to the Curb/Kerb), and is being deployed by BellSouth in the US, and BT and Deutsche Telekom in Europe. This FTTC model gives you about the same bandwidth as FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) using GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Networks), which is what the US telcos are moving to (about 40 to 80 Mbps per subscriber depending on number of subscribers on each PON 'fibre tree').

WiMAX is another option but it's debatable whether it can ever support enough simultaneous users at 40 to 100 Mbps in a densely populated area - probably best for competitive carriers and less populated areas.

Since I live about 12,000 feet from my exchange, remote DSLAMs / FTTx are my main hope for more than 512Kbps (at least without getting satellite, WiFi/WiMAX or something more exotic)... I just checked with Be and my home is indeed too far away for ADSL2+...

Speeds up to....

[CBob]

Shades of Comcrap (comcast).

"For only $42 a month".

I was actually a tolerant Comcast customer until one of their "upgrades" did in my 3Com OfficeConnect modem.

A week of BS..."it's your garden wall software", "outages in the area", "your account is scheduled to be shut off", "I'm surprised this old modedm still works".

And then by a "miracle", their RCA/Thomson modem works!! It also shows me why they shutdown my "junk" modem. Despite "excellent" signal strenght, the new modem drops connection quite a few times a day. I guess that's Comcrap's little way of making sure I'm not running a server or whatever.

Can you say switching to Verizon DSL? With it's severe limitation of only 768k, I'll be hard pressed to beat Comcrap's superior best sustained showing to date of a touch over 400k. (and save $26 a month too)

24 Mib not 24 Mb

[Anpheus]

Maybe while we're at it, we should use Mib instead of Mb.

Re:24 Mib not 24 Mb

[Anonymous Coward]

No we should not. In communications, Kilo actually means 1000. Yes, a 56Kbps modem is 56000 Bits per second.

Re:24 Mib not 24 Mb

[ModMeFlamebait]

Maybe we shouldn't, as bandwidth is measured in standard SI units (1Mbps = 10^6bps)

Re:24 Mib not 24 Mb

[Anpheus]

Which is interesting because programs like RevConnect, a DC++ client, measure bandwidth in SI units too. Being that Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, etc., are all SI units.

Bottlenecks

[Errandboy of Doom]

We're able to stream higher and higher quality films. At a certain point, we're going to be able to retrieve information much faster than our wimpy eyes can process it.

We will be our own biggest bottlenecks.

Am I the only one?

[Greg01851]

Am I the only one who would rather pay less for a slower broadband line? I pay ~$43/mo through Comcast (US) for a cable modem with 4Mbps download. I don't hardly ever need this much.

If they (or someone else) would provide an 'economy' package, I'd be the first to sign up. It would be handy to be able to 'crank it up' when needed (now I'm dreaming), but for day to day use, I could get by quite happily with 20% of the current bandwidth.

Just my .02 (US$)

I'm impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember where (and what) Moses Lake is,

that is a lot of bandwidth for a town that small in the middle of nowhere.

High speed problems

[codeboost]

High speed connections are not that much of a blessing as one may imagine. Here in Romania, I have a fiber connection, 100Mbps throughout Romania and about 10Mbps with the outside world.
The first problem that hits you is storage.
You can download a movie in 2 minutes (on DC), at this rate you can max out your hard disk pretty quickly. I'm constantly out of space, although I have 400Gb of storage. And I'm sure that adding more space won't help, in one week it will be full too.
The second problem is CPU usage. When you have multiple uploads/downloads at Megabytes per second, your CPU starts to feel it.
Apart from that, it's not that bad to always have more bandwidth than you can eat :).

Maybe so

[QMO]

"Right now, 3Mb/sec is running $40-50/month and is likely to stay there."

Luckily, I don't need 3Mb/sec. 768Kb/sec is more than fine for me and it's only US$15/month.

Re:Maybe so

[The_Dixie_Flatline]

I'd love that -
I pay ~US50 for 768 kbps through the only ISP my apartment complex provides ( I'm in Atlanta, so it isn't a very small city and I'd expect better ) and I'm lucky to ever get ~30 kbps. Also, it's via wireless (unreliable as hell) and no static IPs, or external access (no ssh, etc).

