Verizon Speeds Up FiOS To 150Mbps

wiredmikey writes with a snippet from MacWorld offering some welcome news for Americans sick of 20th-century broadband speeds "Verizon is adding a new tier of service to its FiOS fiber broadband service, offering 150Mbps (megabits per second) downstream and 35Mbps upstream for $195 per month. The carrier has begun to roll out the service to consumers in the 12 US states, plus the District of Columbia, where FiOS is available. Small businesses will be able to get it by the end of the year, Verizon said on Monday. The fastest service offered so far on FiOS has been 50Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream."

Comments

Nice, now why

[zoomshorts]

are we not meeting or exceeding all other countries in this?

Re:Nice, now why

[mrsteveman1]

Look at the price. The ISPs continue to believe they deserve hundreds of dollars for connections like this even in a major city where population density is extremely high.

Re:Nice, now why

[Zak3056]

I honestly can't believe that people bitch about paying $200 a month for speed comparable to an OC3 ($20k/month).

Re:Nice, now why

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Because in most other advanced countries, those speeds would run you a quarter that price or less.

Re:Nice, now why

[donnyspi]

With a connection like that it's about latency, not just pure speed. Also you usually get an SLA. Not so with residential FiOS.

Re:Nice, now why

[coryking]

Because people who buy an OC3 are actually using the capacity of their link. The end user—us Joe Shmoe's in our apartments, we barely use it at all. But when we do use it (say to watch an HD Netflix movie) we want it delivered fast.

So really, per gig used, $200 is very, very, very expensive if you pull down a dozen gigs a month (which is probably within reason for a netflix user)

Re:Nice, now why

[splutty]

OC3 is unlimited, guaranteed, bidirectional 155Mb/s...

FIOS is... Well... Not.

Re:Nice, now why

[Shakrai]

But when we do use it (say to watch an HD Netflix movie) we want it delivered fast.

You don't need a 150mbit/s connection to watch Netflix in HD. I watch it just fine on my 10mbit/s cable connection. The HD streams from Netflix run around 5-6mbit/s in my experience.

I can't think of any reason that someone would need this much bandwidth at home, other than geek bragging rights or a heavy porn/bittorrent fetish. Perhaps one day there will be a killer app that needs this much bandwidth but as it stands right now I'm not sure why anybody would pay for it. Must be nice to have that kind of disposable income lying around.

Re:Nice, now why

[Anonymous Coward]

Other countries that have connections like this for a cheap price also have a quarter of the land area and require a quarter of the infrastructure to support it due to it being available in higher density areas.

Re:Nice, now why

[coryking]

Now you are trolling. I'll pull this out of my ass but most of us are lucky to get above 3mbit. Here in Seattle, I can't get more though DSL.

If you can't see why people would want to burst to 150mbit and beyond, you have a serious lack of imagination. Here, I will use mine with tangible things i could do better if I could burst above 150mbit:

1) better VPN into work. It would be quicker to check the source code repository out.
2) faster online backup, and more important, backups that down slow down the Internet for everything else.
3) Uploading stuff to client FTP sites would be orders of magnitude faster.
4) software distribution would be faster thus people would do it more.

Nobody will be saturating their Internet, but the fact that everybody will be able to burst to speeds approximating that of a LAN will open many new doors and enable things that were not feasable before. I don't understand what is so hard to imagine about that.

Re:Nice, now why

[mrsteveman1]

Which I already addressed in my first comment.

Why don't high density American cities have cheap superfast connections?

Re:Nice, now why

[mrsteveman1]

I honestly can't believe that people bitch about paying $200 a month for speed comparable to an OC3 ($20k/month).

I honestly can't believe it's not butter.

Re:Nice, now why

[AmberBlackCat]

Probably because with that $20 thousand dollar connection, you actually get the speed. But with the home internet services, you get a burst of speed and then you get slowed down or cut off altogether. You're getting charged hundreds of dollars for a connection that flakes out.

Re:Nice, now why

[TrentTheThief]

Because people who buy an OC3 are actually using the capacity of their link. The end user—us Joe Shmoe's in our apartments, we barely use it at all. But when we do use it (say to watch an HD Netflix movie) we want it delivered fast.

So really, per gig used, $200 is very, very, very expensive if you pull down a dozen gigs a month (which is probably within reason for a netflix user)

I've got a 25/25 FiOS line ($104 minus a $25 package rate * 24 mo.) with a static ip and could easily use the whole thing. I have to throttle my server to keep it down to 15 up.

Before I throttled the server, I was seeing long-term averages of 35M and bursts to 85M. I've only had a couple users notice the throttling, so for the most part I'm thrilled with my FiOS.

I'm not a verizon fanboy, but man, this is a damned nice line.

Also, for netflix viewing you need 2.5M to have a nice HD picture. You'll find that the issue is not Verizon's speed, but that of the junk on Netflix's end. Netflix currently doesn't have the capacity to serve the number of subscribers using instant view. Especially now, with the growing number of net-enabled TVs, set top boxes, and blu-ray players it's you'll get freezes and grainy/jumpy pictures during peak hours. They plan to move to provider that'll be able to give them more throughput in the near future. I hope it's damned soon.

Re:Nice, now why

[Lumpy]

I honestly cant believe that people bitch about paying $200.00 a month for PROMISED speeds comparable to an OC3, with throttling and bandwidth caps as well as a raft full of conditions that are NOT on a OC3.

There, I fixed that for you.

Honestly, it's a marketing gimmick. An OC3 is a specified bandwidth I can saturate 24/7/365/1000 That OC3 has 150meg UP and DOWN. No bandwidth caps, no ports blocked, no throttling, etc.....

Plus, if you think that slashdot will load faster on 150M compared to even a 768K entry DSL, then you need an education about the internet. 99% of where I surf and bandwidth I use, this includes Netflix HD streaming movies, uses less than 3mbit.. I upgraded to 7.5Mbit and saw NO difference on anything but bittorrent downloads. Most of the internet is slow as hell, a faster pipe to you will not make anything faster, it just makes it so you can do 10 things at a time at the same speeds.

Problem is, those that can afford this tier typically do not use it at all.

Re:Nice, now why

[filthpickle]

I admit...It would only be geek bragging rights for me. I couldn't justify $200 a month, but if I had a roommate/neighbor willing to split it with me I'd think about it. Yes, disposable income is awesome.

I can get 720p HD movies off newsgroups in around 25-35 minutes on my 20mbit (goes up to 25 at times) connection. Sweet Jeebus how fast would they go if it was anywhere near 150.But that's blatantly just for bragging rights. As it stands it doesn't bother me to fire up newsleecher before I go to work and have it all by the time I get home. Of course, that is a completely illegitimate reason

Re:Nice, now why

[Shakrai]

Now you are trolling

Disagreeing with you != trolling

I'll pull this out of my ass but most of us are lucky to get above 3mbit.

You are pulling that out of your ass. Most cable providers would laugh at that speed. Granted, not everyone can get cable, but MOST people can. Around these parts the only people who are limited to DSL are those out in the rural sticks and they are frankly happy to have access to that comparatively slow DSL because it beats dial-up and satellite.

Here in Seattle, I can't get more though DSL.

Switch to cable then. A properly designed DOCSIS network is always going to be able to provide more bandwidth than DSL, unless you are lucky enough to live across the street from the DSLAM.

better VPN into work. It would be quicker to check the source code repository out.

If you need a 150mbit/s VPN then your employer should be paying for your connection.

The rest of your points are actually valid, but still not worth $200/mo, at least IMHO. If you want to blow that much money on an internet connection be my guest but I'm not seeing the value there. To each their own I suppose :)

Re:Nice, now why

[Lumpy]

Netflix HD works great on a 3Mbit DSL connection.

Re:Nice, now why

[YrWrstNtmr]

Why don't high density American cities have cheap superfast connections?

Because the same company, Verizon in this case, also has to service the non-high density parts. Yes, they have different pricing for different areas. But the probably can't/don't want to price it too differently.

Re:Nice, now why

[Bengie]

Quick search for OC3 will return ISPs that charge $10k-20k per month plus data fees which are per GB.

I'm not sure "unlimited" fits.

Re:Nice, now why

[elsJake]

>> Because in most other advanced countries

And a few not so advanced countries. Actually , "not so advanced" would be taking it lightly.
Romania is still under recession , has some of the worst possible education and healthcare systems and the entire economical sphere is built on derailed socialist values (ie: prices increase on holiday instead of decreasing due to more sales , natural gas and petrol have some of the highest prices in the EU , basically everybody thinks ripping everybody off will actually benefit them)
Yet still we have one of THE BEST wan networks around , almost all cities are covered with FTTB , 100mbps for everybody @ 20$/month.
What's your excuse now USA ?

Re:Nice, now why

[Zak3056]

Honestly, it's a marketing gimmick. An OC3 is a specified bandwidth I can saturate 24/7/365/1000 That OC3 has 150meg UP and DOWN. No bandwidth caps, no ports blocked, no throttling, etc....

This is a true statement, but when you read slashdot posts, this is what people expect out of a residential internet connection, even though this expectation just isn't realistic. "zOMG, Comcast is throttling teh bittorrentz!!!!11one" is a common refrain, and we hear about how over subscription is immoral, should be illegal, etc.

Take away these limitations, though, and you're left with the idea that people want the performance and class of service of an enterprise grade circuit, and want to pay peanuts for it. I stand by my statement above: I cannot understand why people find this "expensive."

Re:Nice, now why

[SanityInAnarchy]

Even here, there are better deals. I'm in a small town in Iowa where $70/mo gets you 100 mbit up and down.

Re:Nice, now why

[Ecuador]

Ehmm... Verizon had been offering the amazing top speed of 3mbit to our company for $80/month in the middle of Manhattan until recently (we relocated, so I don't know if they managed to get Fios over). For years it was the fastest we could buy at any price (5Mbit/384 cable alternative was actually slower, T1 was much more expensive for slower download). Then, 1-2 years ago, I see Speakeasy is offering "up to 12Mbit" adsl2+ in our area. I call them up and they would not guarantee speeds of course (they said we were at an average distance and it would depend on our building since we were on a high rise) and wanted $160/month (note I asked for residential rate, but it included static IP - they offered no dynamic) for the CHANCE to get something faster than 3mbit (potentially, if the stars align apparently, up to 12).
So IF you can get 150Mbps at $195 it sounds to me like an amazing deal for the US - those who need it will gladly pay.
Now if you compare to other countries it might feel steep, but again for the US you should not complain.

Re:Nice, now why

[c6gunner]

Right. Overcharge one area so you can make another cheaper. Damn socialists. ;)

Re:Nice, now why

[WARM3CH]

True. Also consider that there could be multiple users at home so they might need to do several of those things at the same time.

Re:Nice, now why

[c6gunner]

What's your excuse now USA ?

You have three times the population density that they do?

Here in Canada our service is far worse than in the US, and the population density is even lower. Meanwhile Japan, with the highest population density, has the best service. Now, I'm no statistician, but I'm sensing a trend here.

Re:Nice, now why

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe people should bitch about $20k/month for OC3.

Re:Nice, now why

[noewun]

Because the same company, Verizon in this case, also has to service the non-high density parts. Yes, they have different pricing for different areas. But the probably can't/don't want to price it too differently.

85% of the American population lives in, or near, a densely populated urban area. Over 21 million people live within short driving distance of New York City. 17 million live in and around Los Angeles, 10.8 million around Chicago. . . and you get the idea. Most Americans live in population density very similar to what we see as Europe's 'high density', more than enough to pay for the relatively few who don't.

There is only one reason why US broadband sucks: we have telecom monopolies which are federally-mandated through lack of oversight. I live in NYC, surrounded by the equivalent of one quarter of the entire UK population, and have, essentially, two options for broadband. I can either get Time Warner's offerings, or the offerings of a provider who pays Time Warner to use their lines, or I can have Verizon's offerings, or use a provider who leases Verizon's lines. That's it: two, in a place with an average of 27,000 people per square mile. And if I want a blazing 3 Mbps, I'd better be willing to dole out $50/month.

It's not about the tech, it's not about the density. It's about unregulated corporate greed. If you don't believe me, look at the outcry over even the idea of net neutrality.

Re:Nice, now why

[Moryath]

No, the real reason is that in most of these areas, the company - verizon, comcast, cox, etc - is a FUCKING MONOPOLY. In 90% of the US, you have your choice of either one ISP, or dialup, and that's it. In major metro areas, you might have a competition between the DSL guys and the local cable TV monopoly, but that's a fucking joke in itself since they all have side collusion agreements not to let their prices get too far apart.

No competition = no reason for prices to come down.

If the Democrats really cared about broadband penetration like they were lying about, they'd have crafted equal-access laws to force other carriers to be able to get into the market like they did for local and long-distance phone carriers ages ago. The fact that they haven't shows you just how much hot air they spew whenever they talk about it.

Re:Nice, now why

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll pull this out of my ass but most of us are lucky to get above 3mbit.

You are pulling that out of your ass. Most cable providers would laugh at that speed.

Mine sure would. They have no plans to ever offer speeds that high.

Re:Nice, now why

[EvilBudMan]

We pay $100 a month for 100meg down an 10 up. It's a fiber connection.

Re:Nice, now why

[bored]

Uh, hu... and why do you have a really fast CPU that sits idle or throttled back 99% of the time?

