Slashdot Mirror
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."
Let's give more bandwidth to ordinary people that run super-secure Operating Systems and will undoubtedly never get any malicious trojans.
Seriously, 1Gbps is so insanely overboard. Many service providers don't even need that much bandwidth. That much can only be used for bad things.
The amusing part about it, is that it will be capped at 30GB transfer a month probably. AWESOME! You can reach your cap for the month in a matter of hours.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I mean, they have to do *something* with the bandwidth
That makes it much more likely that Japanese slashdot users will get first post!
Just means we would reach our cap that much sooner. And of course, the ISP's would just go off and over sell that too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
It's one thing to get a fiber hookup but it's another to get the bandwidth. Do you believe every little Nipponese boy and girl - all 150 million of the tykes - get 1G? Come this way, I've some prime real-estate for you down on the bayou.
Chances are good the price you pay for your Internet access is largely irrelevant.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
They can use up Comcasts's 250GB monthly cap in 33 minutes.
"synchronous" = symmetric?
What the heck is synchronous about these connections? Don't you mean symmetric?
I think I speak for everyone else when I say F*** you Japan! We never liked you anyway!
For legal things such as VNC (remote desktop type stuff), legal streaming video, video chat, etc. None of which is exactly feasible on 6 megabit service at "full" quality.
It must be almost 10 years now since I wrote (Ethernet inventor) Bob Metcalfe when he was an Infoworld columnist, to ask why the hell North America was building an Internet system out of wires installed for completely different purposes: a 1930's POTS network and a 1970's cable-TV network. There was much talk about the "unaffordable" trillions it would take to run fiber to every home.
This begged the question of how we managed to run phone to every home with the much-smaller 1920's-1940's economy to draw on, then did it all again with more-expensive cable in a decade over the 1970's. And, you see, I work for a water and sewer utility and KNOW what it costs to run big, heavy, iron 6" diameter pipes both to and from your street and get payback on the capital out of the $40/month water bill, even after operating costs.
Metcalfe had no reply, he tossed it to his readers; none of whom had an answer either, save those who wrote me by E-mail to rail against telephone monopolies and lobbyist-ruined governance.
What's Japan going to DO with 1Gbps? By the time we find out, it'll take us over a decade to catch up, even if all the monopolies and lobbies are broken the next day. (In my business, we used to get a few gallons per day of water out of wells and have a shower once a week or so; now consumption can be a ton of water per day per person and we shower all we want, we have hot tubs and pools, kids in Nevada learn to swim, we irrigate gardens, and fill our cities with trees in arid climates: trust me, uses for bandwidth WILL arise, and our kids will wonder how we got by without.)
Americans might want to start getting advice from the British on how you handle it, psychologically, when you wake up a decade or so into a new century and realize that you just aren't the most important nation on Earth anymore.
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.
While what you say is largely true, suburbs that are about an hour by train can be quite inexpensive. And most companies buy a monthly pass for you. And where I live in Osaka, the rent is lower compared to the place I was renting back in India.
On topic, this is awesome news indeed. I currently pay 5500 Yen for a 100Mbps from K-Opt/eonet(http://eonet.jp). But too bad that I am living in the western part of Japan.
Maybe we need to not pass this bailout bill so our economy tanks, and then 10 years from now we'll all have 1Gbps Home Fiber connections just like Japan!
Their appetite for tentacle rape porn is insatiable. I expect we'll see another bandwidth increase in about 6 months. Honestly, how much tentacle rape porn can there be in the world?!?!
Americans are jealous, ha-ha! Your pathetic country is dying! Do you think we forgot Hiroshima and Nagasaki??? Keep thinking... Time of our revenge is about to come. The USA are going to pay for all the evil they did around the world...
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.
That proves that it *is* viable to have much better connectivity at an affordable price. Most of us around the world get ripped off by greedy telecom giants that instead of catching up with current tech, they invest on how to spy on us, sue us, or limit our already slow connections. Great! On the other hand, Tokyo is densely populated and has a lot better infrastructure than the average city, but still why don't we have access to equivalent services at large urban centers? Peter
how far does the 1Gbps go? in town only? in the local switch only?
No Fair!!
I wish I could get 1/10th of this at a decent price. Good for them though
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
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.