IP

[cynicalmoose]

Am I the only person who thinks calling a company Be, and then producing a BeBox, might just infringe Palm's copyrights, given that Palm acquired the IP of Be, Inc (the guys who produced BeOS, and whose original computer was called, wait for it, a BeBox)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Incorporated

Over 18000 feet and still over 1Mbps!

[Wills]

"Since I live about 12,000 feet from my exchange, remote DSLAMs / FTTx are my main hope for more than 512Kbps"

My office is over 18000 feet (5.5km) from the exchange -- literally on the limit for ADSL service -- and yet I was able to get 1Mbps ADSL.

What is intriguing is that on several occasions my line has temporarily been able to boosted to around 2Mbps according to speed tests based on downloading 20MByte test files created from /dev/random. According to a telco engineer the telco had been doing experiments of some sort during tests of long line capabilities.

1 Gigabit BB

[McFadden]

I recently received a card through my door from NTT asking if I wouldn't mind staying in my house for a couple of hours one afternoon while their engineer visited to upgrade my 100 Mb connection to 1 Gb (free of charge).

Re:1 Gigabit BB

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate you with a passion now. =P

Sweden Bredbandsbolaget

[Anonymous Coward]

Was more then a year ago, I got an advertice from Swedish Bredbandsbolaget, 100Mbit for 60$/month.. Whats the big deal with 24?.. I did stay with my old 10Mbit for 34$/months tho.

Re:Throughput not Bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

The correct technical term is Throughput, not Bandwidth like everyone thinks... Look up the definition of the two! Slashdot editors, please correct that as well.

Oh boy, even faster downloadz!

[n6kuy]

I'd rather have cheaper prices and faster uploads....

Except you're an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the server would be able to complete each download in a fraction of what it would normally take. So you would only have a few users hitting the server at a time. If you have users with slower connections they would download longer and therefore more users would hitting the server at the same time. It doesn't matter what the bandwidth of the users are from the servers point of view, it will still have the same load. The only way to fix this would be to increase the bandwidth on the server or have less users.

Meanwhile,

[thebdj]

in the US, is anyone getting service faster than say 6 Mbps without paying ridiculous costs? I think Verizon has FIOS at 6 Mpbs with a 2 Mbps upstream for like $40+. Most cable companies I have seen refuse to give you more then 1 Mbps upstream, though some have started to offer 2 Mbps up for home users.

So has anyone seen numbers above this, including major markets (since I am in one now) that are actually affordable. I would like to have some more upstream available so I can more smoothly access my machines while I am away from home.

Great! More Speed!

[nurb432]

This will lead to more bandwidth wasting websites.. More bandwidth for spam and viruses.

Great.. Just f-ing great.

How to tell if you qualify for this

[RichardX]

To check whether your household is capable of getting this service, please use the following test.

1. Open your window.
2. Lean out.
3. Stick out your tongue.

If you can lick the wall of your telephone exchange, then you qualify for this service. Otherwise you are unfortunately too far away.

Have a nice day
-- Customer Service Dept.

I live in Korea too...

[Anonymous Coward]

As I live in Korea also...who is your ISP?
And do you live in an apartment complex or what?

Is this really news?

[JourneyExpertApe]

I've got 100 Mb/s for $35/mo in the US. I'm not sure what the upload rate is, but I'll bet it beats 1.3 Mb/s. Do you not have cable in the UK?

Amazing... Simply amazing...

[Svartalf]

I keep asking why the Telcos haven't twigged onto this one or the cable companies for that matter- pure greed is the only answer I can come up with, that and inefficiency that makes it too costly for them to deploy it. Ah, well... More cash for the enterprising person(s) that field something other than what's being done with Broadband- doesn't matter what so long as there's a decent upstream and downstram pipe. I notice that Free is feeding video over the wire- people say that this wouldn't be realistic with ADSL services- well, with MPEG2/MPEG4 and IP multicast, you COULD provide that functionality comfortably and still allow usage for surfing, etc. elsewhere in the house. And pay per view movies become blindingly simple to accomplish.

Too bad

[Descalzo]

All I can find for $15 is dial-up around here.