Maybe its because when you want to use something you don't want to wait for it. Instead of waiting 10 seconds to open firefox it opens in 2 seconds, instead of it taking 30 minutes to get the latest openSuse you get it in 1 minute..

Re:Nice, now why

[Cylix]

Let's be honest...

DSL and Dial-Up are barely competitors to low latency broadband.

I've had to join a support group just to get through the days of using Qwest DSL.

Re:Nice, now why

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Democrats really cared about broadband penetration like they were lying about, they'd have crafted equal-access laws to force other carriers to be able to get into the market like they did for local and long-distance phone carriers ages ago.

If the Democrats really cared about improving the broadband situation, they'd have grown a sack, told people flat out that Socialism makes sense in a certain situations and that last-mile infrastructure is one of them. Then they'd have crafted some sort of program that enables local municipalities to install publicly-owned FTTH which broadband companies can all use to deliver broadband.

The fact that any one company can own infrastructure that precludes other companies owning the same type of infrastructure should be the first clue that privately-owned infrastructure will inhibit the free-market Capitalism that's so important to so many people. If a small amount of Socialism can actually increase competition, shouldn't we be in favor of that?

Once all companies have the ability to sell service using the publicly-owned last-mile infrastructure, we'll see real competition in the broadband market. Things like network neutrality legislation will be completely unnecessary since consumers can avoid non-neutral networks if that's an important consideration for them. Once there's true choice, I think non-neutral networks make a whole lot of sense. You could have a provider that's targeted specifically at non-technical home users. Web and email would be lightning fast, BitTorrent downloads could be given the lowest priority and the ISP could have direct peering agreements with Netflix-like services to allow extremely-high quality video without saturating the upstream bandwidth. It's not a service that many Slashdot readers would choose personally, but I would gladly choose that service for my parents.

Re:Nice, now why

[careysub]

If the Democrats really cared about improving the broadband situation, they'd have grown a sack, told people flat out that Socialism makes sense in a certain situations and that last-mile infrastructure is one of them.

Right! Unregulated big business naturally tends to monopolies and cartels where competition is extinguished. This happened in the Nineteenth Century Gilded Age, and just over 100 years later here we are The New Gilded Age awash with its new robber barons.

Re:Nice, now why

[CRCulver]

Inded, I was about to bring up Romania. As far back as 2007 people in Cluj were enjoying higher speeds and lower prices than what residents of high-population density locations could dream of. I get 300 Mbps for only about $15/month, and my connection isn't throttled to hell like any of the American ISPs I had the misfortune of dealing with.

Re:Nice, now why

[Ihmhi]

The parent post is most certainly not Flamebait. This does happen and has been documented many times.

FCC analysis shows that average (mean) actual speed consumers received was approximately 4 Mbps, while the median actual speed was roughly 3 Mbps in 2009. Therefore actual download speeds experienced by U.S. consumers lag advertised speeds by roughly 50%.

Source (Warning: PDF): http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db0813/DOC-300902A1.pdf

Re:Nice, now why

[Troed]

Sweden, at place #194 in this list - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_population_density - is a place where one (like I did yesterday) can sign up for 100/100MBit for $25/month or so.

In my other apartment (yes .. ) I have 10/10 "for free" included in the rent.

Actually I wasn't sure about signing up for the fixed connection at all, since my mobile broadband already gives me around 10/4 (real life numbers) - also at $25/month.

Re:Nice, now why

[nabsltd]

Netflix HD works great on a 3Mbit DSL connection.

That would be because it's not very good HD.

I recently encoded some 720p24 material, and although the average bitrate was only around 3.6Mbps, there were peaks as high as 50Mbps, some for as long as 5 seconds. Note that this doesn't include the audio, which was 1.5Mbps by itself, but that's not a problem for Netflix, as I don't think their streams have more than 2 audio channels.

Re:Nice, now why

[nabsltd]

If you compare apples to apples (i.e., business FiOS to an OC3), then you're wrong.

Business FiOS is guaranteed speed (both directions), with an SLA. Now, like every other ISP, they'll only guarantee the speed to the edge of their network. Once off their network, they obviously don't have any responsibility.

In my personal experience, though, the limit that Verizon claims as your fastest possible speed for your FiOS line is lower than the actual peak speed you will see.

Re:Nice, now why

[c6gunner]

Sure. And Rwanda, at #29 in the list, has dialup. Obviously population density isn't the only factor - it's just an important one.

Re:Nice, now why

[nabsltd]

I honestly cant believe that people bitch about paying $200.00 a month for PROMISED speeds comparable to an OC3, with throttling and bandwidth caps as well as a raft full of conditions that are NOT on a OC3.

I see this sorts of statements a lot, but this comes from people who haven't ever used FiOS.

The only problem that FiOS with a dynamic IP has is port blocking. This problem goes away if you have a static IP. Otherwise, both have full speed available 24/7, with no throttling or bandwidth caps. I do agree that this 150/35 service won't give you 150Mbps upstream, but, then, it doesn't claim to.

I don't keep my FiOS saturated 24/7 because I want to leave room for everyday use. I do average about 50% utilization of my 25/15 line over the past year, with peaks over 100%.

Re:Nice, now why

[Stiletto]

The "higher density" argument is totally bogus, but it keeps getting trotted out over and over.

If that were a valid argument, we'd have companies offering 1GB/s service for $30, but limiting their offer to the large metro areas. They don't, not because it is technically impossible, but because they don't have to. The market is artificially controlled to let a few companies extract a lot of money for little service. Why offer 1GB/s for $30 when you can offer 8MB/s for $30 and get away with it?

The lack of broadband in the USA is not about land area or population density or cost. It's about greed and a total lack of competition.

I live in Silicon Valley, supposedly the heart of high-tech in the USA, and I pay a small fortune for a couple of MB/s. It's outrageous.

Re:Nice, now why

[YrWrstNtmr]

There is only one reason why US broadband sucks: we have telecom monopolies which are federally-mandated through lack of oversight.

Agreed. But TimeWarner and Verizon laid the cables. And others are leasing from them. Unless you want every tom, dick, and harry stringing yet another set of redundant lines (I know I don't) either we lease from the 2 or 3 physical owners, or there is an endless line of road and yard digging up. And rewiring NYC is a nontrivial matter.

And if I want a blazing 3 Mbps, I'd better be willing to dole out $50/month.

And I can get 35/35 FiOS for $69, here in JerkWater Virginia. Currently, I have 9/2 via Cox for ~$50, but switching over after the first of the year.

Re:Nice, now why

[NeutronCowboy]

And merely stating that you're not trolling doesn't make it so. My only cable option is Comcast, and I'm boycotting them due to their shoddy service. And DSL is actually throttled to 100kbits/sec due to excessive line noise. Where do I live? In the heart of silicon valley. And this is a pretty common situation.

So yes, you're trolling.

Re:Nice, now why

[Anonymous Coward]

Great...so since the greater New York City metropolitan area has about 600,000 more people than entire country of Romania and everyone is packed into a much smaller area, people should be able to get at least 100mbps for $20/mo, right?

So why are new yorkers paying 3-4 times that for 30 times less bandwidth? As someone said above, because they will pay that much and there's no competition to offer a better deal.

Re:Nice, now why

[Anonymous Coward]

If you build it, they will come.

Re:Nice, now why

[hawguy]

I wonder the same thing. Not only does my San Francisco not have "cheap superfast" connections, it has no "superfast" connections. I can get12mbit cable internet from Comcast or 1.5Mbit (not even 3Mbit) DSL from AT&T - there are no other options.

Even though I'm in a residential district of SF, it's not exactly a low-density suburban neighborhood. On my block alone there are 60 - 80 families within 400 feet -- surely that's enough density to provide other options? That density continues for a mile to the east, west, north and south.

In general, I don't like communities running their own utilities, but maybe municipal fiber to the home is the only way to get some real competition and some real first class broadband speeds. Though to be fair, I heard that it's NIMBY's that are delaying AT&T's U-verse rollout -- no one wants the U-Verse telcom cabinets on their street corner.

Re:Nice, now why

[NeutronCowboy]

Err, that should be 100 kbytes, not kbits.

Re:Nice, now why

[Anonymous Coward]

I love my 100 Mbps (synchronous) socialized high-speed fiber!

Re:Nice, now why

[GreggBz]

Price out dedicated bandwith in a big city sometime. There's plenty of competition and the best you can do in a big city is 2-8 dollars a Mb.

Re:Nice, now why

[Lanteran]

I'd say that's because our non-coastal population tends to be far more spread out than other nations'.

Re:Nice, now why

[Anonymous Coward]

Our population density here in Australia is a lot lower than either Canada or the USA and we have better internet than you do.

Wait, am I doing it right?

Re:Nice, now why

[adolf]

Which, you know, mentions nothing about quality. Different encoders, different settings, different [etc]...

Bitrate isn't everything. I've got one or two high-bitrate 1080p Blu-Ray movies that look like shit.

The real question would be: Given your 3.6Mbps video, and the same video encoded by Netflix, which one looks better?

I'm a picky bastard (much to the annoyance of the entire family) when it comes to encoding artifacts, but I'm increasingly pleased with the overall quality of Netflix's streams, which seem to improve as time wears on.

Re:Nice, now why

[nabsltd]

Which, you know, mentions nothing about quality. Different encoders, different settings, different [etc]...

All of which make no difference to the actual point, which is that some material is extremely hard to accurately compress to a low bitrate using any DCT-based, motion-estimating compression. And, it's trivially easy to find source material that fits this profile.

It's also quite unlikely that anyone at Netflix is optimizing encodes any better than what has been tweaked by thousands of video rippers out there. In particular, H.264 has literally millions of combinations of settings, but not every decoder implementation can support every combination, and the embedded ones (like those used in the boxes that stream Netflix) are some of the most limited.

I've got one or two high-bitrate 1080p Blu-Ray movies that look like shit.

If these truly contain encoding issues and not source material issues (there's nothing an encoder can do about a source with poor colors, overly edge-enhanced, etc.), I suspect that if you run them through a bitrate profiler you'll find that despite having a high average bitrate, they don't have the peaks that they need for the tougher scenes.

The real question would be: Given your 3.6Mbps video, and the same video encoded by Netflix, which one looks better?

I can pretty much guarantee that any 720p24 source that is encoded with a limitation for smooth streaming without a large buffer (i.e., no severe bitrate peaks) will look far worse on fast motion than my unconstrained profile encodes.

If you haven't done a lot of encoding of a wide variety of source material, you owe it to yourself to try, and see just what you can do in comparison to what Netflix streams. I think you'll be complaining a lot more about Netflix after that sort of experiment.

Re:Nice, now why

[evilviper]

Probably because with that $20 thousand dollar connection, you actually get the speed. But with the home internet services, you get a burst of speed and then you get slowed down or cut off altogether.

I have over a decade of experience with both leased lines and "business" broadband, and I can safely say, you're paying a hell of a premium for those extra "9"s. "Business" broadband will have more downtime, but still only an hour a month or so, maybe more on occasion.

Yeah, I know... If you're running e-Commerce sites, and the like, the added cost of the leased line is overshadowed by the potential losses if the line goes down at peak hours. However, pretty much anything short of that, and I'd strongly recomend "business" class broadband. If necessary, from two different providers in a fail-over configuration.

Re:Nice, now why

[AigariusDebian]

You just need government regulation that forces anyone that has a cable laid to your house to lease full access to that cable to any company that you hire for a low fixed cost that is barely above the maintenance cost for that cable.

But, naturally, republicans would block all such 'government takeovers of the Internet' and 60% of the sheeple will follow them.

Re:Nice, now why

[Anonymous Coward]

FiOS probably has more usage restrictions than an OC3 line.

Re:Nice, now why

[metamatic]

I can't think of any reason that someone would need this much bandwidth at home, other than geek bragging rights or a heavy porn/bittorrent fetish.

Home office. My cable connection starts to get a bit painful when I need to move 4GB of database around.

Re:Nice, now why

[Shakrai]

Don't expect any sympathy from me when you willingly decide to go with a slower service and then complain about said service.

Re:Nice, now why

[willzzz]

If you're in Manhattan and willing to pay up to $200-$800/month (enterprise class with SLA) you can get dedicated IP-transit of 1Gbps+. This is NOT consumer/small business internet. This is 100% dedicated bandwidth. If it's a High-rise most-likely VZ/Cogentco/XO and a few other Tier-1 and upstream providers probably already have GigE/OC-X fiber termination router in the basement and it doesn't cost them much to hook it up. There are a few carrier hotels with Internet exchanges there (Equinix, 111 8th street, a few others, I frogot.) If this is for a business. Check with your high-rise mgmt. and see what carriers have fiber in the basement. Every single high-rise these days has a fiber-termination gear of GigE/10GigE/OC-X in Manhattan due to business needs of certain firms in certain buildings.

Re:Nice, now why

[willzzz]

FiOS is not enterprise level, it is small business level though the shared PON infrastructure has a shit-load of b/w.

Re:Nice, now why

[willzzz]

Yup. Be a business, get a enterprise grade router doing BGP and just buy IP-transit. It's $2-8/Mb. Buy all the bandwidth you want. This is dedicated bandwidth. I've see $895/month Global Crossing Tier 1 bandwidth for a full GigE (1Gbps) port in a co-location/data-center recently.

Re:Nice, now why

[willzzz]

Shared or dedicated? Who are the IP-transit providers?

