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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."

17 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Hope they start using bittorrent by ChienAndalu · · Score: 5, Funny

    I mean, they have to do *something* with the bandwidth

  2. Sweet! by commodoresloat · · Score: 4, Funny

    That makes it much more likely that Japanese slashdot users will get first post!

  3. Re:Brilliant! by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  4. If you can afford a single-family home in Tokyo... by bconway · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Chances are good the price you pay for your Internet access is largely irrelevant.

    --
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  5. Synchronous? by 680x0 · · Score: 4, Informative

    What the heck is synchronous about these connections? Don't you mean symmetric?

  6. Not hard technology; it's the politics by rbrander · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Not hard technology; it's the politics by OriginalArlen · · Score: 5, Funny

      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

      You become terribly bitter and unhappy, but you try really hard not to show it. Then you invent Monty Python.

      --

      Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
  7. The reason is obvious. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?!?!

  8. Doesn't really matter by TheLink · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Doesn't really matter by name*censored* · · Score: 4, Insightful

      We also have to wait for the internet to catch up too. YouTube is still showing video at ADSL1 bitrates, and most (good) websites are still mainly text-only (thank god).

      I predict that we're within "a generation" of superfluous bandwidth - that is, regular home connections will never even come close to completely saturated under reasonable use, because the content is simply not heavy enough. This is similar to what's happened with processing power (a P4 is more powerful than Joe User will ever need) and hard disk space (I've never heard of a non-nerd actually filling as much as 120GB). 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). After that, we'll probably start to see mobile internet become more and more prevalent, as we have seen with the miniaturisation of computers due to superfluous processing/storage. Of course, there'll always be us nerds who'll never be able to have enough, but we're in the minority so we'll probably stay glued to wires, as we have been glued to desktops in the land of the laptop (yes, I know most/all of us have laptops, but that's usually in addition to some kind of powerful desktop/high capacity homebrew server).

      Personally, I think that 1GB/s synchronous is probably well within the category of "superfluous bandwidth" - that's more than enough for streaming high resolution video.

      --
      Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
  9. Re:Synchronous? by dubl-u · · Score: 4, Funny

    No, it's really synchronous. That's how they can afford to do it cheaply. It works like this:

    Suppose you want to download a video. For every packet of the video you download, you need to upload one. Now naturally, you can't upload somebody else's copyrighted content. So you have to upload original video content that somebody else wants to watch.

    The main sponsors of the rollout are porn companies, because that's the only kind of marketable content most people can create. Some camwhores will probably do all right, too. And if you live in an interesting neighborhood, you can put up some webcams to meet the synchronous data requirement.

    Most people, though, won't be able to generate enough content, so they'll have to pay extra to get the synchronous requirement waved. It's sort of like how cellphone companies sell you a cheap plan, knowing they'll screw you on extras.

  10. Not in Japan by RawsonDR · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Not in Japan by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
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  11. Re:Brilliant! by adamstew · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. Re:Think of the Backbone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I work at tech support for one of swedens largest ISP:s (bredbandsbolaget). We're currently testing 1gbit-connections with a couple of hundred customers. I'm guessing we'll start selling to the general public within the next two years or so. ^^

  13. Re:Brilliant! by Tuoqui · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  14. Re:Brilliant! by Yokaze · · Score: 4, Informative

    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"