Re:Too bad

[ArtStone]

If dialup still costs $15/month, that most likely means that you live in area not subject to the effects of the 1996 Telecomm Deregulation Act. The CLECs have partnered with the ISP wholesalers to bypass the control of the local ILEC phone companies. Access charges for ISPs using those networks is generally around the $4/month range (somewhat depending of their user profile - avg hrs/month, etc...). So they can charge $10 a month or less and still pay their bills without going to forced advertising, outsourcing to India, etc...

If you are in a former Bell RBOC service area (Verizon, BellSouth, SBC, Qwest), do some more shopping [end shameless plug]. If not, consider moving :)

lovely!!

[Danzigism]

its great hearing about all this massive broadband shit when I can't even GET ANY KIND OF affordable broadband for the business i work for here in delaware.. before we boast about this amazing technology, how about we work distribution!?!?

Screw broadband - what about peering?

[cr0sh]

When are we going to stop blathering on about high-speed this, wireless-that, FIOS-OMFG!? True, I enjoy my broadband cable speed as much as anyone, but at the same time, I feel like I am being cheated. I don't want to be a consumer - I want to be a peer. I want to be able to pay to be a peer on the internet, so I can easily host my own servers.

Right now, my only choices if I want to run a website are 1) pay out the butt for ISDN or a T1 to the phone company and an ISP for service, 2) pay out the butt for colocation of my server (unless I am lucky and I have a friend thru whom I can colocate with - which I don't) - plus all of the travel expenses if something goes horribly wrong and I need to be on-site, 3) use a virtual hosting system (which is what I do now, and is cheap, of course) - but I don't have extreme control over what is on the server, 4) say "f--k them" and set up a server at home and dynamic DNS or something, and pray I don't get "caught" and my service terminated.

Personally, I would be happy if my cable company would allow me to pay $50.00/month for 256k/256k symetric u/d ratio, static IP, capped at 5gig transfer each way per month (with a fee structure and monitoring tools to allow you to go over this rate and/or pay extra when you do). Why can't I have this? Right now, if I want anything close to this, I have to switch to "business class" service, pay $150.00 a month (not too bad compared to T1 prices), but I also have to pony up close to $400.00 for "installation fees" (where they just change some crap on the head-end to bump the speed up and such - I already have the cable modem). I have looked into SpeakEasy, who have excellent DSL broadband plans that would allow just what I want (they seem to be the only provider in America that "gets it") - but I can't get DSL in my neighborhood (though their offer on a T1 line is pretty sweet).

Will people like me ever have the ability and means to inexpensively become peers on the internet from within our homes? Will we ever demand it?

Re:Amazing... Simply amazing...

[boa13]

people say that this wouldn't be realistic with ADSL services

And yet it works. Free offers more than 60 channels as part of the flat monthly fee (mostly public channels and crappy channels), and offers something like 140 others using various pricing schemes: one or two bucks per month and per channel (the channel sets the price, you can cancel any time, though every month you start is fully due), various packs, and a premium Canalsat offer. I've watched it at a friend's, and the quality is very nice, except you can get occasional temporary freezes or garbage, especially when you do intensive downloads in parallel. Most of the times, it works just as well as regular TV.

They also offer radio channels, and distribute a modified videolan client to help you stream your media (music, videos) from your computer to your TV.

By the way, as a typical Free move, they now show realtime statistics of what people are watching. Ain't that cool? Freebox TV Stats

I don't have a TV, so I don't use that service, but I do use the phone service quite a lot. Your typical IP phone, with some echo at the beginning of a call, slight distorstions sometimes, but free and unlimited calls to all landlines in France, and cheap rates for the rest of the world.

Not everything's perfect though. Their customer service has improved a lot, it used to totally suck, it is now mediocre at best. You pay a fee when you leave (the more you stay, the less you pay). You pay 400 euros if you damage the Freebox (ouch!). That, and several less important annoyances.

But overall, for someone who's on the geek side of things, their offer is a great value that beats everything else currently offered.

(Oops, I forgot to rant about their top-notch and free web hosting, their tech friendlyness, and... oh well.)