Re:Nice, now why

[willzzz]

They have super-fast connections. It's just ISPs taking profits. Dedicated IP-transit ports of GigE or higher in major US metros are now as low as $895/month for 1Gbps. This is of course in the data-center. You have to find your own way to your location. :-)

Re:Nice, now why

[willzzz]

People don't understand what we in the industry called dedicated versus shared internet. Dedicated 1Gbps circuits are now going for as low as $895/month or $2-8/Mb in most US metros from Tier-1 carriers now. That just gets you the network bandwidth and port. There is also build-out or getting your business on-to a dedicated fiber ring in the DC (data-center) from the co-location/data-center.

Re:Nice, now why

[Lumpy]

It's because 95% of the USA cant have FiOS. I would pay for it, they tell me that I suck and they have no plans of rolling out around here. I'm in a tiny city of only 230,000 people. so small towns like this have to miss out.

Re:Nice, now why

[EvilBudMan]

dedicated

sunset

Re:Nice, now why

[adolf]

This is quite late.

It's also quite unlikely that anyone at Netflix is optimizing encodes any better than what has been tweaked by thousands of video rippers out there. In particular, H.264 has literally millions of combinations of settings, but not every decoder implementation can support every combination, and the embedded ones (like those used in the boxes that stream Netflix) are some of the most limited.

You suggest that the thousands (really? thousands? hundreds sounds more likely) of folks doing this stuff are doing a better job, for free, than the paid folks at Netflix who do the same thing.

Which may, or may not be, true.

It takes real people comparing like-to-like source material to make a critical differentiation as to which is actually better. I'm not aware of anyone currently doing so on any diagnostically-useful level.

I, however, am willing to try. I shall take your advice, and do some encoding, and compare the results.

Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

I'll probably be waiting a long time. It's only been three years since they upgraded my phone lines to handle DSL. It'll probably be a long time 'til they upgrade them to fiber.

I think Congress could help too. Simple mandate, through the FCC, that phone companies MUST provide DSL (or cable or fiber) to any customer that requests DSL. And then give them a one-year-limit to do the upgrade. No person should have to be stuck on 50k internet.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[hedwards]

Because that's not realistic. They have been dragging their feet, but giving them only a year to upgrade that much line and not just in urban areas is asking a bit much. A better solution would be to require telecoms to invest in their infrastructure and not raise their rates unless they can demonstrate that they're needing the extra money to pay for actually expenses. That's worked in other industries which were essentially utilities.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[zach_the_lizard]

If I choose to live in the middle of nowhere, Alaska, does it apply to me? Why should they pay for my choice to live in the boonies? It's just promoting more sprawl.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Monkeedude1212]

It is kind of annoying how these things work.

I moved into a new place just at the end of August here. I was with Telus for my internet service before - and my room mate works at Shaw, the other big ISP in our city, and he was always going on about how it was so much better and faster and he never had lag playing Halo and what not. So I called them up. Got to the machine, navigated to wanting a new setup, please hold for an agent. On hold for 20 minutes, hang up.

The next day at work, I decide to try again, except this time I called Telus at the same time, to see who could get me to a human being capable of processing my request faster. I got to Telus within a few minutes, still on hold with Shaw, which was on my desk phone so I just put them on speaker phone so I could hear if someone picked up while listening to hold music while chatting with Telus.

About half way through my Telus call the Shaw service says that they are experiencing higher than normal call volume and if I want, I can opt to put my number in a que and they'll try calling me back later. Sounds good! Did that. They called me back Three weeks ago. That was two months my number was in wait without getting a response. Anyways, enough about Shaw.

So in researching both companies I decided that the Optik TV and internet service was a good bundle for its price. So I say thats what I want. They say its not available in my area. I ask why not, don't get a straight answer. I get the next best thing. Anyways - so I go online, there's the "Check Availability" for Optik TV button, must have missed it before. So I go to try it out. It asks me to enter my address. I do. It says, "Choose the correct street" where it populates a bunch of choices for street names similar to the one I entered. Puts it in the format they like, so I choose my street. I click continue, it asks me again. No matter how many times I try selecting any house on my street it won't go to the next page and tell me the availability, it won't accept the street name.

Frustrating.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's the KEY with dsl.

You don't need to upgrade the lines (it's just POTS twisted pair). All you need to do is install the DSLAM at or near the central office, and that can be done before lunchtime. Phone companies could easily upgrade a customer from Dialup to DSL on demand & within one year's time of the request.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[jimbolauski]

I'll probably be waiting a long time. It's only been three years since they upgraded my phone lines to handle DSL. It'll probably be a long time 'til they upgrade them to fiber.

I think Congress could help too. Simple mandate, through the FCC, that phone companies MUST provide DSL (or cable or fiber) to any customer that requests DSL. And then give them a one-year-limit to do the upgrade. No person should have to be stuck on 50k internet.

If you want DSL or fiber how about you pay for the lines to be run I'm sure no company would object to that. The problem with people in the boonies is that the cost to run the line will not be recouped, think initial cost and maintenance, pricing it to cover the cost would be too expensive for most people, the only way everyone could get DSL is if the price were subsidized, I'm overcharged enough with out having to pay for someone else's service.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[rjstanford]

Yes, but they've been charging government mandated fees (totaling in the billions, literally) to deliver on that promise. We've already paid them for it, as an involuntary tax on services provided. So they should indeed deliver to you. They work around it be defining "broadband" as some tiny number like anything over 33kbps (don't recall exactly, anyone can google for the details).

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[nschubach]

In one thread people talk about congested spots for terrorist attacks, and in another... a petition to prevent people from spreading out.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[TheRaven64]

In theory, yes. If the customer is close to the exchange. If they're not, then the DSLAM needs to go in a cabinet on a roadside somewhere. Often these are not large enough, so the cabinet needs replacing with a larger one. This needs planning permission, and because they look ugly locals have a habit of objecting... and then complaining that their Internet is slow.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised how much they object.

When I signed up for DSL (nearly a decade ago!), I was informed that my location was just at the edge of being serviceable (12000 line feet was the limit at the time), and that they would have to determine whether I was actually within the proper distance or if I was just outside of it. If I was outside of it, I would have to pay for "line conditioning" to get DSL. That bill would've been around $2500. Fortunately, I was just inside the service area (11800 line feet) and they removed an unterminated segment and got things working for me.

But just out of curiosity, I asked if they would put new lines down to a location that was capable of being within the limit, but because of current line routing was not. They said that they wouldn't do that, not even if the tenant offered to pay for it. It had something to do with the scheduling of current build-out projects. They couldn't meet a reasonable deadline on a custom project, so they just wouldn't take it.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Tanktalus]

Telus still calls me regularly to try to get me to switch. I tell them I want speeds in excess of what I get with Shaw for a comparable price to get me to think about it. (Same speed for same price is not worth the hassle of switching everything over, of course.) They can't do it. DSL is too slow given that I work from home and need something approaching peppy speeds when VPN'd to work (across the country, not just somewhere else in the greater metropolitan area). Without being slowed down significantly by my daughter using another machine in the house to play flash games off PBS Kids' web site or whatever.

When I moved here, the cable wasn't hooked up. Shaw came out within the week, draped a cable over the street, attached it to my roof, hung it down to the box where it entered the premises. Next spring, they came out with the proper machinery to dig a proper cable through the right-of-way, under the driveway, up the front yard, and into the house. They then took down the draped cable. I had about a five-minute downtime for my internet connection. They even told me ahead of time it was coming in, and to expect that downtime.

Telus was, meanwhile, gouging me for POTS. When Shaw rolled out its phone service, I switched. Telus got REALLY peeved at that point, and was calling me every month or two for a while trying to get me to come back. I think they've finally clued in somewhat, because I only get the call every 6-10 months now.

Over the summer, I put our cable "on hold" since there was nothing to watch anyway. About all that seemed to do was disable our PVR's guide functionality. All the channels still worked. Then I reinstated it in late September, they came out and removed a filter, and everything was back to normal. I still had all the options at their original prices ("HD Plus" is now more expensive than when I signed up for it, but I still have the original rate) because when I put it on pause, the sales critter made sure to leave it there, and gave me a credit for the summer so I wasn't actually paying for it even though it was still on the bill, allowing me to grandfather it back in.

Shaw's tech support is largely useless if you're not running Windows, but they also largely seem to stay out of the way. Largely, I'm not complaining.

And I've made many calls to Shaw over the years, both waiting for someone to get on the line as well as getting the call back. I've never had to wait to the next day for a callback. Either someone there doesn't like you or you had really bad luck, in my experience.

-- a satisfied though not ecstatic Shaw customer, at 15Mbps down/1Mbps up.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

>>>the DSLAM needs to go in a cabinet on a roadside somewhere

And you don't think if I lived in Cow Corner Iowa, and requested a phone to DSL upgrade, my local company could get the DSLAM Cabinet installed within a year's time??? I think they could. And no you don't really need planning permission out in the middle-of-nowhere (no planning boards) and/or if the cabinet is attached to the phone company's pole (they have right of way).

I know people who are stuck on 50k and they'd be THRILLED if congress passed the law requiring the upgrade to DSL (or other high-speed equivalent), since it would represent a ~20 times increase to gain DSL.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

>>>Why should they pay for my choice to live in the boonies?

The phone company doesn't have to. They are welcome to hand the govt-granted monopoly back to the government, and retire. POINT: If you accept the privilege of a monopoly, you must also accept the consequences and strings, such as upgrading Alaskans & other rural homes to DSL (or high-speed equivalent).

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

>>>over 33kbps

It used to be 128k based on the old ISDN broadband of the 1990s. But now it's been increased to 2000 kbit/s.

BTW I agree in principle that if you choose to live in no man's land, you must face the consequences (no internet, no cell service, etc) but IF the obama government insists upon providing broadband for all, then let's do it as cheaply as possible. i.e. No digging of trenches for new lines, but simply upgrade the existing POTS to DSL.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

>>>The problem with people in the boonies is that the cost to run the line will not be recouped

Raise the price then. Or use the funds from the USF tax.
And what new line? DSL uses the existing phone lines.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[barzok]

There is a Verizon substation 2 blocks from my house - less than half a mile. FiOS isn't even "coming soon" - they won't even tell you that they're considering offering it.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Blakey Rat]

In my state, Verizon was bought-out by Frontier. If you live in Western Washington, and you don't already have FIOS-- you're not getting it. Ever.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

How is my comment about raising prices and/or using the Universal Service Fund a "flamebait"?
Stupid mods.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

-1 Overrated.

What the hell kind of moderation is that? And I see I got that thrice on this thread. Way to damage my karma (and thereby suspend me from making posts for one day). If you disagree with what I said about Congress mandating POTS to DSL upgrades, then click the "reply" button and say "I disagree."

Don't go-round damaging people with negative mod hits.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Sloppy]

I think Congress should mandate that anyone who wants a pony, should be provided with one.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Hatta]

If you want DSL or fiber how about you pay for the lines to be run

The American people already paid for a nation wide broadband network that was never delivered.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Hatta]

The telecoms promised us fiber optic networks nationwide in 1993. They charged us for it, and never built it. They've had 17 years to do it, giving them one more year is more than generous enough. The heads of the various ISPs involved should be sitting in jail on fraud charges. They've stolen more than Bernie Madoff ever did.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if you in particular weren't so guilty of karma bitching. It's fucking Slashdot for Christ's sake. Get a life.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

They promised fiber in 1993 and charged us for it?
Bull. Citation please else we'll simply choose not to believe you.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Silicon Valley.. LITERALLY (not figuratively, the REAL literally) less than 2 miles from AMD world headquarters. No FiOS. My place of work is less than 1 mile from AMD world headquarters... we can't even get cable. The fastest internet we can even get is a wireless point-to-point. We pay around $400/mo for 2.5Mb symmetric. What was that about the middle of Alaska again?

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[tacokill]

The telecoms promised us fiber optic networks nationwide in 1993. They charged us for it, and never built it.

Citation needed

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

That blog is LYING to you.

If you read the Actual 1996 Bill it says companies must upgrade to 56k Digital lines (which was considered very fast in the mid-90s). It says almost nothing about fiber. So the companies did *exactly* what Congress told them to do.

Blame Congress not the corporations.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Toze]

http://www.newnetworks.com/FCCCITIbroadband.htm

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[falconwolf]

There is a Verizon substation 2 blocks from my house - less than half a mile. FiOS isn't even "coming soon"

Verizon isn't in my state, Minnesota, but Qwest is offering Fiber to the neighborhood. 7mps downloads cost $30/mo, $20/mo for the first 6 months. And 40mps is $70/mo with the first 6 months being $30/mo. I want to see if I can get my ISP to offer access through Qwest, currently I get my access from them through ComCast but it costs $15 more.

Falcon

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[LordLimecat]

No verizon? Oh the horror, who will I go to when I want to be abused by terrible customer service and spotty access?

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/news/2010-10-08-09-51-01-news.php

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Anonymous Coward]

Because that is what they agreed to when they took the government subsidies and where given access to public and private property as part of their business.

They can't just soak up the cash in the honey pot areas while leaving the lower areas to rot as that weren't given that option to begin with and if they aren't willing to do their job and uphold their promises and responsibilities, they need to step down and allow someone else to step up who will do the job.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

This is not a citation.
This is hearsay. A citation would link to the actual law, or quotes from the law, that state "Congress shall grant XX billion to ATT, et al for the purpose of installing fiber." or somehting along those lines. All you did was link to an OPINION that has nothing to back it up.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

How is my comment about raising prices and/or using the Universal Service Fund, deserving of a "flamebait" mod?

