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2.5Gb/s Internet For French Homes
Erick Lionheart at www.gamersloot.net writes "Presence-pc at reports that France Telecom just announced they are offering 2.5 Gb/s Internet connections to select cities in the Paris region. For ... $85(70 Euros) a month you also get free phone and TV. From the article (in French): 'The historical operator opted for a GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) FTTH architecture (Fiber To The Home). This technology allows up to 2.5 Gbits/s download and 1.2 Gigabits/s upload.'"
LET THE TORRENTS BEGIN
Oh the sweet, sweet pr0n! Holy crap, I wish I lived in France!
Wait, did I just say what I think I said...?
For... $85(70 Euros) a month you also get free phone and TV.
Ummm.... if it's $85/month, it isn't really "free," is it?
Soylens viridis homines es
You mean when you don't devote all the country's resources to war, you can actually spend money on developing infrastructure at home and abroad that improves the lives of citizens?!?? AMAAAAAZING!!
THE FRENCH....the french have more bandwidth. Its just not right I tell you. I want fiber to the home. Oh and I want a cooler cell phone like the Japanese. How come the terrorist are after us. All we have is crappy phones that have been out for like a year or more other places and a few Mb of bandwidth.
Uh...that's completely unrelated to Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality has to do with the priorities of packets, not connection speed. This is just a case of lower population density making it not worth it in most areas and low competition making it not worth it everywhere.
Okay, it was an obligatory joke... yes I know we won the revolutionary war due to the French military assistance and they gave us the statue of liberty... I just find it funny to swap out the word 'French' with the word 'Freedom' to be "PC" -- however, when talking about France should one instead use the word "Freedom"? Wow, 2.5 gigs... yeah that is freedom!
But I notice they are using GPON. I have 1Gb/s GPON in Japan (free, comes with the body corp fees) and 1Gig aint "1Gig". Yeah looks good but I would prefer dedicated 100Meg than 2.5Gig GPON.
And what, in 40 seconds you've hit your monthly cap?
Seriously though, it' s trade-off. We could have this sort of thing in parts of North America, but it would require consumers and gov't to stop moaning and griping about where telecos and cablecos pick to choose their deployments. Cherry-picking, if you will.
Because in case you didn't notice, all these Asian and European plans that seem so fast (and than always get everyone green with envy) always have the disclaimer "in select areas/markets" on them. Which means "deployed to a very few affluent areas that can likely afford it", a concept which seems to go over OK in Asia and Europe, but not so OK in North America.
For some reason, when I read news releases like these, I get all excited about the possibilities of a tremendous amount of bandwidth available to me in the home -- then realize the reality.
You are only going to get the bandwidth that you are being served.
With that said, if I'm downloading a huge ISO or other multimedia file from a site on my 2.5GB connection, and the remote site is sitting on a 256K upstream cable modem, then I'm going to get no more than 256K.
While YOU might have 2.5GB of downstream available to you, most providers these days serving upstream content don't have anything close to that availability.
And furthermore, I seriously doubt that many PCs today even have the ability to CONSUME 2.5GB of bandwidth. Are they making 10GB ethernet cards for the consumer market? Ummm... no.
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
France Telecom/Orange better improve their current offers. They are eaten alive by other ADSL providers. FT/Orange gives you 18Mb/s ADSL for 40 euros a month (includes TV channels AND NO telephone) when other providers gives you 24Mb/s for 25 to 30 euros which includes TV AND free phone calls to Europe, USA, and other countries. They lose thousands of customers per month.
Let's hope that they'll compete by innovating, but I doubt it.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Net Neutrality will accomplish the exact opposite effect, in this case, as there won't be any incentive for ISP's to upgrade their networks if that bill is passed.
2.5Gb/s, but they will not give you any airspace with that!
Finally, a real reason to hate the French.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Good to see telco PRs have now infiltrated slashdot.
15mbps? WOW.
Wait till you hear what we get in Canada for that money. And its actually gotten slower over the past 6 years (as vendors learned QoS).
Go figure.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
As TFA is in french i can't check the facts but it sound not really plausible to me. There must be some catch as in "it's shared for a whole block". Otherwise 4 customers would be able to saturate a 10Gb switch
O la la... c'est un tas de porn.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
And here in America, we STILL fall further and further behind in broadband. Where is this 45+ M/bit sync fiber connection the telcos promised 80%+ of Americans were supposed to have by now?
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
All i know is, p2p is legal and they have 1.2 gbs up... you cant beat that with a stick.
we cant even get FTTP in San Fran where its offered
when it does come to america please invest in cisco.......
In the spirit of world communication and harmony, we should all adopt this French model.
French models usually aren't tech saavy, but this one is.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Just to make you feel better: here in Indonesia we pay $60 for a 128 kbps cable modem connection.
google: verb - to search for information on the Internet.
I'm skeptical of the net neutrality effort for other reasons. Net neutrality is a great idea, but some have tried to tag on repugnant changes (such as government control of political web content) to the Net Neutrality bills. Leave Kos and Drudge alone.
Where were you when the voynix came?
ummm, for especially low values of 85?
Is 15 mbps shit? I wish I had that shit. I just have 4 Mbps for 20/month.
People like me who live in a major American metropolis (home to our regional telephone monopoly!) can only get 256 Kbps/128 Kbps for $20 (with a special offer; it's normally $25)! Getting 3-6 Mbps down costs $38-47.
Cable internet (for non cable TV customers) costs $58-68 for 4-8 Mbps (or $15 less if you're willing to pay $15-50 for TV).
I would practically KILL to have 4 Mbps for $20/month. I don't know WHERE in the US you get 15 Mbps, but I'm sure that it costs nearly 4X what you're paying. (3X if that figure is 20 EUR/month.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Would have been funnier if you didn't parade your ignorance of the English language while trying to sound condescending.