Upstream

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one would like to see more symmetric connections. 4 Mbps and 256 Kbps upload is a joke... you can download decently, but uploading pictures or videos to someone takes a lot of time, whether it is e-mail, AIM, or a p2p program.

I would rather have my connection be 3 Mbps down and 1.2 Mbps up.

FIOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon FIOS is available in my neighborhood - 30/2Mb for $44/mo. (fiber). Great service.

--SONET

ADSL2+ available in the USA

[frogblender]

My local ISP rolled out ADSL2+ a few months ago - advertised at 24Mbps, with the usual disclamiers - real life speeds are consistent 18Mbps down and 784K up (at my house, half mile from the switch)- sweet deal for the same $29.95 per mo... I laugh at the cable commercials who advertise "faster than DSL" - I point and yell, "LIARS!"

Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.bethere.co.uk/

Interesting that they offer 24Mbps service, but can't survive a Slashdot effect?

Yeah, that's my choice.

What is the fastest service in Massachusetts?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the fastest service in Massachusetts? I am currently shopping around.

100Mbit and still not satisfied

[Anonymous Coward]

And here I'm on 100/100Mbit Full Duplex to my apartment and is still not happy...
Are we spoiled in Sweden or is the US/UK just shit on IT?

iiNet only ADSL2

[creamandchives]

Last time I checked, iiNet in Australia only has ADSL2 enabled (not ADSL2+) which is why the max for iiNet is 12Mbit down. Although, ADSL2 has some reach-extend variants that can be enabled to help those further from the exchange.

The big issue is the provider's IP and aggregation network. Around the world for DSL internet services, these only provide 30-50Kbit/s average per user. A LONG way from the 20 or so Mbit being offered on the access portion of the network (from your exchange to your house). This is why large scale streaming video deployments on these networks (ones with 10Mbit+ to the house) are non existant.

The back haul networks are expensive, hence the pissy little bandwidths.

The catch? Simple.

[typical]

The catch is that at some point, with existing applications, people just *plain don't use that much data*. Right now, P2P in particular has pushed demand for bandwidth up above what is reasonably available. You probably wind up throttling the tiny percentage of people that continuously saturate your lines, and you just handle the bursty demands of everyone else. Honestly, once someone has a week long MP3 playlist and all the movies and porn and games and whatever that they can possibly consume, demand is simply going to taper off, at least until someone comes up with new uses that demand more bandwidth.

Take newshosting, for example. Newshosting.com is one of the popular Usenet providers. They have a plan that provides unlimited access to their newsfeed. Could that exist if everyone saturated the thing? Of course not. But if you assume that most people are simply not going to, over the long term, come anywhere near continuous usage, then it works.

A lot of ISPs got in trouble back in the day because they tried making this assumption (valid for the Web and email) and then were hit by changing technology (P2P came along). But at some point, you have to think that there really is enough bandwidth for everyone.

France rolled out ADSL2+ over a year ago

[Anonymous Coward]

In most metropolitan areas of France, two companies have been competing for the "ultrafast" ADSL subscriptions for much of this year already. Free (the company) rolled out ADSL2+ over a year ago after France Telecom deregulated their lines. Their plan includes 29,99 EUR / 20 Mbit/s DOWN by 1Mbit/s UP. Free's runs Linux on the backend, and support Linux with their DSL hardware (built in-house).

I currently suscribe to a second company, Wanadoo (aka France Telecom) due to contractual reasons. The plans offered here are identical with differing hardware and slightly different pricing. Wanadoo is slightly more expensive, but have some included perks such as static-ip and free domain names.

The serious problem with this system is what to do with so much overhead on the download pipe. I absolutely have never used 20Mbit/s down. The closest I can get is roughly half that. There is no service (that I know of) that allows me to stream high throughput video (HDTV 19Mbit/s?) which is the most logical use for such a copious amount of data throughput.

Free has launched their service with complimentary TV over ADSL to combat this, and Wanadoo has built the capability into their hardware, but to my knowledge has not implemented the service. The oppurtunity for On Demand IP.TV, or feature length film distribution through digital means (Ireland's cinema system in the home?) is knocking on our door. Wake up the venture capitalists.

Just my deux centines.

-Robert Emperley
Strasbourg, France