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Toze]

Evidently you didn't read the report. Click the link I posted to the abstract, follow the link to the actual report. Page 5 has the ISP claims, summarized on page 8. Financial commitments on page 9. Incentive regulation information on 11 and 14, outcomes on 15. Page 31 mentions NY's 2.3B tax deduction in exchange for NYNEX's 1B upgrade commitment, which was never fulfilled. Et cetera. Every other sentence, every claim of fact, is footnoted. It goes state by state, company by company, through the whole history of 1990-2004. There are over 230 citations.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Raenex]

Too funny. You don't think government should be involved in things like health care or unemployment benefits, yet you think they should force companies to pay for broadband out in the boonies?

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[froggymana]

I'm also in a state that got switched to Frontier and I would much rather have verizon's terrible customer service over Frontier's even worse and brain dead customer service. At least when I had Verizon I never had any connectivity problems, or high pings/latency. Now with frontier there are times when I don't get access to the internet, don't get my advertised speeds, and I get high pings/latency (highest I've had so far is ~3000ms). Its terrible. I would much rather be back on Verizon.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[willzzz]

Jesus Christ your company needs to talk to some fucking network engineers for Christ sake in SJC. There's a difference between consumer internet and dedicated internet. You're company can pay as low as $895/month now for 1Gbps dedicated fiber IP-transit (Internet) in SJC. If you're near AMD there's probably fiber-strands on the ground from a Tier-1 carrier that they can sell you with build-out costs ($400-800). I hope your company hires a good network engineer and can manage the BGP routing or get the ISP to manage it for you. Stop shoping for consumer internet and start buying dedicated/real internet with a corporate network engineer (IP-transit, etc...). It's a-lot cheaper than you think due to competition in SJC.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why I'm doing this, you won't believe me, you never do.

Maybe if you didn't have such a history of trolling, people wouldn't be so quick to downmod your posts. Again, I know you won't believe me (what with your cognitive dissonance), but I do support you.

Or rather I support your claimed positions.

You're obviously being paid to be a troll or else you'd change your tactics in order to try and get more people on to your side.

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation please else we'll simply choose not to believe you.

Liar. Even with a citation, you wouldn't believe them. You never believe a citation that goes against your pre-conceived notions of what is or should be. And when you have no citation to the contrary, you resort to calling the other person a liar.

You really need to work on that cognitive dissonance thing you've got going on. :)

Re:Great - now put FiOS here please

[commodore64_love]

It's like reading a Tobacco Company study showing how cigarettes are healthy.

That too includes tons of citations, but mostly self-references or paid consultants. A biased study is no more useful than a lie. A true study would link to the relevant portions of the 1996 Telecommunications Act which demand fiber optics be put in place. Of course no such study exists because the 1996 TA has no provision like that.

50/20 isn't the fastest

[EmagGeek]

I've had 35/35 for a while, and I could have 50/50 if I wanted to pay another $30/mo for it.

Re:50/20 isn't the fastest

[Anonymous Coward]

How much are you paying now? My 35/35 is 42/35 in reality, and it's about $40/month on top of the FiOS TV bill. The 50/50 was $150/month the last time I checked.

Re:50/20 isn't the fastest

[rwa2]

Hmm, I'm actually afraid to say I'll pass. Been pretty happy with the 25/15 service. My WRT54Gv4 router just barely keeps up with that as it is, and only then because I updated from HyperWRT to Tomato. (HyperWRT couldn't push past 20Mbps on my hardware)

Would rather spend money on additional mobile bandwidth for the wife, or maybe even the car :-P T-Mobile's HSDPA on an HTC slide runs pretty sweet at 1Mbps with much lower latency than the 3G connections. Still waiting for a decent Android tablet (or even a phone with a large screen) for the car, though.

Re:50/20 isn't the fastest

[EmagGeek]

I believe my bundle price is $57.99. I actually get more like 40-42Mbit down as well. When I reupped my contract in July they offered me the 50/50 for $89.99. This was, of course, one month before they eliminated the "premium" for no-contract service. Grumble...

Slashdot nigga!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like a nigga, who's in the hole,
It's like a nigga, he's on the dole!

It's like a nigga, he's made of plastic,
It's like a nigga, he's niggatastic!

So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[chemicaldave]

Why does 15 Mbps down cost $50? but 150 Mbps only costs $195?

If speeds don't scale like I think they do, then someone explain it to me please.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[Bagels]

Part of it is fixed costs - it's expensive to roll out fiber to the home, and that expense doesn't change whether you're buying the 15Mbps tier or the 150Mbps tier. The other part is naked greed; Verizon is a telco, after all.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[devitto]

Because speeds don't scale like you think they do. If you have lots of little pipes going into a fat one, you can manage contingency and plan easily. If the little pipes are 10x the size, it's harder - especially as the actual point where service is impacted (around 80%) can go from 'ok for next 6 months' to 'upgrade now' due to a single customer changing usage profile.

It's like the difference between driving trucks, and driving cars - yeah, they are 3 times the length, but they cause 10x the traffic slowdown.

Service providers work of graphs that measure peaks (and 95%s), and if a single customer can move the peak from 85% full to 100% full, then it's hard to plan a good service - the only way is to have more contingency, which means more equipment/fibre/lambdas.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Why does 15 Mbps down cost $50? but 150 Mbps only costs $195?

If speeds don't scale like I think they do, then someone explain it to me please.

It likely has nothing to do with scale, and all about persuading you of the "value" of spending $200/mo for internet service.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[chemicaldave]

By your explanation, price for faster service should scale up, not down.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[zach_the_lizard]

There are fixed costs of operation that will be in place no matter the speeds. For all we know, the lower tier bill could be mostly to cover fixed costs.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[Kjella]

Fixed cost? Canle maintenance and repairs, rack space, billing, customer support etc. are all pretty constant. Here in Norway I consider it to be quite decent competition but they all pretty much flat out at 40$/month for the really low end, whether DSL or cable. 60$ is normal and 80$ high-end, often giving you 10x the speed for 2x the cost.

Personally I predict that the usage pattern changes too. My 2 Mbit line was maxed almost 24x7. My 25 Mbit line isn't. A 150 Mbit line would be even better, but my average utilization would be even lower. So it's not even certain that their bandwidth costs scale with the advertised speed.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is probably $30-40/month for the cost of the connection and the rest is for Internet bandwidth.
Internet bandwidth costs about $10 per month per Mbps

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[Nevo]

Price has nothing to do with cost. It's all about supply and demand. Verizon, like any other company, will price their products at what they believe the market will bear.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[coryking]

That is only true if your SLA promises you can saturate that sweet ass gig link you have in your home. A business class account might have that kind of thing, but a residential account does not. If 100 residential people download something at the same time, combined they might saturate the backhaul, but their downloads would each be 1gb/100=10mb. And 10mbit is still better than what most of us shmucks get.

Basically, they charge $200 because they can. It has nothing to do with the actual cost of service.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[MacGyver2210]

I think by "fixed costs" you mean "fixed profits". Even $5 a month would recoup the cost of your equipment/service to Verizon for cable. $10 would make them a tidy profit.

The only reason they charge $50 is so they can guarantee that the top 1% of employees (read: executives) and their shareholders get that $10 Million bonus they were promised.

This is the problem with the 'Freedom' we get in America, and the way the government regulates business as a whole. It's criminal, but allowed and acceptable.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[Charliemopps]

Because the buying and maintaining the equipment and lines that run to your house cost a telco around $20/month. That price is the same if you have a voice line, a 56k line, a 10Mb line or a gigabit connection. On top of that cost you have your badwidth costs, profit margin, local taxes, etc. So the bandwidth is only a part of the total cost. When you have a much slower connection all that overhead takes up a lot more of the bill than it does when you have this ultra high speed line. $20-$30 of your bill is hardware, maintinance, and tax related irrelevent of the speed. So it's more like saying the 15meg line is costing you $20 for bandwith and the 150meg line is costing you $170.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[ch-chuck]

That's so ppl can buy 150Mbps for $200, resell 6 15Mbps streams for $50 each and recover their cost, make $100, and still have 90Mbps left over for themselves.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[commodore64_love]

>>>Part of it is fixed costs -

And also quantity pricing. If I buy one shirt at my local store it's $15 but if I buy two then it's $25. Likewise when my electricity use drops in winter, the price goes up to ~11 cents/KWhr but in summer I go above the ~1000KWhr level and the overall price drops to 9.5 cents per.

I imagine the same is true with the internet. The more speed you buy, the less you pay per Mb/s. In my case I get 750k for $15 but if I upgraded to 7000k I would not pay $150. I'd pay $35.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[Glendale2x]

Basically, they charge $200 because they can. It has nothing to do with the actual cost of service.

Correct; it is the price a residential customer will bear for what they feel is "advanced" pricing for a "fast" speed the customer probably doesn't fully grasp. These customers are also willing to pay for truck rolls, play "reboot the router" games with scripted tech support, and wait until the next business day for someone to fix it if it breaks. Many business class accounts (like cable) are the same quality as residential except the pricing is higher and you're allowed to pay extra for a static IP; that's how Charter does it where I am.

When you move into the land of T1, T3 and OC-x then you're dealing with a whole different class of customer. One that won't accept anything less than the technical capacity of the line, a comprehensive SLA, a first line tech that doesn't read a script, and real 24x7 service should there be trouble or an outage. Other factors are terminating your line to a much more expensive router that does lots of BGP rather than some cheap thing that only does static routes with a default. This customer is also willing to pay for it. One can argue the "bandwidth" should still be cheap, and it is, but the human aspect is certainly not.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[MaWeiTao]

Actually, trucks cause less traffic because they act as traffic dampers. They're slower to speed up and slower to stop so their drivers tend to maintain a greater distance from traffic ahead of them. This enables to maintain a more consistent speed. Unlike the pinheads in cars who are always compelled to tailgate and end up slowing each other down.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[MaWeiTao]

Like everything else, the more you buy of something the cheaper it gets. Buying an individual can of beer is more expensive, per can, than a six-pack. Getting 50 business cards printed is considerably more expensive, per card, than getting 1000 printed.

A similar principle presumably applies here although I'm sure some other factors come into play.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your explanation just supports what "chemicaldave" said. By your logic - the "little pipes x 10" should be more expensive per capacity unit - because they affect the service peaks & planning more than linear. But actually Verizon makes them about 2.5 times less expensive per megabit than 15 Mbps plans. According to your argument - Verizon should make them 150 Mbps plans more expensive per megabit than 15 Mbps plans.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're basing your argument on flawed logic, it's already been established that the internet isn't a truck, it's a series of tubes.

Re:So why is my lower tier so expensive?

[hosecoat]

Why does 15 Mbps down cost $50? but 150 Mbps only costs $195?

If speeds don't scale like I think they do, then someone explain it to me please.

ok, it's like a series of tubes...

Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

In Japan they pay like $40 for 100 Mbps. As usual the US is so far behind it's not even funny.

Re:Meanwhile

[MidnightBrewer]

At my apartment in Osaka it's $20 for 1GB, actually.

Re:Meanwhile

[Nadaka]

That makes me angry. I am paying $60 for 8mbit/1.5mbit

Re:Meanwhile

[TheCRAIGGERS]

Ever compared the size of Japan with that of the US? If Verizon only had to cover the size of, say a single state, I'd like to think it would be a fair bit cheaper and we'd already have it.

Not to mention the population density difference...

Re:Meanwhile

[__aaqvdr516]

And at my house in rural Virginia: $95 for 768k/512k with a FAP of 600 MB/day. Within a year I'll have fiber passed within 1000ft of my yard and I will likely still not have anything better than I have right now...

Re:Meanwhile

[zach_the_lizard]

Meanwhile, Japan is very densely populated, making the roll out of fiber very fast as compared to, say, the US or EU (though the EU, at least the western half, beats the US IIRC).

Re:Meanwhile

[thijsh]

I thought every uplink came with free FAP.

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

The cheapest internet I can get where I live in Sweden is about $30 for 10/10.. (Unless I want to sign up for a 3 month period oslt.)
I went for 30/30 @ $40 instead...

Re:Meanwhile

[hedwards]

At least that's available. I live in Seattle and the best speed I can get from Qwest is apparently 5 Mbps for $50 a month excluding tax. Speakeasy allows for faster connections but it's well over a hundred for the connection you've got.

Our best bet is Google coming in and fixing the situation, it's been years since Verizon and Qwest have supposedly been upgrading their equipment, but they've yet to actually get here. And Comcrap was such a joke when we had them years ago that whatever they're offering we don't want. Qwest might be slow, but at least it's rarely if ever out.

Re:Meanwhile

[geekoid]

Whyd oes that make you angry.

Would you want a 5% federal tax on all goods to get that service? And this is in addition to current rates, not instead of.

Frankly, if it went into education and digital infrastructure I wouldn't mind a 5% fed tax on goods.

OTOH, I would much rather there was a .006% tax on all financial trades, buying and selling. thats 6 cents for every 1000 dollars. we would have plenty of money to pay down are debt and get a first class world education for all children, and real government health care.