If the US hopes to stay competitive in the high tech sector we are really going to have to do something about broadband. Letting the companies run it the way they have has clearly slowed down the uptake and we can't let it happen any longer. Teleco monopolies are bad for America.
With the population density of japan, I figure they can get some good deals.
It's one thing to get a fiber hookup but it's another to get the bandwidth. Do you believe every little Nipponese boy and girl - all 150 million of the tykes - get 1G? Come this way, I've some prime real-estate for you down on the bayou.
You Sir apparently do not know the Japanese.
You cannot be too rich, too thin, or have too much bandwidth :-P
...than I get on my wired LAN.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
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.
Far from it, actually. Japan is the world leader in internet infrastructure.
See the recent study that quantified this into a "bandwidth quality score" for 42 countries. Japan's score was basically double everyone else. USA scored 16th, UK 24th.
And their population is only a little less than half of the United States, but being spread out over an area 25 times smaller is really what makes adoption a bit easier for them.
Shut the fuck up or we'll nuke you again. That non-nuclear policy is a bitch, isn't it?
This is silly! Right silly! Its merely 2986.42966360856269113149 times as fast as my recently upgraded adsl connection (it used to be roughly half as fast), for $40 per month. I'm not bitter. No, dammit! Not a bit! So just shuddup about your gigabit ethernet, ok? I am not being taken by my ISP! Sniff.
And you seem to be forgetting about Nanjing (Nanking).
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
What the sibling AC said. Central Tokyo is amazingly expensive, but while none of it is cheap, Tokyo is the size of Rhode Island, and a lot of it is affordable (else how would all those people live there?).
But, Most wireless routers can't handle 1gb/s. 802.11n can't handle more than 600mb/s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11n
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Fuck you Comcast. Fuck you AT&T.
Because of your greed and sloth, the US is laggard in online innovation and content delivery. Enjoy it while you can. We may have invented everything, but the Japanese are making it cooler, smaller, faster, cheaper, and more reliable than us. The snarling greed of US corporate enterprise has reared its ugly head for three decades. It has ruined our way of life and our safety and our nation. This really doesn't surprise me all that much. I pay the same price for 6Mbit of highly limited service over a line which can handle 16 times that. Imagine if they realized they could still make money by doing things for the benefit of everyone rather than the benefit of themselves.
They're using their grammar skills there.
My thoughts exactly.
I wish slashdot would finally hire some editors with a clue. It can't be so hard, can it?
Seriously, the way slashdot is headed I won't be surprised when it dies the death-by-fork, soon...
"Fortunately for Japan, the submarines carrying the materials were sunk en-route, as the retaliation for the attacks (especially the bio-warfare) would have been massive." You mean worse than having their cities relentlessly firebombed, then using the world's entire supply of U-238 and Plutonium to vaporize two cities?
Yes, It would have been worse.
If japan had used those to retake saipan and Guam, they probably would not have succeeded. Because while the land troops would have been mauled, the ships would have pummeled the japs who tried to retake them.
Plus, Truman would have probably dropped both of the Big Boys on Tokyo, ending their emperor's reign in a blinding flash of light one wonderful morning.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
The link (fiber) may be able to handle 1gbps, but users aren't going to get that much in reality. Why not? It's the routing. Call up your favorite router vendor, and ask what it would take to route 100 gigabits. Then consider that with the density of living in Japan, you could put one of those in every neighborhood, and still not be able to get even half of the people up to full gigabit speed.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
How is that any worse than the destruction of some german cities by allied bombers in WWII ?
You should really take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
and educate yourself some more about the destruction waged on germany during that time.
/me moves to Japan
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
hmm..I have 2mbs and I'm moving in 10-15 days to my new house, where I can only get 1mbs for now. I remember celebrating when I first upgraded to this new provider with 1.5mbs and then upgrading the speed to 2mbs. I won't be able to celebrate again when I think of japan users spending my country's bandwidth in a small area...
Please state price, speed (downstream and upstream) and country.
I pay $58/month for symetric 100Mbps in Sweden.
She made the willows dance
then why does the island of the UK have such slow broadband?
Some countries claim their size holds them back but the UK doesn't have that excuse. We're just getting screwed.
How can an article about bandwidth, posted on /., not include a reference to how many Libraries of Congress can be downloaded in a given amount of time???
