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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.
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)
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
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.
"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.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
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.
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).
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.
#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)
... 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
#2 i wonder how they can afford it
#3 while they're at it, i'd even be lucky to get a 8mbit connection for 24 pounds over here
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
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. :)
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
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
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
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.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
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!
Streaming media? That would do it pretty fast, I would think, if you use that a lot.
Not Free SF Reader
In short, the formula goes like this: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?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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...)
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.
----
"I believe in karma. That means I can do bad things to people and assume they deserve it" - Dogbert
Your tactic might be a bit screwed when the two companies merge.
== Jez ==
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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.
Scroogle