But hey, that's socialism, and a government helping people is bad for some reason.

Re:Meanwhile

[jimbolauski]

It's not about being far behind it about being spread out, Japan has a population density of 336 people per km^2 while the US has a density of 31 people per km^2. It's much cheaper to connect people when their that close together.

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Central London: £10 ($16) for 12mbit/1.2mbit.

Re:Meanwhile

[countSudoku()]

I don't get angry, I make my carrier give me a better deal, or I start switching around. I'm in central California and pay about $30/month for 6Mb, which is outrageous, but cheaper than the current alternative. I first had Comcrap, and they had to come out and install a brand new coax line into my house, at CONSIDERABLE expense to them, and I own it so there's no "next customer" at this node. After their deals ran out, I switched to the local carrier SureWest, and when their deals ran out and they wanted to charge $180 for the 3 service package (digital phone line, DSL-delivered IP/TV, and Intertubes), I talked them down to $88 for the whole bundle, and didn't even lose any of the four TV channels I bother to watch. *cough* top gear *cough*

DSL/Cable Intertubes are starting to get better in terms of pricing in the US, but not cell phone services. Fucking completely out of line [sic] for lame slow "3G" and an overpriced phone which will be a brick in two years. Even the highly stylized iPhone is a brick waiting to happen without a customer replacable battery and an OS, and soon your data, tied to a closed service and a single vendor. *sniff* *sniff* I smell lock-in.

Re:Meanwhile

[Nethemas the Great]

You'd like to think it, but you'd be wrong. Let's look at it from another perspective. The urban centers of the U.S. have a population density about 1/3 that of Japan or South Korea. We're now comparing apples with their cousin the pear. Same area to cover but the US has 1/3 fewer customers trying to push data through the pipes. For $40/month in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area you can get 1.5Mbit/384Kbit service. Would you please explain to me what justification one could have for charging twice as much for nearly three orders of magnitude (682 times) slower service.

If we're talking about geographically dispersed rural America we aren't even considering speed. We're talking about whether or not they have service available in the first place. We're looking at satellite based service as the only option in many cases. Cheapest you'll find is $50/month for 512Kbit/128Kbit complete with 750-1500ms latency and 7GB cap--weather permitting of course.

Re:Meanwhile

[compro01]

And now watch your argument fall to pieces when you compare the size and population density of the cities.

Re:Meanwhile

[Nadaka]

And New York City has a population density of over 10 thousand per k^2. But they do not have widespread gigabit or ~$20 internet with speeds over 100mbit.

Population density is a bad argument. It doesn't matter if rural Montana is stuck with dialup, even in our most dense cities we don't have anywhere near the service as the rest of the world.

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course. Free FAP! (I love their logo, BTW.)

Re:Meanwhile

[compro01]

And yet your dense cities can't get decent connection speeds either.

Re:Meanwhile

[Mr. Freeman]

Yeah, the free market works really damn well... WHEN THERE'S A MARKET.

You're lucky enough to live in one of the few areas in which there are several broadband providers. In most areas this isn't the case and you don't have anything to bargain with. You can't threaten to switch to another provider because there aren't any. Where I live there's only two. Comcrap and Quest. Both suck and have almost identical prices.

Cell phones, same thing. There's really only 3-4 carriers in the US. Add to this the fact that they're allowed to lock you into 2-year contracts and we start to see why all phone service sucks.

Re:Meanwhile

[Bengie]

yet some large cities in the USA rival some of the less dense cities of Japan in population density, yet the less dense cities of Japan still have magnitudes better i-net service.

Re:Meanwhile

[Shakrai]

Add to this the fact that they're allowed to lock you into 2-year contracts

If you don't like 2 year contracts why would you sign one? There are alternatives you know. T-Mobile will even give you a break on the monthly service if you bring your own equipment.

Re:Meanwhile

[commodore64_love]

Cellphone providers are more of a Free market than the cable/phone duopoly. I think I have 8 wireless choices in my area, and they all compete against one another just as the old Dialup ISPs used to do.

As for contracts: They are easy to escape. When they send you a Notice of change of terms, you can immediately terminate the contract on the basis you don't accept the New changed contract. -or- You could sign-on with a non-contract service like VirginMobile so you don't feel trapped. I could quit them anytime I desire.

Re:Meanwhile

[TheLink]

Not to mention the population density difference...

Really? The US people get swindled because the average US person is denser than the average Japanese person?

But with all the supersize fries and soda the average US person should be less dense...

Re:Meanwhile

[s73v3r]

Then why isn't Los Angeles/Orange County a glowing bastion of internet service? There are plenty of places in the country that are as dense as Japan/S. Korea, and they still have shitty service.

Re:Meanwhile

[TheLink]

The problem is people are too dense.

That's why you need regulators who work for the benefit of those dense people. Not for the people who exploit them.

Re:Meanwhile

[Zadaz]

And meanwhile in Rural America Verison is unable to provide anything better than .2 MB/s at any price. (Currently $60 a month, but they have simply said "That's the fastest you can ever expect to get.)

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a flash drive, because bandwidth isn't described in GigaBYTEs. I assume you mean 1 Gbps, which is somewhat pointless since the bulk of the Internet servers don't run anywhere near that speed. At least you'll be able to connect to others on your subnet faster.

Re:Meanwhile

[PitaBred]

That's an apartment. Would you get the same service for the same price if you had a house?

Re:Meanwhile

[yabos]

True, but don't they pay like $2000 USD/month for a 300 sq. foot apartment? Which is better?

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Right - smaller areas with high population density, as can be clearly seen in large US cities like New York, Chicago, L.A., etc. Oh wait, they have the same sucky service as the rest of us...

Re:Meanwhile

[Hatta]

1 GB? Or 1GB/s?

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm paying $95 for 6mbit because I still have to have the land line.

Re:Meanwhile

[mordejai]

Buenos Aires: $40 for 3M/512K.
The fastest my ISP (one of the 3 "big ones") will go is 15M/1M... for $150 (!!!)
$20 will buy you 640K/256K.

Remember we're not talking about some rural town. This is the "Paris of the South", the 17th largest city in the world.

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Vilnius, Lithuania

~30 euros for 200Mbit (upload at around 90 Mbit )

I personaly pay around 15 euros a month for 100Mbit/80Mbit connection.

Feels good man.

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Halifax, Canada
5Mb/1Mb - $50
100Mb/5Mb - $160

Personally I use the 5Mb service and really it's fast enough for BT (~1hr/movie) and browsing. HD youtube etc. works fine.

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

>In Japan they pay like $40 for 100 Mbps. As usual the US is so far behind it's not even funny.

In Sweden I pay $7 (50SEK) a month for 100/100 Mbps. I think it's kind of funny.

Re:Meanwhile

[StikyPad]

I have the same choices. I called Comcast and complained about the price of 50Mbit and threatened to switch to Qwest 40Mbit (with some imaginary promotion I pulled out of my rear end), and they offered me $40 off the 50Mbit service. They also offered me some better deal to upgrade to 100Mbit, but I wasn't interested since I can't even cap my 50Mbit anymore :( (probably due to increased uptake in the neighborhood).

Re:Meanwhile

[DrGamez]

I don't want to nitpick but the whole reason they are allowed to "lock you in for 2 years" is because you chose to subsidize the phone instead of paying the actual (and cheaper) cost. There are a few cell phone carriers that let you pay month-to-month as long as you supply your own phone.

Re:Meanwhile

[AigariusDebian]

Nice! We in Latvia still have to live with 500 Mbit both ways for 100$ (this includes phone service and cable TV with on-demand functionality and all available channels) or 200 Mbit both ways for 35$ :)

Re:Meanwhile

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Just wow.

Last time you brought this up you got called out on it and even admitted you were wrong.

Considering how much you suffer from cognitive dissonance I shouldn't be surprised that you seem to have "conveniently" forgotten about that little discussion, and yet I am surprised at you, Troll64.

Note to mods. Troll64 has trolled/flamebaited with the phrase "cognitive dissonance" in the past. I'm just throwing it right back in their smug face.

Nice

[scubamage]

Now if only I could get 19$/month gigabit ethernet into my house like my boss's mother in South Korea. I know the country is a fraction of our size, but honestly our lackidasical approach to increasing bandwidth is infuriating.

Re:Nice

[zach_the_lizard]

It's not size, it's population density, and South Korea is king. Just wiring Seoul alone would give them very fast speeds in comparison with the rest of the world.

Re:Nice

[TheEyes]

Yeah? Then why does it cost $40 a month for 1.5 mbit service in Los Angeles? It's a county with 10 million people, and a population density twice that of South Korea, and yet I'm paying the same amount for service two orders of magnitude worse.

Face it, population density is not the determining factor here. The determining factor is the lack of meaningful competition, the fact that, despite the lack of explicit franchise agreements, the telcom and cable companies have collaborated to form a Nash equilibrium, to siphon as much money as possible for as little service as they can get away with.

i get 50/50 as a small business

[dalewj]

with FIOS. jsut saying

Clap clap clap.

[coryking]

Good news for some small sect of the US. Wake me when I can finally get more than 3mbit in the middle of Seattle up on Capitol Hill.

Qwest has been promising "OMG mega-fast Internet" for years now and they have yet to deliver. What gives?

Course I remember it being the same way when DSL was the new kid on the block. Took years before that was deployed everywhere. Remember trying to work out your distance to your central office to see if you would ever qualify?

Re:Clap clap clap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Austin, we have the same bandwidth tiers as we did five years ago, and almost the same as 10 years ago. Only thing different is now it costs more, and paying per bit is going to be implemented soon. Oh yeah... we have Clear 4G, but it isn't faster in bandwidth, and its latency the last time I saw stats on it were horrid. Pretty much, other than a few metro areas, bandwidth has stayed the same, or the same amount has gotten expensive.

Re:Clap clap clap.

[hedwards]

I'm in a similar situation, it can only be incompetence that explains why you can't get more than 3mbit from them. I'm in North Seattle and we get up to 5mbps and you're significantly closer to the CO.

But the reason why it's taking them so long is that they're run by a bunch of incompetent assholes. They sold their wireless unit off about a decade or so ago, and that's where most of the other companies have been getting the pocket change to upgrade their network. The price for life thing isn't doing them any favors either. While the cost of providing service has gone down, it doesn't give them much money to upgrade their network to join the modern era.

Kinda pricy

[schnikies79]

I have 1.5/384 because I don't want to pay a bunch for internet. $30/month is pretty much my price limit.

Re:Kinda pricy

[daid303]

Damn, internet is pricy for the US people. I'm paying 15 euros for 20mbit/1mbit.

Re:Kinda pricy

[Anonymous Coward]

10 euros for 10mbit/10mbit here.

Not US as a big surprise for everyone. :P

Re:Kinda pricy

[coryking]

Yes. Because investing in your nations infrastructure is a form if socialism. Well, at least according to enough tea party idiots in the US to block any attempt.

Well, that and the telcos have their hands far up the asses of our government. But doing away with that is messing with the free market, and thus also socialism. Basically, making things better==socialism. The only people who should have it good are corporations, which are also people—anything else is socialism.

Re:Kinda pricy

[blackraven14250]

You're talking like they don't also pay by actual usage.

Re:Kinda pricy

[AndrewNeo]

Ouch. I'm paying $35/mo for 6mb/768k on AT&T.

Re:Kinda pricy

[coryking]

I'll pay actual use if it is reasonable. Better would be to pay the same way Internet providers charge each other—95th percentile billing. Charge something like 50/mo for 1mbit. Give me a gigabit port, and 95% of the time I and most people wont go anywhere near that amount.

The problem is anybody but people who buy "real" Internet know what 95th percentile billing is—and even if they did they wouldn't understand it (nor should they need to, honestly). That is why most consumer grade Internet is either flat rate with five pages of small print, or it is charged per gig used.

Re:Kinda pricy

[Alarash]

20/1 Mbps sounds like DSL 2. This is fiber which is a more reliable transport medium because it's much less impacted by typical impairments (road work, noise on the line, rusty copper pairs, etc...). A better comparison would be the 50 Mbps/10 Mbps you get in Paris, with Fiber, for 50€.

Re:Kinda pricy

[IBBoard]

Well, that and the telcos have their hands far up the asses of our government.

Just to beat some American to it:

"blah blah blah TSA blah blah blad"

Re:Kinda pricy

[hedwards]

That's a good point. But, I'm guessing that they also aren't expected to pay for the sort of lavish lifestyles that our executives expect. Those telecoms probably also put a larger portion of the money to actually upgrading their networks.

Re:Kinda pricy

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, internet is pricy for the US people. I'm paying 15 euros for 20mbit/1mbit.

thats really not that much different its 7.5 times the download and 20 times the upload you have so if you take your speed and price and just work out what it would cost for the download your paying 112 euro which is $150 dollars. so there is still a price difference but your comparing apples and oranges. i can get a 10/1 dsl connection for $9.95 if i wanted slow internet

Re:Kinda pricy

[Shakrai]

Yes. Because investing in your nations infrastructure is a form if socialism.

Verizon was investing billions in their infrastructure using private sector money until the FCC started talking about a nationwide fiber rollout. Then Verizon halted new FiOS deployments. Why spend your own money when the Government is thinking about doing it for you with the taxpayers money? I don't blame them a bit, I'd do the exact same thing if I was in their shoes.

As usual, Government involvement in the marketplace distorts said marketplace to the detriment of consumers.