What's expensive with FTTH is the termination of the fiber to the homes, not so much the backbone.
French experts agree that getting all the homes connected in France would cost approximately 30bn (with an average cost of 1500 per house).
That may sound like a lot but in fact it's only the price of 500KM of new highway.
I think that this infrastructure should be paid for by the state and allowed access to private companies against a fee for TV, Internet and phone services.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
So my father invested in France telecom. Bought at 128, the all time high I think. They went down to 70, 40, 30. At one point they were down to 9. At that time, the company released its finacial report detailing how they had taken in I think 23 billion in revenue, and had made a loss of 1 billion.
Upon closer inspection, I discovered that their expendature had been marked as 12 billion in running costs or some such, and the other 12 billion was marked as "captial infrastructural development", or some such. The main telecoms provider in france had just invested 12 billion in its infrastructural development as was down to 9 per share.
I advised him to remortgage his house and put it all on France Telecom.
He did no such thing. I believe he sold what he had at 15. The shares are now worth about 22.
As I tried to explain, that 12 billion infrastructural fund wasn't to repaint buildings. France Telecom were giving the French telecoms system a serious upgrade, and as you can no doubt see, it's already paid off. The French can now get their phone, TV and internet over the same line. The company was never, ever going to go under as anyone who knows anything about French big business will tell you.
That's what a high bandwidth network for 70 million people costs. 12 billion, give or take. And it doesn't require any extortion policies from telecoms on internet businesses. It took a 1 billion loss in one year, and the French now have the best telecoms infrastructure on the continent, if not the world. Say what you may about the French, but when they do big infrastructural projects, they tend to get it right; TGV, Nuclear power, Millau Viaduct, etc.
May the Maths Be with you!
It's a damn shame when the country that basically pioneered the internet is falling so far behind the rest of the world in connectivity. It's pretty bad when one of the world's top economic powers is getting LAPPED by countries like Sweden and South Korea. Last time I checked, we had dropped to something like 13th place.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
because I don't see any other way of saturating a 1.2 Gb/s connection upload, even if your entire street shares it...
well, I guess Bittorrent might.
I ask because I setup a Gentoo-based webserver in my house but can't open it to the world because it's against my ISP's Terms of Service.
"Scud Storm!" -- Jeremy of PurePwnage.com
Who believes they'll upgrade anyway? They've said that before in order to get tax breaks, but they lied then just like they're lying now.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
sure . and if you're nice they'll teach you there gramar too .
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
They're getting fibres to their homes with a capacity of 2.5Gb. It's possible that this bandwidth is only between a home and the other end of the cable. This doesn't mean it's plugged into a router with that bandwidth. They're probably going to be using it for other purposes such as HD-VoD.
They must have some big trucks, um, tubes that is in France!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Oh, so you people are the ones to blame for DSL?
If it wasn't for you guys our government might had invested 50.000.000.000 sek in fiber for everyone, but since the market forces started to pick it on themself with DSL they have only invested like 5.000.000.000 and people are sitting there with their shitty 1mbps upload.
Stupid government, over 20-30 years time fiber to everyone would be worth it, the cost per month in that perspective isn't much.
Thanks for the link to a French article. At any rate though, what will people do with all that bandwidth? What do they do with it now? No, seriously I'm just wondering. I have about 12 megabits download speed right now, and honestly I don't really need that much. I do wish my 600 kilobit upload speed were much faster. But what would I do with a gigabit of download?
Penny - plain text accounting
Same fiber to the home concept...10x+ the speed...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I recently heard that when the fiber lines that are run all over the US were originally planned and put in back in the 70's/80's, it was planned for each house in the US to get FREE 150Mb fiber. I'm unable to find any documentation for this, but I'm assuming that The Telco's bought/leased it instead and are selling it to us.
This space intentionally left blank
I'll just stand over here and hold my breath now.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with the speeds of the service offerings from the network providers.
And you can get 100Mbps+ high speed FTTH in select areas of the US too.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Net neutrality has everything to do with this. ISPs are claiming that they need the extra income from the second-tier extortion fees to be able to provide high speed access like that.
The communications companies have been using that same excuse for years. Net neutrailty, equal access, fighting over telephone pole and last mile ownership, potential for telco to send TV and cable to send phone, franchise laws, local and long distance fees.. The list goes on and on.
We won't upgrade until this condition is met, a few years or months later, we won't upgrade our network until a different condition is met. Rinse lather repeat.
I live to far from from the CO to use DSL. Verizon has not touched a single thing in my area for over 20 years
Yup. It'll be here any day now. We might need to give them another couple hundred billion in additional subsidies so that they can ensure that they do it right...
This guy's the limit!
We've only just started getting 10MB cable connections in the UK, and 16-20MB is still in its infancy and only available to about 0.001% of the population. Even then you need to physically reside on top of the phone exchange to get anything like the full speed.
I pay £35 (approx. $65) a month for 10Mbit, with a paltry 384kbps upload. So, you haven't got it that bad to be honest.
But...It's a series of tubes.
And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
Dear Senator Ted Stevens,
The French can figure this shit out, why can't you?
Love, rm
Can all fish swim?
"In france and other countries, people get insane connections (like the one listed in TFA)"
The people getting this service in the France are a subset of people living in the Parisian suburbs, not all of France. Most people in France are in the same situation Americans are - waiting for the telco to roll out something decent. Or at least the lucky ones are - when I was in France earlier this year, I couldn't actually get power for my electronic devices in some small Provincial towns because their electrical systems can't even churn out a good enough stream of AC to power the devices I wanted to use. How's that for crappy?
i dont know about you, but i get 6mbps in canada MAX
a side note about GPON. the headline is a bit misleading. the 2.5gb/s is shared between multiple home (32 according to this spec i have) so it's not a full 2.5gb/s. not that it really matters, but just for the sake of correctness
That is still a lot of money.
