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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."
I mean, they have to do *something* with the bandwidth
That makes it much more likely that Japanese slashdot users will get first post!
You're right 640 Kbps should be enough for anybody! I'll get off your lawn now.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
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?
"synchronous" = symmetric?
What the heck is synchronous about these connections? Don't you mean symmetric?
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.
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?!?!
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
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.
Supposedly NHK will begin "broadcasting" streaming HDTV over the internet later this year or early next year. 1Gbps will allow this to happen without compressing the data into artifact hell.
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.
Actually you are off by a little bit. Bytes are measured in powers of 1024, while bits are not. Thus you need to adjust by a factor of 2^30/10^9.
Or 30 GB * (1 S/Gb) * (Gb/10^9 b) * (8 b / B) * (2^30 B / GB) = 4 minutes 18 seconds
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
Please state price, speed (downstream and upstream) and country.
I pay $58/month for symetric 100Mbps in Sweden.
She made the willows dance
Considering that blue-ray is 1080p, but limited to 54Mbps, I think one can safely assume, that 1Gbps is not entirely necessary for that kind of thing.
Super HiVision, on the other hand, would be a different matter.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
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.
Not Slashdot's fault. Mine. I've been putting in networks long enough (22 years) to know the difference.
Must be getting senile.
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
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
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 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.
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.