Re:Kinda pricy

[Glendale2x]

The property manager for the office park I'm in let us put Ethernet switches on the buildings so we could offer fast symmetric speeds like our non-US friends enjoy for a fraction of the average cost for cable or DSL. It was interesting for a few reasons:

* The people that signed up were amazed that such speeds were possible; they had been stuck with DSL, cable, or mobile broadband that topped out at 1.5Mbps downstream on a good day.
* They were even more surprised that it was symmetric (the most expensive cable package was only 3Mbps up) and included a subnet standard.
* One of the tenants accused us of trying to scam them with a service that could not be possible for a company of our size.

So I'd say that the expectation of the average US consumer is to pay a high price for slow service from the local big cable company or big telco, then pay extra for add-ons like a static IP. Some of them won't even believe you or accuse you of lying if you go outside of that expectation.

Re:Kinda pricy

[apoc.famine]

Yep. I can concur with the GP. I'm paying $35 for the same connection he has. Like the GP, that's my price limit. I'd love to be paying $20-$25 US for the connection that you have.

While I'm no fan of the telecos here, I do recognize that my price is subsidizing their expansion into rural areas, where there are only a couple of houses every mile. I lived in one such rural area. Without the regulators making rural broadband a requirement, those houses will never have broadband. And without me subsidizing them at least a little, telecos would go broke trying to make that happen.

While they are money grubbing bastards, the US still has a lot of areas where only a few people live, and where the communications infrastructure is spotty. That alone makes it more expensive for ISPs to operate here.

Re:Kinda pricy

[Anonymous Coward]

Those telecoms probably also put a larger portion of the money to actually upgrading their networks.

OH HOW I LAUGHED. Thank you for that moment of mirth, sir or madam.

Re:Kinda pricy

[Shadow99_1]

Just be glad your only price option is 8Mbps/512kbps cable for $59.99 (Not including fees and taxes)... My only other options are dial-up and satellite internet... I'd love to only pay $35 a month even if I have to be slower...

Re:Kinda pricy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to get those speeds for that price. Around here it's $40 for 3/384 and $55 for 10/512. Right now I'm grandfathered into the $47.50 price for 10/512 so I'm slightly happy.

Re:Kinda pricy

[willzzz]

How much upstream bandwidth do you have? IP-transit costs?

$195 per month ?

[psergiu]

$195 per month ? That's WAY too much.

Move to Romania:

http://www.ilink.ro/rezidential/internet/

100/100 mbps 70 Lei/month =~ $20/month

or even cheaper:

http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink/pachete

100/100 Mbps 39 Lei/Month =~ $12/month

And there's no transfer cap.

Re:$195 per month ?

[geekoid]

It's paid through taxes. Just an FYI.

Not that I'm against that, and quit frankly It's as important as roads. SO Inwoudn't mind paying a bit more in taxes for it. That's a different discussion.

Re:$195 per month ?

[Nethemas the Great]

Yeh, but since you're not part of the 1st world your service must suck! I mean come on, you probably only get 98 of those 100Mbit/s. Us 1st worlders pay far more so surely we get every one of those Mbits promised in the advertisement.

$195 a month?

[MidnightBrewer]

Pity about the continuation of the 20th century pricing. I live in Japan and my 1GB fiber costs me $20 a month.

Re:$195 a month?

[Anonymous Coward]

Japan is a much smaller country than the US, requiring much smaller infrastructure to reach people due to higher population densities (Japan is about 5x more population dense than the US).

This is 21st century pricing, just over a much larger area.

Re:$195 a month?

[bn-7bc]

wow 8 gigabits/second (capotal B is bytes not bits),even if you menat Gbps that is grant One question does that line have any usage caps?

Re:$195 a month?

[bn-7bc]

sorry for replying to myself, disregard the start, I tried to tag it so that i wold not offend but slashdot stripped it

Note to self: check the preview git.

231 Mbps down/ 224 Mbps up

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what my Verizon router reports as the WAN link speeds on each reboot.

Looks like those FIOS connections have always had a bit of headroom built in for higher tiers.

South Korea is faster

[digitaldc]

Why can't we be as fast as South Korea?
What's the big hold up?

Re:South Korea is faster

[geekoid]

Infrastructure, distances, money.

We started first, that means we have previous generation systems still in place. We need to roll out over vast distances, and telecoms don't want to spend money to completely revamp infrastructure every 5 years.

If the government rolled it out, we would have had 150Mbps 10 years ago.

Re:South Korea is faster

[nschubach]

The counter to that is that wireless technology has been taking off so, my guess is that if they hold off long enough, Verizon doesn't have to even worry about hard lines.

Re:South Korea is faster

[countSudoku()]

Makes complete economic sense, to the carriers. The great roll-out of fiber optics was supposed to happen in the 1970s here in California. What happened? The carriers moved so slowly that they could eventually use their copper infrastructure to sell combined services on it. Why ever bother to upgrade when there is no competition and no incentive to upgrade unless you can charge idiotic prices like $200/month for Intertubes alone? Fiber will roll out when wireless carriers move into town and give us more choice. Unless the incumbents reuse our dollars against us in the bribing of public officials, I mean lobbying, to keep out the wireless offerings which they would claim as "unfair competition".

Think about that; your carrier will spend more on defending their turf, than on providing you any more service for a better price... as long as they can pay for government influence, this will be the case.

Re:South Korea is faster

[Nethemas the Great]

Greed, popular ignorance, free hookers and blow for all involved politicians, we're a free market democracy, they're a oh wait...

Re:South Korea is faster

[asvravi]

Here are some calculations, withi highest listed first -

Country speed*sqrt(area) normalized

Russia 45857
United States 31000
Canada 29576
Australia 22188
Brazil 13540
Sweden 13528
Japan 13156
South Korea 11302
Kazakhstan 10928
Romania 10878
Ukraine 10526
China 10378
France 9911
Germany 9597
Mongolia 8092
Spain 7419
Finland 7376
Greenland 7226
Lithuania 6869
Norway 6663
Latvia 6273
Bulgaria 5937
Argentina 5753
Saudi Arabia 5689
Portugal 5362
Chile 5113
Iceland 4994
United Kingdom 4855
Turkey 4815
Poland 4322

Re:South Korea is faster

[willzzz]

The majority of traffic in South Korea and Japan stay WITHIN the country making it extremely cheap. The US is a large spread out country with a-lot of users accessing international content, etc. It's like 1Gbps in SK but 10Mbps international.

Faster Speeds Still in Chattanooga!

[pctainto]

Verizon FIOS has nothing on "Fi-Internet" in Chattanooga, TN. 1000 Mbps to your house for $350/month.

https://epbfi.com/internet/

Re:Faster Speeds Still in Chattanooga!

[Donniedarkness]

Exactly what I was about to post.

Unfortunately, EPB doesn't offer fiber at my apartment (not that I need 1000 Mbps anyway).

Re:Faster Speeds Still in Chattanooga!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Verizon was showing their 10GB fiber connection only a few weeks ago. Fiber is fully capable of ridiculous speeds, Verizon is just being jewish about capping the speeds for now.

Re:Faster Speeds Still in Chattanooga!

[Anonymous Coward]

Naturally, the only problem with that is you have to live in the Chattanooga, TN area.

A blighted downtown, a few BBQ shacks, and rednecks in overalls at the local Wal-Mart. Try finding a TigerDirect, or an Apple store, or anything open on a Sunday in that awful little bible-thumping town. Pollution is terrible -- people just throw garbage out their car windows -- and the road infrastructure is pitiful. I've actually seen a pair of guys in a pickup shoveling fill into the large holes on Amnicola.

If that's what it takes to get cheap internet service, the price is too high for me. I couldn't wait to get the hell out of that shantytown.

Re:Faster Speeds Still in Chattanooga!

[Donniedarkness]

The 1000Mbps service doesn't come cheap.

Also, I've only lived in Chattanooga for a couple of months (although I've worked here for years). The place doesn't seem half as bad as you're making it seem. Want to see bad? Go about an hour north to a place called Georgetown, TN. THAT'S a bad place to be.

Also, how many places around have Tigerdirect stores, anyways? They're not that common.

Monopoly pricing...

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

$195/month is the sort a price that only a monopoly can get away with demanding. Too bad nobody bothers to enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act these days.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[smashr]

$195/month is the sort a price that only a monopoly can get away with demanding. Too bad nobody bothers to enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act these days.

Take a look at the areas where FIOS competes with the cable companies. I live in such an area, and you will find that prices are down and features are up. Both Verizon and the cable companies try to one-up each other with internet speeds, tv packages and discounts.

While far from perfect competition, FIOS vs Cable really works out in the consumer's favor. In non-FIOS areas, the cable companies have far less of a motivation to compete.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Monopoly price? Have you ever priced *real* bandwidth? T1 used to cost thousands, now it is $250. T3 still costs thousands, but is better. 150 Mbps downstream is more than triple a T3 and you can get it to YOUR HOUSE for $200 a month? That is the best price / Mbps that you will find in the states.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

150 Mbps downstream is more than triple a T3 and you can get it to YOUR HOUSE for $200 a month? That is the best price / Mbps that you will find in the states.

Yeah, it's the best I'll find in the People's Christian Republic of Amerika. It's a depraved joke compared to the service one can get in civilized parts of Europe and Asia. Hell, I could probably get more bandwidth at a cheaper price in Canada or Australia.

I really need to get my shit together and emigrate. If I wait until the Bill of Rights is repealed, it'll probably be too late.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Verizon vs. Comcast isn't much of a choice. You're still picking between two monopolies, as Verizon holds a monopoly on fibre and POTS, and Comcast holds a monopoly on cable.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[zach_the_lizard]

Yeah! Splitting up telcos into different local monopolies is going to help us. My town just got fiber in some areas, and only after a lengthy fight with the local government telco people over franchise agreements. If you want to help enter the 21st century, kill all of those franchise agreements. It's a start.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[gravis777]

Obviously you are not familer with what other companies charge for these speeds. Check around. Many companies charge anywhere from $300 a month up to $1000 a month or more for a business-fiber 100Mbps line (of course, that is 100 up as well). Shoot, T1s cost about that much in some areas. $195 a month for 150down/35 up is going to be a deal for many companies who need a lot of speed.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[jspayne]

Hell, I could probably get more bandwidth at a cheaper price in Canada or Australia.

Uh, no. Canada has a worse population density than the US, and we pay for it. I'm paying $50/mo for 14/3 cable internet. Add 13% sales tax to that. Oh, and don't get me started on cell phone service.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[O('_')O_Bush]

That might be true on the national scale, but on the local scale, there are several cable companies in our area offering competing internet/tv to Comcast, Cox being the largest.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Splitting regional monopolies into local monopolies isn't the answer. The answer is to make the telecom infrastructure publicly owned. Any business that wants to offer net service may do so as long as it contributes to the maintenance and improvement of the network. Ensure through regulation and appropriate penalties that the government does not abuse the public trust by spying on the network without a warrant.

Yes, I know this sounds like socialism, but I'm tired of caring.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Take a look at the areas where FIOS competes with the cable companies."

So why are we 10x slower than Osaka when we have multiple metropolitan areas with the same or greater population density, and population, than Osaka, Japan?

And where we have this two party "competition,"...which is like what, a few small areas? Even the metropolitan areas where these things are offered, it's usually only parts of the city, even though Comcast and Verizon will count the WHOLE city..

Take a look at where there is no FiOS. Hell, there's isn't even DSL. These aren't rural areas. Cable has been jacking rates up. DSL is non-existent, because the telephone company won't upgrade pair gained wires, even when they upgrade the damn poles.

It isn't a rich or poor issue, or distance from CO either. I know areas within 5,000 feet that are run on pair gain. Million and multi-million dollar homes. We have Comcast. Verizon won't serve data to the area. My parents place have fiber to the curb. Verizon won' t hook it up--it was originally put in for ISDN, which they never offered. I've even spoken to someone higher up on the chain, who *thinks* ISDN is available. Call in, they say it's not. And they won't link the fiber or allow you to link it.

This past year, we got clear. What's sad is that 10 years after DSL rollout, Clear is the SECOND OPTION for higher speed internet. And they're 1mbit under the fastest available DSL in the area (6 mbit versus 7.1 mbit). Oh wait, Clear doesn't make it over the minor hill just north of the city. Nevermind. Still have to go with shitty Comcast.

With all the copyright protection in this country, there should be a massive distribution of fast networks to get the streaming and distribution of content out there. There isn't. With all the technology is this country, there should be faster networks than anywhere on the planet save maybe Korea and Japan. We aren't even close. The internet lines in the country are a product of the meddling of government playing special favors to corporations, nothing more--I don't give a damn any more about whether regulation is or is not good, or free market practices with minimal regulation oversight is the best, I care that we are behind.

I learned of Vuzu yesterday. 1080p streaming. I wonder how long before Comcast sends me a letter saying I'm beating the hell out of their 250gb cap. Then again, all you ipad users put up with AT&Ts bait and switch, and still buy the device, so what freaking hope is there when the masses "ooo" and "aaaa" over technology that's been overseas for over a DECADE.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[compro01]

Depends on where in Canada. In the east, you get Bell and Rogers instituting hideously low caps trying to shut out streaming services (e.g. Netflix) so they can force you into their overpriced video-on-demand service, with the CRTC happy to let them institute the same caps on the competition (Teksavvy, et al).