We are currently heading to Wimax instead to cover rural areas (DSL is considered economically unfeasible for more than 10% of french population, and unfortunately, this population is mostly composed of upper middle class, so is not really computer illiterate.
But how much will Watson get?
Get your own free personal location tracker
I am French and am well aware of FREE's (ISP) ambition for WI-MAX.
Just wanted to clarify why DSL is not economically feasible for ~10% of the population.
DSL needs to be within 5-6 Km of a DSLAM, which as we well know don't come cheap and need hundreds of users to amortise cost.
Fiber doesn't suffer as much from signal attenuation (I've heard things like 15KM aren't impossible). So in fact, for these people FTTH is more of a possibility than DSL.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
I think that this infrastructure should be paid for by the state and allowed access to private companies against a fee for TV, Internet and phone services.
You'd think that the average government would see it this way, but they don't. They spend billions on roads and other infrastructure but don't see the importance or benefit of providing advanced networking and bandwidth. Once in place, cheap and acessible it could make a huge difference to the economy and quality of life, not to mention create industries and tech development.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Here is an English translation of the page from Google. http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F %2Fwww.presence-pc.com%2Factualite%2Fftth-experien ce-18331%2F&langpair=fr%7Cen&hl=en&safe=off&ie=UTF -8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
GPON, like other PON fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies, uses a single fibre at the central office (telephone exchange), which splits again and again on its way to homes. A single fibre does deliver about 2.5 Gbps, but it is split up to 32, 64 or 128 times (depending on how many subscribers have signed up, and how the telco has deployed the fibre. So the real bandwidth you get is something like 20 Mbps (1:128 split) to 80 Mbps (1:32 split). Good, but not quite gigabits...
m ?ARTICLE_ID=231662&p=13 for details of the various standards.
GPON is the ITU (international) standard, while EPON, aka GEPON is from the US's IEEE - GPON is used more in Europe and US, while GEPON is bigger in AsiaPac, where NTT and others are investing huge amounts in fibre (DSL is already on decline in Japan and Korea). See http://lw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cf
The other FTTP architecture of interest is Active Ethernet, in which you have a fibre per home/business, and plain old powered Ethernet kit driving the fibres. It gives you 100 Mbps bidirectionally, and possibly more depending on the kit (just upgrade the switches as technology becomes available). So it's more future-proof, but generally costs more to deploy initially, though in some cases it's a better bet according to some (in rural areas or densely populated cities, where it becomes fibre to the basement with VDSL in-building over pre-installed copper, 100 Meg end to end).
We had a new cable company come into my home city pushing fiber to the curb, and in order to get access to the rights of way they had to install in the poor neighborhoods first. Rural areas and chery picking rich neighborhoods are too different issues. If they could have gone into the rich neighborhood they would probably offer much faster services and have a much larger market share.
I was not aware that this kind of thing happened. I will retreat from my last comment.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
That I think we'll start seeing a new 1337 term popping up from our fellow French gamers..."LE GPONed!1!1!!!!"
I surrender, and will be moving to Paris ASAP!
Or will be moving to Paris, and then surrendering - whichever French law requires.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
To put this in terms of a monetary unit I just saw (in "Science" no less), this is only 50 IWDs - "Iraq War Days" - about $190 million. (Yes, France doesn't really have IWDs and this speed broadband would cost the US much more. But I couldn't resist using the unit.)
Please, for the love of freedom, if you have one of these connections, donate some of your spare bandwidth to anonymous browsing services.
If a good upstream connection (with no bandwidth caps) were affordable where I live, I'd be doing it today.
Or, they could download YOUR whole culture, run it through a spellchecker, and reupload it again in only 3 seconds!
Thought they were talking about GB's. Since it's Gigabits, well, that's available in many parts of the world today.
We had a free upgrades from a major ISP from 1 Gbps up/down to 1 Gbps up / 10 Gbps down over here half a year ago or so.
I'm not intending to brag about my country with this; that's why I don't mention it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This technology allows up to 2.5 Gbits/s download and 1.2 Gigabits/s upload.
Translation: they will deliver 2.3Gbps downstream
and 128kbps upstream
Like they always do.
Pisses me off that I have "broadband" and can download isos in 20 minutes, but it takes a half a friggin hour to email a hanldful of photos to the folks.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"Not most". Some rural areas are still waiting for optic fiber. The last time I checked DSL subscriptions. France was one of the leading countries in Europe (Second if I remind well. The first is Finland).
I still remember how mad French were about their Internet connections around 2001. Extremely expensive Dial-up connections. You couldn't read anything about Internet without a reference over South Korea or scandinavian countries. They have made a lot of investments, they forced France Telecom (in bad shape after investments in foreign mobile phone companies and UMTS) to open its infrastructure to competitors. What you see is the result of this good policy.
Old: Cheese-eating surrender monkeys
New: Fast-surfing surrender monkeys
And if you're nice we'll teach you how to spell "grammar".
The article doesn't imply that France Telecom is offering a 2,5 Gbits/s Internet connexion, just that the link that connects the customer to the FT network is 2,5 Gbits/s.
l ists/press_releases/CP_old/cp060117.html
FT uses this link to provide Phone, TV, Internet. The article does not say what is the Internet bandwidth that is offered to the customer.
According to the news, the new service is offered in a few select cities of Paris Region.
In fact, the service isn't commercially available. It's only a pilot experiment, only about one hundred of people are concerned.
And finally this is old news, from january:
http://www.francetelecom.com/en/financials/journa
In other words, each endpoint gets around 80 Mb/s downstream and around 40 Mb/s upstream. 2.5 Gb/s is the downstream system capacity between the optical line terminal and optical network terminal, not the service offered to an individual customer.