The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money
Im on a 22mb/s (small b) and I havent seen a server yet that makes use of this bandwidth. The sad thing is most web services have a capped connection speed per IP/MAC address so you can have 2,000,000Gb/s and it wont make an difference.
Like the article said, this is to compete with NTT. This kind of bandwidth has been widely available for many months already.
only for uncompressed BluRay discs!!
umm...yeah, subject pretty much says it all. I'm done with Verizon, qualcomm (did they get bought out?) and all the other do nothing greedy (well who isn't, but American corporations are greedy AND stupid) tel-com companies. Well...I wanted to write sayonara in hiragana, but slashdot is slightly on the retarded side and kept %@$#ing changing it to html crap or something...uggg...anyway, sayonara.
Must be nice...I would love have that connection at home, then I can download all my favorite anime at a much higher speed.
If it's anything like my broadband connection here in the USA, it probably goes to the curb where it is converted into 1200bps bisync running on a Zilog 8530 (not the new fangled fancy 85230 with data FIFOs).
Unless your wife (who gets your entire paycheck) expects you to pay the internet fee out of your own pocket.
1gbps should be enough to copy a file using Window Vista. So long as it's not too big.
No sig today...
Well, there were more people killed in Hiroshima (140,000) and Nagasaki (80,000) than in Dresden (24,000 - 40,000).
If we did we would quit whining about what the telecoms offer us and let our power utility districts build us a real network.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Woohoo, better download speeds on Bittorrent.
And more were killed in the conventional firebombing of Tokyo.
Infuriate left and right
With all this newfangled technology penetrating Japanese homes, is there a demand for network engineers in Japan?
Possibly enough so that one who doesn't speak a word of Japanese could get hired?
I'd like to work somewhere where I can be valued for my technical abilities and not knowing the language is the ultimate cop-out to avoiding "being social" at work.
Do you think we forgot Hiroshima and Nagasaki??? Keep thinking... Time of our revenge is about to come. The USA are going to pay for all the evil they did around the world...
Oh yes, and surely the best way to exact revenge for these nuclear attacks is by getting faster internet!
It's great how Japanese users can get 1 Gbps links to surf their Mixi friends faster. Japan should probably beef up the computer education so that the people can take advantage of the links.
Comcast is just another corrupt American business that rips off our citizens and uses our government to legalize and enforce their never ending blood sucking existence.
Broadband is just that... and if you can not provide it... I hope your company dies a swift death so that another more serious business can move in and do the right thing.
It's cheaper than what I pay for 30mbps down/2mbps up here in Germany, which would be 39.90 EUR == ~58.28 USD.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
FWIW, I'm in the Seattle 'burbs and just got Verizon FIOS 20/20. The router claims that it's connected to the CO at 251mbps and the techs I talked to said the system and the fiber drops were capable of 1gbps. I got the impression they would have to install different switches though.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
that's not true.. I pay about $1400 US per month, and I live in central Tokyo... The people who think all of Japan is super expensive are the same people who always say it's super crowded, and clearly haven't been around here much. Anyway Japan had it's housing boom and bust a little while ago, so prices aren't terribly high right now. That's not to say it's cheap, but it's certainly comparable to NYC or other big cities.
Also, you're right the price of the 1GBps doesn't matter that much because it's new and wasn't available before at any price. But I have an NTT contract, so I'll have to "suffer" with 100mbps ;)
They won't be for long. The Colorado River is being overdrawn. Lake Powell as well as the other manmade lakes are drying up. Vegas is now looking to the north to take water from farmers. Things are even worse south of the state line. Cities in Arizona are running try and are making deals with farmers in southern California for water. The entire 8 state agreement splitting the Colorado River was stupid.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
On 100mbps ftth I typically get 30-50mbps throughput from domestic sites (microsoft update, freebsd .jp mirrors, etc.)
Going to gigabit wirespeeds isn't going to make a great deal of difference most likely. You're also contending with ability of the server to read from disks at that point.
Yeah, I kinda mentioned the firebombing.
I guess this is off topic, but I have to agree with you. I think that people think of Japan as crowded and expensive because they come here as tourists. They go to all the famous sites where people are jammed in like sardines. And they buy stuff at tourist places and get ripped off. Or eat steak at a restaurant.
I've been living here a year (admittedly in the inaka) and I spend *far* less than I did in Canada. Of course, you have to live like a Japanese person (buy the same food, wear the same clothes, enjoy the same entertainment, avoid traveling around, etc), but once you do prices become quite reasonable -- even in Tokyo.
