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Japan To Get 1Gbps Home Fiber Connections
ashitaka writes "KDDI has announced that they will be launching a 1Gbps Internet service to single-family home and condo users in October. The service is supposedly synchronous, with 1Gbps in both directions, although the article implies that speeds will vary with location. Cost will be 5,985 yen/month (about US$56.50) for the basic Internet and IP phone service. This is intended to compete with NTT, who currently control over 70% of the Japanese FTTH market."
Woah, someone is totally jealous.
I thought the service providers were already complaining about individual users clogging up "the pipes".
Giving a bigger bandwidth to end users is just asking for more backend network congestion.
Unless they are expecting us to continue along the http: clicky traffic model with all this new bandwidth.
YouTube and movie on demand services look more usable with this increased bandwidth.
I suppose the service providers are drooling at the thought of pricing per gigabyte downloads along the lines of text-message pricing.
Actually, he has a very good point.
Imagine a botnet of 10000 zombied windows machines on 3.0Mbps up/down.
Now imagine a botnet of 10000 zombied windows machines on 1Gbps up/down.
Now if you're the target of the latter botnets DoS attack, i'm sure you'd be asking "what in the hell do they need that much upstream for to begin with!".
Some would have very good uses for that bandwidth but if their market is anything like what I see in north america, at least half or more will be people who get it because of shinyness or the myth of the best. Depending on the ToS, this could be quite the liability for the rest of the world at large unless enough of the worlds backbones are similarly upgraded to handle the home user market hitting 1Gbps+. Not saying it is a bad thing overall, simply that the concern is valid and that given time it will no longer be a problem. Right now, he has a point.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Chances are good the price you pay for your Internet access is largely irrelevant.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
that the world is getting more bandwidth capacity to individuals on new technology, whereas most of the US is on cable modem and we're getting new restrictions after years of unannounced restrictions placed on our bandwidth.
If you don't have a 30Gbps link, it doesn't really matter whether you're getting hit by 10000 x 3Mbps (30 Gbps) or 10000 x 1Gbps.
:).
It'll be hard for you to tell the difference
I think most sites don't even have a 1Gbps link.
Watch streaming video without having to hit 'pause' on the player to let it fully buffer before even starting to play?
Not have to shut down other applications because my 4 BitTorrent connections are making my email logon time out and my web browser not load images on the pages (assuming it can even load the page to begin with)?
Lots of possibilities for new applications, but just fixing the current problems would be marvelous.
Yeah, these problems won't be fixed without backbone upgrades, but I bet Japan doesn't have that problem to the degree those of us in the U.S. do.
This highlights exactly whats wrong in the U.S. Japan gets faster and faster speeds, the U.S. gets slower and slower. In my area, Comcast is now offering a SLOWER speed for less money (but not much less). 640 Kbps in 2008? Come on! 1/10th the speed for 1/2 the price. We're getting robbed.
You cannot be too rich, too thin, or have too much bandwidth :-P
you're forgetting the difference between GB and Gb (bytes vs. bits). there are 8 Gb in 1 GB.
If the connection is 1Gbps: 30 GB * 8 GB/Gb = 240 Gb, which is 240 seconds. 240 seconds is 4 minutes.
Only thing they'll be good for DoS attacking is something in Japan because they'll instantly hit a bottleneck of epic proportions the moment they try to touch the US Network with all its bandwidth problems :P
I think some ISP in Japan recently capped their users at like 250 GB A DAY... Whatever Japan is doing is what the US should be doing in terms of expanding their network. I understand theres alot more problems like distance and such but still.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
then why does the island of the UK have such slow broadband?
Some countries claim their size holds them back but the UK doesn't have that excuse. We're just getting screwed.
Yes, I meant symmetric. Sorry, my brain fart. I was rushing out the door before posting and couldn't get the right word out.
I knew, however, that some pedantics would show up and correct the oversight in a suitably (im)mature fashion.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Slow down, you're just jealous.
This is EXACTLY what civilized nations should be doing. Gigabit fiber is about as fast as you can go on such a wide-scale before cost shoots to infinity.
They won't have 1Gbps to the rest of the world, but as a local interconnect, it's excellent. The main pipe leading out of Japan will still be the same size, and you'll get the same volume of Viagra spam as always. Actually most of that garbage comes from China, Malaysia and Brazil - Japan actually does have a functional legal system that deters such bastards.
If everyone in the USA could get Gigabit to the home, even if it only translated to 1mbit per user to the outside world, holy crap can you even begin to imagine the uses for that sort of bandwidth ? How about hi-def Youtube ? How about IPTV for the masses ? How about not having to wrestle with QOS tweaks to get goddamned VoIP working properly ?
As long as same-network traffic is unmetered, this kind of deployment can lead to huge cultural changes.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Examine the population density of various major US and Japanese cities. They're surprisingly comparable.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I always wonder when people say this kind of thing because I never find Japan to seem overly crowded. So I looked it up.
Japan *does* have roughly 10 times the population density of the US (339/km2 vs 31/km2). But in comparison to Europe, it's not really very different. For instance the Netherlands and Belgium have higher population densities (395 and 341). The UK has similar density at 246.
But I think especially when we're talking about fiber rollout, we're mostly talking about doing so in *cities*. In this case, the US, Japan and even Canada (at 3.2/km2) are going to have similar population densities. So I have a hard time thinking that this rollout in Japan is going to be significantly less expensive than it would be in the US.
The idea that the size of a country is what holds it back from high speed access is a myth. Japan may be smaller than the US, but it is a lot larger than the UK and contains some really difficult terrain. Yet, they are still pushing for universal fibre access by 2010, even in small remote villages in mountainous regions.
If it was simply a question of population density, then why does no-where in the UK have fibre yet? Why does fibre in the US seem to be stuck at 20mb?
The reason Japan is so fast is that the government decided BB was an important infrastructure/utility, like the road and rail networks or the electricity grid, and pushed it forwards themselves. After nationalising all our publicly owned infrastructure and utilities here in the UK, we are now realising that they need to be state owned or heavily state regulated or the country as a whole suffers. I expect BB will go the same way eventually, or we will simply fall very far behind and loose out to the rest of Europe.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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