Oh, well only 80 Mbps. I'd still take that. I'd still just about kill for that, especially if it was affordable.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
They may soon. The major disaster of the teleco breakup etc was that the teleco's continue to own the lines and provide services. They do not own the lines, they were paid for by gov provided monopoly grants, and thus should truly be owned by the governments (local/state/fed) anyways. If cables are municipality owned, and service is provided by separate companies, then you can have true competition.
Of course, and the thing that keeps this from happening, is that then the affluent areas that desire the "best" will get it, while "under-privledged" areas (defined as those that have something less) will then "unlawfully be discriminated" against.
That could be regulated by imposing line fees to maintain and upgrade the network as needed, while allowing the affluent areas to upgrade when they want by paying for it themselves. A sort of public/private partnership where the public sector maintains ownership. It's not like they public "owner" can shift the cabling to another area, much like a road or water main cannot be shifted to another area. The output of power generation plants, however, can be.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
This kind of bandwith is useless for most people at this time, and probably for years; I would rather spend my tax money spent in expanding DSL infrastructure everywhere, which is probably not very expensive now.
As if they would upgrade their networks without net neutrality...
See, the issue is that the telcos have way too much power, things started going very good for us french (as far as internet connections go) around 2000 when the Free ISP appeared: their customer service sucks (and has always sucked), but they immediatly set extremely agressive prices for high speed and a usually good enough reliability (when they appeared, their offer was something like 512/128 for 30/mo, when you couldn't get 256/64 for less than 40 from France Telecom -- french historical telco, and free then promtly upped their offer to 1024/256 a year or so later -- without changing the prices). And they kept at it, Free mostly appeals to students & techies (if only because their customer service sucks so much that if you ever need them better stay on your own), but the other ISPs had to follow suit and up their offers every time Free upped theirs, they had to add a phone when Free added it, and TV when free added it, ...
You don't have that kind of disruptive ISPs in the USA, if only because your telcos are not required by law to let any and everyone use their pipes, and they can therefore strangle any ISP they don't like by fucking up with their customers. Or arbitrarily refuse to let other ISPs take control of the pipes.
The phone network should be owned by your state/federal govts, and leased to both telcos and ISPs. This would effectively remove all the power the telcos use, and allow for the birth of disruptive/innovative/low cost ISPs.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Just like mass transit requires mass, so does getting any kind of reasonable return out of setting up fibre to the door infrastructure. It should come as no surprise that sprawling, sparse North America should be way behind the likes of western Europe.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" - Einstein
If a SATAII drive can only do 300 MB/s (assuming we're talking about bits for both speeds), surely the hard drive speeds will start hampering the speed of connection? In this case unless my maths is very wrong, it'll deliver faster than the hard disk can write.
Nothing costs nothing
ah ! ah !
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
I never thought I'd say this, but: I kind of wish I lived in France. [ewww]
Haiku for you!
Maybe the bottleneck isn't on the last-mile in Europe with the multiple mbps and gbps connections... but here in the US "high speed internet" is defined by the providers as 512kbps (possibly even less than that...) The average home here is normally hard pressed to find 3 mbps at an affordable rate... Damn the telco's and their stealing $200 Billion that was supposed to upgrade the network...
Read my blog posts on usability.
$30 BILLION for 500 miles of new highway? Where, exactly, are you getting your figures? That's about $18,500 per linear foot of highway. Contrast that to a recent proposal for building a "new" Interstate 69 in Indiana, which came in at $1.9B for 140 miles, or about $2600 per linear foot. Assuming your example highway was three times as wide as I69, where does the $11,000 per linear foot go?
Two words: Population density.
I believe (I'm not totally sure but I'm reasonably confident) that both Japan and Korea have significantly higher population density than the U.S. I'm absolutely positive that continental Europe has a much higher population density than the U.S., which also happens to be why mass transit such as the French TGV and German ICE trains are so much more successful than in the U.S., where only a select few passenger routes are profitable for rail companies. (Namely, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and not much else.) For the same reason mass transit is more practical, it's far cheaper on average to roll out last-mile infrastructure.
Add telecom greed to that and we're screwed. That said, most of the problem is the issue of population density (or lack thereof) and the resulting high last-mile costs.
As to why you see high prices even in cities - The U.S. has laws mandating rural telecom subsidies, effectively averaging the population density across the country as far as telecom prices are concerned.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I understand the concept of a bell curve.
I understand that total employment is a myth.
I even understand the whole concept of people "at the top" and people "at the bottom".
However, a 10% unemployment rate is a rather vicious bell curve. Especially for a country with 63 million people.
Additionally, reducing it to a bell curve and then just turning people into statistics always tends to trivialize the severity of a problem.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Are the French Government subsidising this in anyway?
if not, what has the French unemployment rate got to do with anything?
Acid House saves Souls
there should be their gramar should be grammar Never follow a full stop with the word 'And'. Perhaps you could sign up for the same course....?
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Sheesh. Of all the words to leave out...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192221&cid=157 83381
Why are you American's all bitching? After all you do have AOL!
...rather than building a better war machine, we too could have 2.5 Gb/s connections to the desktop.
i've been seeing lots of people posting about how much their connections cost - i finally have 1.5/384 adsl (after waiting 1.5 mo for the install) @ $60/mo and my actual speeds are more like 1.3/200. I specifically moved to my current apartment because i was told that this location could hit 6/512, but after 3 weeks of waiting for covad, i was told that at&t misrepresented the distance to the CO and it was actually about 5000 feet further...the only local competition to this dsl is TW cable which costs about the same ($55/mo) and while the download is about 5mbps, the upload is 128kbps and the AUP doesn't allow for any hosting (in fact, i had my connection disabled for a week once after ssh-ing into my own box when i had TW last year). i'm being continually tempted to move out of the states to someplace where i can get a decent connection at a decent price.