Before I parted ways with Bell Canada I emailed them and asked why is it Japan has such great high speed infrastructure, and ours is so lousy. I think their response is quite telling of the attitudes over here in North America.
"Dear Valued Customer
We here at Bell would like to point out that despite their 1gbps connections, Japan still has monkeys that get inside peoples houses and cause all sorts of trouble. So really when you think about it, they need those high speed lines over there because most of the time they're fending off monkeys. Whereas here in North America we have no monkeys, and therefore 1.5mbps is more than an acceptable connection speed."
I have nothing compelling to say
The only "killer app" I can imagine that'll take bandwidth into the final generation before superfluous bandwidth is streamed high-resolution video (YouTubeHD, etc).
While it won't be used in the home I see a big use for high bandwidth connections, one which could very well save lives, is Telemedicine. Imagine a doctor in her office operating on a patient a 100 or a 1000 miles away via high speed broadband. Another example would be 5 businessmen on 5 different continents having a business meeting in virtual reality, VR. Despite the fact telecommunications was billed as negating the need to travel, it hasn't. Non verbal communications is just as important, more even, as verbal communications. With VR visual communications will be there.
As for other possibilities, they will come along too, probably unexpectedly. Afterall why would anyone ever need more than 64k RAM?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I see a lot of people saying this is dangerous for botnet kind of things. I agree.
Only let them have fast up if they're not using windows.
I'm glad to see that deregulating the telecom companies in the 90's has been successful in bringing Americans services far and above those received in countries where the government interferes in business (Japan, Korea, France, etc.).
We pay more for less, don't we? MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
It seems like the US is both blessed and cursed by the same short-term profit based thinking:
It is relatively easy to get competing providers for internet connectivity, but each of those providers would much rather squeeze the maximum amount of short-term profits out of their costumers rather than trying to deliver a great product with payback times measured in years.
Here in Norway we put up a cabin in the central mountains a couple of years ago (i.e. a _very_ sparsely populated area), but as soon as we ordered an electric power hookup, the local power company by default also pulled a fiber along.
At home in Oslo I have had ADSL for ~5 years, currently getting 7/1 Mbit/s down/up at a cost of around $60 (NOK is very strong vs $ these days), but now I've had two different fiber providers offering FTTH so in a week or two I'll get symmetrical 30 Mbit/s for the same cost as ADSL.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
This is not new.
NTT has been running gigabit fibre to houses for quite some time, as have the power companies.
I put gigabit fibre into my house two years ago when construction was completed. It's fast, but honestly in daily use I don't notice a huge difference from the 100Mb fibre I had at my last place.
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
Australia is also at a high stage of development where it is proposing the rollout of some internets that will be as fast as 12Mbps. Go aussie go!
Most people rent, and you can get fibre into your rented apartment.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So if you don't go anywhere and live like a college student you can save money? Wow. Who would have thought.
I read the internet for the articles.
If you're using bit torrent and connecting to a peer on the same ISP it does make a difference and there is flash based hard drive technology coming out that does much greater IO then normal hard drives.
at 1Gps they can start sending pokemon on their network as it takes an awful lot of bandwidth to take a critter and disassemble it and then transmit it across the internet and then re-assemble it.
In the past they had to rely on moving pokemon across the net using Peer to Peer bandwidth sharing which resulted in many of the mudkips to not be very liek-able as they came across all deformed and had to be sold for sushi.
Now they can do full speed pokemon streaming which mean more of the disgusting cute critters will be running around...
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I have the 100Mb FTTH from KDDI right now. I pulled down a 5GB binary last night in around 10 minutes, and it only took that long because of the time between connections resetting and requesting the next chunk of data, so my average bandwidth usage was probably around 80% of peak. If I had a 30GB cap and a 1Gb connection I would indeed have burned that up in a few minutes. I only recently 'invested' in a 1TB drive and an account with a good usenet server. It took a matter of hours before it was filled to current levels... ~700GB. I, for one, don't need a 1GB fiber connection. What I'd much rather have is the rest of the world upgrading. Downloading from English language websites, transferring family photos over skype etc, is a chore, just because anyone *outside* japan is so bandwidth throttled.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
No one will ever need more than one 1 Gbps fiber cable run to their home.