Over here in the west, there's something resembling a functional market with 3 major players competing and a few small guys. Fastest available here is 25/2 ($100/month, available in all major cities in the province, no cap) or 100/5 ($160/month, but more limited availability and 500GB/month cap).

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[CmdrPorno]

Local telco just lowered their DSL prices. $150 / month gets you a 15 megabit connection. I have a cable connection but will have to switch to DSL due to unreliability. Won't be getting the 15 megabit plan, though.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Kjella]

This is like the Intel Extreme Edition CPUs, for people who absolutely must have the fastest. To take an example here in Norway from one of our FIOS services. It's in Norwegian but top speed = 1990 NOK/month = $325/month, and they are far from a monopoly. Most people are happy with the $73 30/30 Mbit service if you get TV and phone from them too. To the degree that spending $200/month on Internet makes sense at all, this doesn't look like a bad offer to me...

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Gunnut1124]

If you can pick between them, it's not an effective monopoly.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in a FIOS vs Cable area. I have 35/35Mbps FIOS Internet (the fastest consumer tier in this area), their best HDTV package, digital voice, HBO/Cinemax all for $130 (not including taxes and STB's).

Before FIOS was available, I was paying Comcast about $140 for 5Mbps/384Kbps Internet, basic cable, no digital voice (I was paying an additional $40 for Verizon POTS), and no HBO/Cinemax package.

Since FIOS arrived in my area, Comcast and Verizon have been competing big time. Comcast has definitely improved speeds, packages, and pricing but they still can't keep up with FIOS.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

It's on the national scale that we enforce antitrust law.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

I can't prove it, but I suspect that the regional phone monopolies collude with each other and with the regional cable monopolies to engage in price fixing.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Anonymous Coward]

The competition is minimal, they all offer "deals" that only really bring in more money than what was available 2 years ago, and this cycle will forever continue until a critical mass of subscribers drop cable TV service going 100% online on demand. Adding a few channels (of crap) here, a minor bump in bandwidth there, rebounding existing channels to make a higher tier, doesn't make it a better deal or create competition. What you cannot do is reduce your bill but reducing service packs.

In my road, almost everyone jumped to FiOS when it came in, most have gone back to TW since then, citing reasons of bad service. Not pipe issues, but cocking up accounts, particular premium channels not being available, inability to switch service on after returning from extended trips etc.

How about letting us select channels ala carte and charging us accordingly. FiOS cannot deliver any more HD channels in my area due to its limited bandwidth being taken up with shit like QVC/HSN and about 6 *.TV useless channels.

FiOS also used to passthrough the video signal as they received it, they've now starting adding their own compression due to HDTV running out of bandwidth. At this rate it'll be no different to regular copper from the local oligopolies.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[raddan]

Unfortunately, in this case, publicly-owned infrastructure removes any incentive to improve the network. If you improve the network, you also improve it for your competitor. Trusting a state or federal bureaucracy to do the improvements are probably also a non-starter. I'm usually for publicly-owned infrastructure (roads, railroad, etc), but I'm not so sure it's the best option here. At least there's an iota of incentive to innovate with broadband.

I think this is why wireless communication has innovated so rapidly. You can build infrastructure without helping your competitor, and right-of-way is much easier to acquire for a tower than it is for miles and miles of cable.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[oh_my_080980980]

Yeah right.

I live in a non-fios area and cable is cheaper than fios!

What I have noticed is Verizon dropped it's commitment requirement when Time Warner hammered them on it.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[mcgrew]

Yeah, it's the best I'll find in the People's Christian Republic of Amerika.

I hate to break this to you, Reverend, but the US is certainly not a Christian nation. Its primary religion is the worship of mammon. Here, the little green god in your wallet rules.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Shadow99_1]

As someone who pays US $59.99 (non-taxes/fees) for 8 Mbps/512kbps, I'm going to tell you you I want to move to Canada. I pay ~$75/month for my internet service and the same for the most basic cell phone package I can get (400 minutes + 400 text messages) and it will actually work in the areas I'm in.

I don't even know why you are complaining...

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[GreggBz]

$195/Month for 150Mbs is $1.3 a Mb. Assuming that you can get those speeds reliably, and from all accounts you can, that's ridiculous cheap.

At the most populous carrier hotels in NYC (60 Hudson and 111 8th) the cheapest you can get from all 15 or 20 Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers that tangle those places with their fiber is $2 / Mb. And this not having it conveniently delivered to your door step. It's off some switch in a co-located rack in a crowded data center in the city that you pay for transit to.

And since were are talking a data center that shares ports owned by Google, Limelight, Akamai, Level 3, Verizon, you name it, money changing hands and bidding happen on circuits by the hour. There's plenty of competition for the bandwith provider in NYC, and the best they can do is roughly $2.00/Mb.

Verizon is UNDENIABLY underselling their FiOS bandwidth. They own the 2nd biggest Tier 1 network so they can. Another thing you should know is that Verizon put the breaks on new fios rollouts because they were taking huge hits for each new installation.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're still picking between two monopolies

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[Cimexus]

And as a comparison I'm currently paying $39.95/mo for 20/1 ADSL2+ in Australia. That's bundled with home phone though ... it'd be 49.95 without the POTS connection (i.e. aked DSL).

Australia, until quite recently, sucked, because although it offered faster average ~speeds~ than most North American places (those without FiOS or equivalent), it also tended to have hard download caps. But in the last year or so there's been an explosion of affordable plans with massive (i.e. 1TB+) caps and a few unlimited plans popping up. This is in no small part due to the opening of PPC1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Pacific_Cable) which has massively increased capacity to the US (and reduced cost, due to the other major cable, SXC, finally having some competition).

Having said that, wait around 5 years. All going to plan (and subsequent governments not canning the project), the National Broadband Network should be towards the end of its rollout by then, and we should beat the pants off US/Canada. Fibre capable of 100 Mbit - 1 Gbit, depending on switching equipment, to ~94% of Australian premises. Yes OMG socialism etc ... it is costing the taxpayer a lot, but but this isn't vapourware, there are already paying customers getting 100 Mbit from this, for less than I pay for my ADSL connection now).

Re:Monopoly pricing...

[adolf]

And as another point of comparison, I'm paying $55 per month in the US for 12/1.5 VDSL.

WWOT!! FP

[Anonymous Coward]

it. Do not share bottoms butt. Wipe

All the speed you can't have

[kpainter]

Projected date of availability at my locale: Never

Re:All the speed you can't have

[hedwards]

Indeed, Qwest has been promising service up to 40mbps for quite a while now, and there's been precisely no improvement in my area. We're still roughly where we were a decade ago, and there's no evidence that Qwest actually cares about the Seattle market. The only reason why they're here at all is that they were allowed to buy US West. If there were any viable competition I think people would leave them, and I suspect they are as cell service is often more useful. Internet wise they're essentially the only game in town that isn't Comcrap.

I've heard rumors that FiOS exists in Seattle, but there's no information about when if ever they're going to extend it to my neighborhood. In fact the only ISPs that I've seen anybody talk positively about lately are Speakeasy and Sonic. Sonic isn't available in Qwest's region and Speakeasy is twice as expensive and not the service it was before they were bought.

Re:All the speed you can't have

[MirthScout]

Heh... Verizon has FIOS service in my city. In March of 2009 I asked when I could get service in my area (a fairly dense tourism oriented section of the city). I was told September. I guess I should have asked which year.

Verizon only has FIOS service in carefully selected parts of carefully selected cities. It doesn't do me any good though.

Speed is great, but what about coverage?

[jbarr]

The speeds that FiOS provides for the price is really stunning in comparison to many alternatives, and the increases they are rolling out is amazing. But what about coverage? My neighbors, family living in the same subdivision, and I have been requesting FiOS for a couple years now, and I doubt we'll ever see it any time soon. I guess the reality is that increasing the speed over existing an infrastructure is far cheaper than building out the infrastructure.

Not Fair!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Small orifices will be able to get it by the end of the year, Verizon said on Monday

Why do they need quicker access to porn . . .?

I just

[geekoid]

wet my pants.

Triangle?

[bucklesl]

Ironically, living in the Research Triangle area (Raleigh, Durham, Cary, NC) means some of the slowest choices available for home internet access. There are some places that can get AT&T Uverse here, but otherwise it is all DSL or Cable. I would definitely sign up for this access if I could get it. Then again, Time Warner cable has been buying legislators to pass laws restricting municipal broadband plans like the recent one in Wilson, NC.

Huge disparity in up/down speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we still have such a huge disparity between up and down speeds? Is this helping to destroy the end to end nature of the internet that made it so successful? Discuss...

Re:Huge disparity in up/down speed

[IBBoard]

Because most people only want to download (watch TV, listen to music, read emails, browse the web) and most uploads are comparatively small (game data, emails, photos, requests).

Yeah, some people do big uploads (home-mad music, podcasts or videos), but it is like complaining that 90% of the ticket gates are set to only allow people in to a station during morning rush hour. Yeah, you might not like the delay for being stuck behind someone else when coming out of the station, but you're SOL if you think anything will change and go against the majority requirements.

Re:Huge disparity in up/down speed

[Cimexus]

You're right, but I think connections will become more symmetric over time, even if they never reach 1:1.

People are starting to push 'the cloud' for home users in quite a big way. E.g. those Microsoft ads with them steaming video from their home network while they wait at an airport. Online backup services. Etc. These require a decent amount of upstream bandwidth to perform well.

Myself I'm on 20/1 ADSL2+. I find the 1 Mbps upstream quite limiting at times ... uploading a large photoset to Flickr for instance takes hours. My ISP offers ADSL2+ Annex M for an extra fee that would bump my upstream to 2.5 Mbps, at the cost of some downstream bandwidth ... I'm thinking about taking them up on that offer.

Either way I think residential internet access will remain asymmetric in the future, but perhaps less-so than today. For instance, the limit of standard of ADSL is 24 Mbps down/1 Mbps up (or 2.5 up for Annex M). So that's in the range of 20:1 or 10:1 ratio. However the fibre plans that they are rolling out in my country at the moment all feature a ratio in the vicinity of 4:1 or 5:1: e.g. 50/10, 100/25, etc.

Re:Huge disparity in up/down speed

[willzzz]

You want 1:1 dedicated bandwidth? PAY FOR IT. It's like $900/month at the cheapest for GigE level bandwidth of IP-transit in a data-center. That doesn't include transport to your location either. Consumer bandwidth is all oversold of 1:10 to 1:50 ratios.

Re:Huge disparity in up/down speed

[Cimexus]

Um I think you misunderstand something.

We are talking about the ratio of download to upload speeds offered for residential connections. They could be 1:1 but still be 'oversold in 1:10 or 1:50' ratios. Not talking about contention ratios here.

Also I wasn't saying I 'wanted' anything. I was merely observing that residential plans based on newer technologies e.g. FTTH/FTTN) are already far more symmetrical than, say, a traditional DSL plan. Closer to 1:2 - 1:5 ... and these are plans that are being offered now by various ISPs in different countries.

But yeah, ratio between download and upload speeds has little to do with contention ratios/overselling. Naturally any consumer level/residential plan will be oversold, and if you want dedicated bandwidth you will indeed have to pay for it, regardless of the speeds we are talking about.

price

[donnyspi]

I was an early adopter of FiOS in 2006. Had the 5/2 plan for $29.99. Since then the price has slowly increased. Last year they doubled by download speed and started charging me $49.99 for 10/2. If I had it to do over again, I'd have stuck with DSL. I don't need anything faster than 5/2. Now I'm stuck with a minimum price of $50/month. Lame.

Great news for the 1% of the market that has FiOS

[Anonymous Coward]

i'd much rather they work on availablity than speed.

Availability

[KagakuNinja]

Sounds great, when can I get it? I live in a major US city, and it has been unavailable for a long time. Verizon keeps taunting me with FIOS offers in the mail, and then fails to actually deliver.

but...

[uncanny]

isn't this the company that threatened if their customers used their internet too much he would "hunt down and throttle them"?

Keep in mind

[ddoctorisin]

Most countries offering 1GB to the home have 4M people in an area the size of Most Small towns in Canada or the States. Most of it is population Density. Not to mention other countries anti monopoly laws or customer protection laws. Some countries have been known to sue Apple or MS or even outright ban GSM locking of cel phones. Some countries believe consumers have rights. Until USA and Canada do the same we will never see "fair pricing" we will see "fair market value" which means whatever they think the market will handle not what the reasonable price for service is

Re:Keep in mind

[RobinEggs]

Gah! This is like the fifteenth population density excuse I've seen in this thread alone, and *every* thread about internet speeds is filled with population density arguments.

They're just not true. They look true, based on Japan and Korea, but look at European countries. Norway and Denmark are even less dense than the US, and they still kick our asses in broadband speed. We have shitty internet because of monopolies lying their asses off to the FCC and the public about how people "don't want" better internet than they already have and it would be prohibitively expensive to upgrade anyway. Population density doesn't mean shit, and if it did they would focus more heavily on WiMax or any of the half dozen other solid wireless broadband technologies that mainstream providers avoid like the plague; last mile problem solved.

Re:Keep in mind

[TheEyes]

You mean like South Korea? Population density: 1,271/sq mi

Los Angeles County: 2,427/sq mi

New York City: 5,435.7/sq mi

Why are our cities, with double or even quadruple the density, still stuck with speeds two orders of magnitude slower with higher costs?