To another location within Korea, or across the Pacific Ocean to another continent?
Half mile, I'd kill to have half a mile:
The last 2.2 miles for me.
Of course there's no way they'll bring fiber to my house, even the telephone is on overhead poles, and the lazy bastards stopped the cable TV about 50m away.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Well, there is always Verizon Fios. Verizon is also using Fiber Optics to do the same very thing. And it hooks up to your cable line. Also it enables direct competition with local cable companies with Verizon Fios TV.
\
Could /. actually get /.ed?
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
the_complete_jerry_lewis.torrent, 50,000 seeds... I can see it now.
Task Mangler
People, for God's sake please RTFA! They are talking about an 'experiment' deployed 'in a very few select places' - right now there are *only* 100 (one hundred) such users.
You can't buy it, it's not on sale, it's not announced as a product. Someone should at the very least re-title this misleading slashdot entry.
I don't think everyone realizes just how far behind America is in the field of Internet access. Yes, our broadband connections are significantly slower, and we're falling further back every year.
.5 miles away from our house.
But a lot of us don't even have broadband access. As I'm sitting at home, my laptop is connected to my local dial-up ISP at 31.2 Kbps and I'm downloading a codec pack at 3.3 Kbps. I have never once broken the 4 mark.
The worst part is that we can't change. We're forced to buy phone service, even though we always use our cell phones. Together, we're paying $100 a month for dial-up. Why? Because the nearest broadband provider (Cebridge), stopped laying cable
I don't mean this to sound like I'm whining and complaining. In fact, I'm moving in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to fall in love with high-speed. I'm just pointing out that not only are our broadband connections a problem, but so is the broadband availability.
This is what the French do while we make fun of them... game over man, they win :(
It's France Télécomcastic!
Where there's competition. I can choose between 5 Mbps cable modem and 30 Mbps FIOS, which means the cable company is busting their hump. My parents on the farm get to choose between dialup and smoke signals.
As to why you see high prices even in cities - The U.S. has laws mandating rural telecom subsidies, effectively averaging the population density across the country as far as telecom prices are concerned.
The rural telecom subsidies apply to POTS lines, but I don't think they have much of an effect either way on data service. None of the money you're paying for your cable modem is going to fund some guy's cable modem in East Dogpatch, Nebraska; there's nothing stopping the telcos from deploying much faster (South-Korea-style) broadband in parts of the country with high population density and crappy 1mb service (or less) to rural parts.
So really there's no good reason why you shouldn't be able to get the same type of high-speed service in Manhattan as you can in Seoul; there's no 'forced averaging' going on by law in broadband. The only "universal service" is analog voice.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What country has the largest square footage of industrialized space in the world?
Every time some other country's telco produces a better service than our own, this comes up. It didn't explain why consumers can't get 100mbps in our most dense cities, or 1gbit, and it still doesn't explain why we can't get 2.5gbps now. Even in the places that already have fiber to the home, the best I can do on FiOS is 30M/5M for $180. Meanwhile ATT seems to be giving up on SBC's fiber deployment, at least for this iteration. According to that article they're possibly hoping to come out ahead sometime in the hazy future with 100mbps connections.
It also doesn't explain why rural canada has faster and cheaper consumer bandwidth available than downtown Chicago (I live in downtown Chicago, and what I pay $70/month for is slower than what folks I know in rural Alberta pay $25 CND for). Canada is a larger country, with less dense industrialization, and is far better wired and serviced for internet connectivity than our densely populated metropolitan city centers.
So I call bullshit. Our position as last place among industrialized nations when it comes to Internet connectivity has absolutely nothing to do with our nation's size, and everything to do with a corrupt government in bed with corrupt telcos and corrupt copyright cartels deliberately keeping connectivity artificially slow and prices artificially high. Of course, the war spending that's putting us into record debt isn't helpful, but nor is it directly responsible.
One of my European friends put it best. America is an interesting blend of first and third world. The sad thing is, most of us never travel and don't realize just how third world we're becoming. The rest of the world really is moving along in leaps and bounds, and we have already been left in its technological dust. But don't tell anybody...they'll label you as "unpatriotic."
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Where I live (Toronto), I have two choices: Bell DSL or Rogers Cable for "high-speed" service.
Cost -- about the same ($45/month + tax). Rogers keeps "boosting" the d/l speed (now they claim 5 or 6Mbps AFAIK). Rogers wants me to BUY my own DOCSIS modem, and will offer "Extreme" speed. Upload is 128kbps (reasonably reliable, 256kbps is claimed). Which is ok; I can finally stream music from home to work.
However, Rogers has a draconian AUP. No servers, no how. I did talk to them, and they "ok'd" (unofficially) a limited inbound mail service, and ssh (as long as the bandwidth consumed is below their radar (they have never complained). I still don't like the AUP, and would like faster outbound speed. Also, Rogers no longer offers Usenet.
The other alternative is Bell DSL. These pedants drop bother outbound and INBOUND port 25. Making the issue moot. I would need to subscribe to a mail redirector service, which completely negates any price advantage they have. Not even moving to "business class" service solves this -- the only "free" email would have a "sympatico.ca" (whatever) domain.
So I use the Rogers service. Since the DOCSIS modem is attached straight to the cable, I prefer to "rent" the modem, and I don't get the Extreme service. Upload is limited (and, because I access the songs via http/https protocol) and not allowed according the terms of the AUP. Inbound email is ALSO not allowed by the AUP. I do these things anyway, but my connection is at the sufferance of Rogers.
Couple that with a data cap of 60GB a month, and I would say service in my area sucks (not that I use 60GB a month, but I signed up to an "unlimited" service, with Usenet).
All I can say is "it does work, and it meets my needs". I just feel annoyed. Its good that other places get faster connections; mostly I just want a better and more understanding company to deal with (I would like to be able to negotiate port blocking, data caps, services).
YMMV
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
... ooooh, 2.5Gb/s for freedom homes!
Maybe they're kinda like Sampson or something.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4720409.stm
... Critics point to new cost information that indicates the project could cost several times that amount."
"MPs Colin Challen and John Hayes, say building just one mile of motorway costs on average £23m and a mile of dual carriageway £12m."
So, assuming £1 => $2 we get, £23,000,000/mi / 1600m/mi / * 2$/£ => $28750/meter => ~$8700/ft. I think a motorway is a 4 lane divided highway, but not sure. Now, $30 billion for 500 miles is, $30,000,000,000/500mi => $60,000,000/mi => $37500/meter => ~$11363/ft. I don't understand how you get $18500/ft, but this seems realistic. Contruction costs depend on your terrain and other things.
http://www.taxpayer.net/road2ruin/roads/i-69.htm
"1.9 billion
And it will cost more than that. ALL costs are up including construction and material especially for oil-intensive operations like road building. The other cost different between Europe and US is the value of the land.
I wonder if French have bigger and fatter pipes. May be Senator Ted Stevens should move to France to get his internet delivered faster.
..... best things in life are not so free..........
It's not 500 miles, it's 500km, which is more like 311 miles... Unless the "KM" above was kilo-miles. :)
Oh, and that cost was probably in Euros, which are worth more than dollars at the moment.
I read the internet for the articles.
And perhaps this grammar nitpicking will end. But probably not.
By the way, at English Non-Errors you'll see that the third entry indicates that it is acceptable to begin a sentence with a conjunction.
And have a nice day.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I use the USPS and tape drives. Sure, google may take a week or two to load, but it is far better than my old method of having the hexadecimal value of every character sent back to me on stacks of paper, and then having to enter them into a text editor.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
In the U.S., we see a price like "26 dollars a month for 100 channels".
But by the time state, local, federal, spanish war, indigent korean war veterans with dependents, and other taxes are added on the bill is double that.
How is it in france? Is that $85 really going to be $150?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In Greece for 55 euros+VAT=65 we get 0.5Mb..
With all the chatter about net neutrality, the other question is, what's going to be out there in a few years if the telco's win?
yeah, maybe you can get multiple Mbps actual speeds to google or CNN but anything else is going to timeout on you.
My current 8mbit line is 50:1 contented, so at that rate you could easily share your 2.5Gb with 16,000 of your neighbours!
I think some sort of boost is needed, but I'm not sure what. Obviously, the market is providing enough incentive to innovate and expand services.
In many cities, villages, and other places local governments or other groups are trying to bring broadband, wired if not wireless, to the area they are in yet the telcom and cable companies are fighting this. If these businesses were to offer the service then the local governments wouldn't be trying to do it themselves. Normally I prefer a freemarket but when it comes to things where a natural monopoly occures, as with cable, fiber, and phone lines are concerned I'd rather they be owned by the locals whether it's the government or not, Then have the infracture open to whomever wants to provide, sale, the services to consumers. An excellent example of this is what a group of communities is doing in northeastern Utah:
"A Broadband Utopia"
Utopia, as described by Sir Thomas More, the man who originated the term in the early 16th century, is an imaginary place of few laws, great natural abundance, and an absence of poverty and want. We still don't know how to cure poverty and want. But in a western U.S. desert, a utopia of sorts is taking shape for broadband users who would like to get their phone, television, and Internet services from the providers of their choice.
As it turns out, this Utopia, known formally as the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, promises to be just that, a broadband utopia. And it is very much a real place, encompassing 14 cities in northeastern Utah. It delivers to each of its 3000 subscribers high-speed Internet access, telephony, and television programming through a fiber-optic cable at data rates that now reach 30 megabits per second. Soon, service providers there will be offering speeds of 50 and even 100 Mb/s. That's enough to download a 2-hour movie in about 6 minutes, 10 to 20 times as fast as the typical U.S. cable or digital subscriber line connection, 6 times as fast as Verizon Communications Inc.'s much-publicized fiber-to-the-home service (called FiOS) and twice as fast as the new DSL now being introduced in Europe by France Telecom and others.
This is just the first two paragraphs and there's a lot more.
FalconShould there be a Law?
A handful of cities in UT are on the UTOPIA network, among them Murray (where I live). I get 15mbit (each way) fibre to my home for under $45/mo (including taxes, etc).
:( )
I consistantly (every day, any time of day) see 8-11mbit down, speed tests peg me at 6-9 mbit up but I do not upload enough to verify.
Google UTOPIA+UTAH for more info. Not bragging, just giving a positive example of one rare thing Utah is doing right (now please forgive us for voting for Hatch
-Jazz
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Parts of the Salt Lake valley (ironically not including Salt Lake City) have 15mbit (each way) fibre to the home currently for ~$45 including taxes.
:)
Not trying to make anyone feel bad they don't have it, just telling ya where it is
(Google UTOPIA+UTAH if you want to learn more)
-jazz
PS: yes it does rock. 5GB DLs (and uploads for that matter) in under 1 hour . . . I can about saturate the connections my family has in Ohio when sending stuff to them.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Interesting you mention airlines. Telecom and airlines are both industries that are either government-run or government-subsidized in the typically social-leaning European nations.
The past few years I've read some interesting articles in business and economics magazines on how new airlines are doing in Europe and most of them talk about how those airlines are doing much better than US airlines. Whereas the US airline industry is suffering financially in general those in Europe are doing terrific. They said a few of those in the US are doing well also but these are newer airlines such as Jetblue and Southwestern. Admittedly I don't know how the industry, here or there, is doing now and things may of changed somewhat.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Go ahead...be totally sure. South Korea has a population density of 480 people per sq. km., Japan has 339, and the USA has 31.
List of countries by population density
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
This is the difference between a government-run monopoly and a private-sector monopoly. Governments do things for "the public good" - companies don't have to.
Actually when governments first chartered corporations a corporation would only be chartered if doing so provided a public good. But the corporations have paid politicans to move away from that position. This was one of the things Thomas Jefferson warned of, he feared corporations especially banks would come to own the politicans and have them pass laws favoring them other others. Here's some of what he says about banks:
Banks
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction... I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity ... is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
FalconThomas Jefferson
Should there be a Law?
to pack one end of the fiber in her bags ....
In Spain, and I guess in France it's the same, you pay for all your calls. Local calls, regional calls, national calls, international calls, calls to mobiles, ... errr and that's all of course. And AFAIK in America you don't that's why you don't find it quite a deal.
The phone is metered in Spain too? I was kind of shocked when I heard phone service was metered in Britain, the more you use it the more you pay. I can see that for cellphone but not landline phone service. And with the way the cellphone industry is going in the US I wouldn't be supprised if within a few years if they got rid of metering for cellphones as well the way many providers are offering 1000 minutes plans and such.
FalconShould there be a Law?
...I pay the same $60 for 64k ISDN.
PLUS a penny a minute for when I dare to use it.
7 miles from town...in a canyon, no line of site for wireless.
But come ON....this is friggin Southern California. We're supposed to be civilized...instead we have rolling blackouts and spotty internet coverage.
The US is already a 3rd world country...the rest of the world is just afraid to collect on all the bad debt.
As said in the article, this is a 'pilot test' only, it's not obvious at all that the real price will be similar..
That still doesn't explain the difference in broadband quality between Sweden (20 people per sq. km) and USA (31 people per sq. km).
but we've had this for ages, and better. 100 Mbit/s is roughly $30 in sweden, and you get something like 24Mbit upstream with that, handy when you want to have a webserver etc.. Americans really need to get their stuff sorted, we have this in all major cities and our population density is nothing like that out asian countries etc, in fact I suspect it's closer to that of North America..
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
Here in Sweden, the government gives a tax rebate to people who want to install their own true broadband. So our entire council area (maybe 30-40,000 population) has laid their own fibreoptic backbones and dug trenches and blown in fibre themselves. It requires a bit of thought to be able to weld fibre optic cables and configure the routers but I think that it is quite a nice social activity, and it also means you have control over your own telephone, internet, and TV lines. Theoretical max is 7GB/s per household.
http://www.bikef.se/
(Swedish)
Yeah, IEEE's Spectrum had an article a few months back about a A Broadband Utopia. Good article. And while I prefer a freemarket I think they've got a good idea in that the communities themselves own the infrastructure, backbone but allow others to offer different services.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I wonder if French datacenters offer their customers that kind of speed? And at what cost?
I live in Arizona and dial-up is all that is available where I live. Neither cable or DSL from the phone company is available here. The telephone lines in my neighborhood are only good for 26.4K, so here I am right now, on my 2.4 GHz computer, with a 56K modem, connected with a 26.4K dial-up connection.
I live in a smaller city, up in the mountains in Arizona, but I am not way out in the middle of nowhere. When I look outside, not too far away, I can see a small airport, a private university, a hospital, a golf course, a gated community, an Indian casino, a hotel and hundreds of homes. Lately I have seen the TV commercials from QWest which make disparaging comments about dial-up and suggest getting inexpensive QWest DSL instead. So I called them and they told me that DSL is not available where I live. Unofficially, a QWest repairman recently told me that he had heard that my neighborhood is scheduled to be upgraded by adding a switch nearby sometime within the next year. Lately, someone is digging a 2 mile long ditch nearby and laying plastic conduit. QWest telephone trucks have occasionally been parked along the ditch so I hope that means that they are finally upgrading our neighborhood.
A local Internet provider recently placed an antenna on another hill which might possibly be accessible from where I live and would offer a reasonably high-speed wireless Internet connection at an acceptable price. A more expensive satellite connection from Starband is another option but I don't really want anything too expensive. It's not like 26.4K dial-up is really that bad if you don't have sypware, if you block as many ads as possible, and mostly visit less graphics intense websites such as Slashdot. If I need to download a large file I have it download most of the night while I am asleep or else take a laptop over to a small Cafe which has free WiFi.
Let's see... 2.5Gb/1.2Gb for EU 70/month.
Meanwhile, I get 1.2Mb/1.2Mb for the equivalent of EU 50/month. So, for maybe EU 20/$25 US more a month, I could get 1000 times the bandwidth, if only I lived near Paris. Tough choices...
Given how likely it is that I'll see that sort of home bandwidth at that price here in the US of A within the next 20 years (~0.00000001%), I guess it's time to look into a comfy little gite.
Actually what you get in france is either:
:-))
25mb/s download and 8mbs/upload with Internet, about 30 tv channel and phone (free to call fixed lines) for 45/month (at FT)
or
8mb/s for 30Month (at Free) for the same kind of triple play
This is in Paris
In a small village in the woods you get either dialup (this is still the only option for approx 2% of the population) or some "experimental" satelite + wifi 1mb/lines for 30/month
or your own bidirectional satelite dish for approx 150/month for 512 down 128 up
But in 12 month you will have a WiMax option almost everywhere (probably 0.5% of the population will still be able to hide
Gizoogled!
l ashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/26/127205&from=rss
http://sites.gizoogle.com/index2.php?url=http://s
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
I live in a small town in the USA when I am not living in a small town in France. These towns are equidistant (MOL) from large telecoms centers.
In France I pay something like euros 37 a month for 8 Mbps/1.2 Mbps ADSL. In the USA I pay $69 a month for 1.5 Mpbs/128 Kbps ADSL. Both run without problems.
Even in non-select towns - burgs in the sticks with farm tractors driving through the streets - France Telecom kicks every US provider's butt.
DSL has been available in some cities of France since 1995.
My business partner has (and I'm getting in about 2 months) the Verizon FIOS service. Good and bad: Good: 15 MB/sec down - 2 Mb/sec up. I've tested and consistnetly see number snorth of 13 Mb down You can bundle it with your phone and TV service $44 a month Bad: Its Verizon. And that means eventually you will have to call customer service. Do yourself a favour, and shoot yourself. Or use hard drugs. Is a Fiber Optic offering, probably similar to what they are talking about here. In some areas Verizon has already bumped it to 20/4 for the same cost.
Your hard disk isn't fast enough to write that to disk.
Even if it was, you'd fill up a terabyte disk in an hour or so.
[I bet the ISPs are counting on this....does it count as false advertising?]
No sig today...
And in Cambodia i pay 250$ for 256 knps :(
"Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
In other words, GPON has pretty much the same bandwidth as cable---slightly less in fact. The only difference is that instead of a HFC, you have pure glass to the home.
In fact, PONs are basically just that---an extension of the cable way of doing things. Instead of cable modems, you have special GPON termination units. But, these are not set up to deliver anything like the full OC-48/STM-16 to any one customer. Give me a true FTTP any day.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
I know you're a fraud because you didn't end with, "God Bless America"
Don't forget that lovely anagram proverb:
Saru mochi kara okiru -- Monkeys arise from mochi. Mmm, chewy!
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
DSL was invented in 1988 by Bellcore.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It won't matter since most people only have 100Mbits/s routers and network cards anyway.
Staring at a white background [on a computer screen] while you read is like staring at a light bulb — Maddox
Even the US government knows that the internet is not a dump truck.
The series of tubes, however, is real.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
This has to be BS. Either that, or I'm moving to France. This amazing speed of 2,500 Mbits/second will revolutionize computing, computer software, multiplayer computer games, and much more. Expect to see (more) video on demand, (such as youtube and ifilm), amazing LAN-style p2p software, and probably something else awesome...perhaps an easier to use network API than remoting, rpc, or sockets...plus those counter-strike maps would download at a reasonable speed, perhaps allowing 3D games to update resources on the fly. This amazing speed (unless they actually meant mb/s, in which case it's between dsl & cable) would even allow the network computer to exist, and you could toss your HDD and boot from a shared drive on the network. Perhaps a shared drive with all the software already installed. You could also run software 'on the fly', reading the instructions into memory from another computer on the network, instead of from the HD. Also, those MMORPGS wouldn't lag up with 30 people on the screen at the same time. ;O, and CDs could be discontinued since they could be downloaded in 2 seconds.
Bastard.
P.S. I'm an American living in the backwoods of the Internet. I just _upgraded_ to a 1.5Mbit DSL, and thought it was peaches.
But now the peaches taste like ashes.
Seriously, USA citizens, we need to get our act together and do something. I'll at least start complaining more. :-)
Well, in most countries the pipes are owned by the telecom companies, so to use Skype you will still need the Telecom companies. Actually, in France, since already 11% (in 2005) of all phone calls are VoIP (only 4% 2004, and expectations for the end of 2006 are 30%), all major Telecom companies changed their core business from analog phone service to IP services (this includes Internet obviously, but also VoIP, TV, VoD, HDTV, even mobile phone, etc.) That's why they need bigger pipes. All those services require lots of bandwith. Telecom companies become a mix of Cable Operator (providing TV, VoD, PVR, HDTV), ISP (providing Internet) and old-telecom company (providing phone calls through VoIP). Even, in Europe (Belgium for instance) some so called Telecom companies even started to become TV Network by providing their own TV content. In Belgium, if you want to see the soccer championship, you have to get TV overIP with one of the Telecom company, since this company bought the all championship. So, yes, Telecom companies as we know are dead, we should call them Network or IP companies maybe, but they are still there for a while, they just changed their core business. It is a huge shift. Those who don't shift, will be dead. France Telecom is an interesting example. They decided in 1999 to turn the whole company in IP based company. Now they are in the last phase to merge all their subsidiaries (mobile companies, ISPs, phone, etc.) worldwide in one single company called "Orange" (more than 200.000 employees). Now Orange offers a box (called LiveBox) which is in a single box, a DSL modem, router, Wifi router, VoIP, TV tuner, PVR, and even a mobile phone base station !
This is old, but I thought I'd reply anyway:
...thus: $60M / 3280 feet = $18,293 per linear foot.
...this: $13.6M / 5280 feet = $2,575 per linear foot.
$18,500 per foot calculation is simply:
$30bn (the orig. figure) divided by 500km = $60,000,000/km...
Contrast that to my figures, which I googled, which detailed a 140-mile hiway in Indiana estimated to cost $1.4bn.
$1.4bn divided by 140mi = $13,571,428/mi...
The only thing i didn't include in my original post was the conversion between GBP and USD. While I'm not a mind reader, my guess is the 30bn figure was given in US Dollars, NOT pounds sterling. I came to this conclusion for 2 reasons:
1) 1 GBP is worth much more then USD. If that figure WAS in pounds, it makes the hiway nearly twice as expensive as my math shows it to be, which is just ludicrous.
2) The poster used "billions" as a Unit of Measure. I took this to mean 10^9, or "one thousand million" as it's commonly used in the US. In the UK, one billion is used to describe 10^12, or "one million million" which is the number we call "trillion" in the US. (and this goes on and on... a trillion in the UK describes 10^18 or what we call a quintillion in the US)
Either of these interpretations would push the values out of the range of good sense.