Re:Keep in mind

[TheSync]

This is like the fifteenth population density excuse I've seen in this thread alone, and *every* thread about internet speeds is filled with population density arguments.

Indeed, the issue is US local loop lengths being on average twice that of other countries. DSL is slower because loops are longer.

I suspect the long US local loop issue is split between 1) non-urban areas and 2) in urban areas, the infrastructure is older or Central Offices have been consolidated for efficient audio operation before data operation became a business factor.

I worked at an ISP in the 1990's where we had copper loop pairs from the 1930's. About half of them were good enough for 9600 bps. Eventually, after much effort, we got fiber from the iLEC into the building, but customers in town were still on 1930's copper on their side.

Re:Keep in mind

[Cytotoxic]

You mean like South Korea? Population density: 1,271/sq mi

Los Angeles County: 2,427/sq mi

New York City: 5,435.7/sq mi

Why are our cities, with double or even quadruple the density, still stuck with speeds two orders of magnitude slower with higher costs?

Why are you comparing a country with a city? Half the people in Korea live in Seoul. Population Density: 44,775.7/sq mi

That's nearly 10x your figure for New York City. 24 million customers in a tight, high-rise apartment configuration. Easy to see how infrastructure costs could be lower in an area like that. Heck, if the average family is 4 people and you only get 10% subscription rates, you'd still have lower per customer costs than Los Angeles at 100% subscription rates.

Re:Keep in mind

[Anonymous Coward]

Los Angeles City 8,205/sq mi
Seoul, SK 44,775/sq mi
NYC 27,532/sq mi

You can't use all of SK because most of the country is mountainous and essentially uninhabited compared to the cities. Seoul has a population density of nearly 2x what NYC does and over 5 times what the city of angels does. If you're going to include all of SK, then you have to include Death Valley and Yosemite in LA's calculation.

I can't believe people still trot this one out

[sean.peters]

The Boston - DC corridor is roughly the size of a European country, and every bit as densely populated. So why don't we have high quality, low-cost broadband there? Yours is a good argument for why we don't have good, cheap broadband in Bismark, ND. For Boston-New York-Philly-DC... not so much.

Re:I can't believe people still trot this one out

[Anonymous Coward]

Because those low density areas *still* exist and still have to be serviced. I live 15 miles from the nearest city, my nearest neighbour is half a mile away, and I can get 10 Mb down rather than nothing.

You might have an argument if the whole US had a density like that urban corridor you speak of, but the same company that supplies their service also supplies it for East Nowhere.

Re:I can't believe people still trot this one out

[Anonymous Coward]

Yours is a good argument for why we don't have good, cheap broadband in Bismark, ND. For Boston-New York-Philly-DC... not so much.

Call it by its name: The Sprawl.

All that, running through the world's worst router

[mr_bubb]

And the world's slowest DNS servers. I have FIOS, and I love my throughput. But it's only usable part of the time because the router is constantly dropping connections or requiring reboots, and the dns servers require several seconds for one lookup. I know there are workarounds for this, but Jesus, how about fixing these problems instead of focusing on raw speed?

Because broadband internet is an essential service

[sean.peters]

If we followed this argument earlier in the 20th century, much of the US would still not even have electricity service. In the 21st century, not having low-cost, reliable, quality internet service is just as big a handicap - it seriously affects our national competitiveness. While I'm not sure that the GP post is the right solution, at the very least the government should be encouraging the development of internet cooperatives in underserved areas... not, as now, shutting down such organizations at the behest of Verizon, et al.

FIOS? What FIOS?

[PJ6]

Neither I, nor a single person I know that wanted it has ever had FIOS; Verizon always says it won't be available for six months. This has been for years, since they first announced it. And I'm not in the boonies, I live near Boston. If I didn't hear tell of people that actually have FIOS, I wouldn't think it exists, but is rather some elaborate joke. Maybe they got a deal from regulators for their "ambitious" plan, took the money, and then only delivered to a very limited number of customers.

Re:FIOS? What FIOS?

[misexistentialist]

And you never will since Verizon is no longer expanding service.

Re:FIOS? What FIOS?

[BZ]

> And I'm not in the boonies, I live near Boston

Depending on _where_ near Boston, this could be http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Boston-Wonders-Where-Its-FiOS-Is-105269 or failures to negotiate TV franchise rights with your actual municipality (as was the case for Boston proper for years) or any of a number of other things....

Cary is not in the Triangle!

[Anonymous Coward]

The triangle isn't Raleigh, Durham, Cary...it's NC State, Duke University, and Chapel Hill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle

They'll still filter ports

[Gothmolly]

I want unfiltered ports. I run a small family website and home mail server, and have to jump through all these stupid hacks to get stuff to work. Verizon, I'll take even 1 Mbps if you give me raw access. Be a utility provider, not a content provider please.

Re:They'll still filter ports

[MikeDataLink]

That's exactly what they do if you get the small business package. I am getting 50/35 in Keller, TX with 5 IPs and zero blocks or filters for $99 a month. I have over 40 websites running on the connection. I've had it for 5 years and not one single outage, ever.

Ports blocked?

[dean.collins]

Yeh but is it unrestricted? I bet you they are blocking ports or in the T&C's they are blocking you for running home servers etc. I use Time Warner (NYC) and they have never flagged my email or web servers running on my servers at home on the end of my cable service.

Re:Ports blocked?

[roc97007]

They block port 80 for consumer accounts, but they don't block ports if you have a business (static IP) account. I've had both, and can attest to this.

I suspect the 150 Mbps tier is a business account, so ports should be open.

But even on consumer accounts they do not block ports 8080 and 8088 (at least so far), so hosting web services from home is still possible with dyndns. I host three websites from my garage (soon to be four) with a consumer FIOS account. The server rack does double duty as a space heater for the garage. :-)

You think DSL rollout was bad...

[sean.peters]

You do not know the meaning of the word "pain" if you never attempted to get ISDN hooked up. The approximate timeline: sometime in the mid-90's ISDN became available in my area. The company involved was GTE (now absorbed into Verizon). It took me at least 5 or 6 calls over a period of a week or so before I could even find someone at GTE who knew what ISDN was, then some transferring around before I finally got to someone who could actually sell me the service. So we set a date to get the ISDN "modem" installed and service turned on. The earliest available date was in like 25 days, and they couldn't specify the time at all - I had to take the entire day off work. So I wait around all day, the installer never shows.

I place an irate "WTF?" call to GTE the next day. More transferring around to find someone who has the first clue about what's going on. Finally, get the "we're so sorry" routine, and they reschedule. In another month. Grrr. So on the appointed day I take another day off, and the installers actually show up. I bring them up to the office where I need the outlet. They begin tinkering around, I go off to do other stuff around the house. I'm in the kitchen doing something, I hear them coming downstairs. They go out the front door. I went to the door to see what was up, and they're driving off! Go up to the office, and there's a chit with instructions on using the service and a completed service ticket. Try to follow the instructions. Needless to say, the service is not working.

Another irate phone call to GTE. They claim the guys couldn't find me so they left. Rather than get into an argument about that, I ask for a service call to get it fixed. Which it turns out can't be scheduled for another three weeks. So I wait impatiently for yet another three weeks, take yet another day off, and the service guy shows up. It turns out that the line is working fine, but the modem itself was dead. "I can't understand why this wasn't caught at installation - the installers are supposed to test the thing before they leave". My reply was that apparently a lot of things that were supposed to be happening, in fact, were not. So then I ask if he's got a replacement modem. "Oh, no, we're out of stock - they'll be back ordered for at least a month!".

So by this point I've been at this for almost three months already and I'm no closer to having "high-speed" service than when I started. And I'm looking at at least another month before it can be made functional. I called GTE the next day and cancelled the entire thing, as I had lost confidence they were ever going to be able to deliver. Luckily, Cox cable came out with high speed cable internet soon thereafter, so it became a moot point.

So, yeah, DSL rollout was a picnic compared to that. And (obligatory) you kids get off my lawn.

The medium isn't really the point, though

[sean.peters]

The point is the service they're delivering. I really don't care if my TV/phone/internet comes in over copper wires or glass ones. And I really have experienced Cox and Verizon competing very intensely for my business, which is both holding down the price and improving the service. I used Cox for many years, but Verizon recruited me very diligently, and when I ultimately switched to FiOS, Cox fell all over themselves trying to keep me.

Re:The medium isn't really the point, though

[Anonymous Coward]

He obviously has a bastard definition of monopoly.

Too expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

My broadband 100Mbps/100Mbps costs about US$19.00/month (It is actually cheaper if I include the signing rebate.) Verison is just an amazingly expensive service that perfectly fits world's richest country? :-)

The US has plenty of very dense areas

[sean.peters]

Most countries offering 1GB to the home have 4M people in an area the size of Most Small towns in Canada or the States. Most of it is population Density.

The US has plenty of areas - San Diego/Orange County/LA county, the Northeast Corridor - that are every bit as dense as a European country. Yet we don't have low-cost, high quality broadband service anywhere. Why is that? I think the second part of your post is the true answer.

Not a very compelling argument

[sean.peters]

Yes, low density areas exist. So? What about that fact prevents the Verizons of the world from offering high-speed, low-cost internet in high density areas? They're already providing the different categories of service - on the spectrum of dialup (rural)/DSL (or cable) (intermediate density)/FiOS (high density). The answer is that they can get away with high prices because there's insufficient competition and regulation.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting 50Mbps symmetric, including digital TV and VoIP for 57 euros a month here in NL :-)

Verizon sold me!

[wernox1987]

They dumped all the low density markets to Frontier......they took away some of our features, can't make others work correctly, and seem to just turn stuff off at random times for "unscheduled maintenance" I'd hapily pay to have Verizon back.

Big country

[jaypaulw]

"We" are a big country

Romania!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's awesome. It's one thing to not be able to stack up to Japan. But to cite a former eastern block country as a benchmark to aspire to... ouch.

Everyone who is comparing to Japan or South Korea needs to STFU now. We know we're out-nerded by South Korea, but Romania... Fucking Romania! If you want to hit Americans with a punch to the ego or mess with their preconceptions, that's the one to use, at least until someone finds some superior figures from Uganda or something.

Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse up here in Canada. In Toronto there are basically two ISPs, Bell (DSL) and Rogers (cable) and they charge ridiculously high rates. The speeds have improved in recent years (Rogers offers up to 50/2 Mbps for $99.99 with 175GB and Bell has 25/7 for $67.95 but with only a 60GB cap, $5 extra for 100GB, but the highest speeds are only in big cities.) Throttling of P2P is rampant and overage charges are high to encourage people to use Rogers and Bell TV services. Fiber to the home is unheard of. And don't get me started about our wireless data rates...

Where there is no competition

[ThatsNotPudding]

the fiber optic cable is used to join two tin cans together. To be charitable, it does have symmetric up/down speeds.

Oi. Swedes...

[Chas]

I love the comment from the guy from Sweden.

By tsarkon Tue Nov 23 05:37:49 PST 2010
Reply to this comment

195 dollars is a lot of money. But then there's no one competing with Verizon in terms of fairly speedy fiber, so I guess they can charge whatever sum they want.

I have a 100 Mbit fiber connection that costs me 36.1 dollars per month with taxes included (Sweden). There are no downloads quotas and I get the download speed I pay for. The reason why it's so cheap is because there is a hierarchy of tier providers. I only pay monthly for the last tier in the chain. The network maintenance costs are hidden somewhere in the apartment rent.

Yep. Sweden is roughly equivalent in size to the US Eastern Seaboard. But 80+% of their population is only occupying about 1/4th of the country's total landmass (about the size of North and South Carolina) with roughly the population of North Carolina. Population density even compared to that single state is laughable.

I'm certain it's MUCH easier to cover so little landmass and so few customers with such an even population distribution.

Currently the FIOS service ALREADY has more customers than the entire population of Sweden.

People griping about how great other countries have it have exactly ZERO grasp of the scale of what they're yapping about.

When you get...

[roc97007]

...150 Mbps upstream, call me.

150 Mbps down isn't really interesting. What would a normal person use it for? Even with 20 Mbps (current FIOS consumer tier) the limiting factor will almost always be the upload speed at the other end. If you're thinking of buying this, first take a long hard look at your current peak usage. Most people don't use a fraction of the lowest tier bandwidth (for broadband).

And yes, I know, one word: Torrents. To which I reply, two words: Geeks only.

Re:When you get...

[Overzeetop]

One word: Netflix
Four words: Netflix in multiple rooms

Get that service happening in HD, and you're going to want a high peaking line, especially if you are running VoIP and a cloud data service.

I rarely complain about my 3Mb connection, but I've been backing up my "stuff" to the cloud (First SpiderOak, now LiveDrive) and it takes for fucking ever to get those services set up with the smallest of datasets (80-100GB, not really a large amount of data for anyone with a digital camera).

Remember - it's less about the rate*2.6E6 seconds/month total capacity, and more about getting your stuff done/transferred NOW, without impacting the other services you use. I'd gladly take a 500GB cap (about 2Mb service) with a 150Mb rate over a 6Mb rate with no cap.

Re:When you get...

[roc97007]

We've got a Roxio downstairs and the Netflix plugin for Media Center upstairs, sometimes running at the same time, and haven't noticed a problem with 20 Mb.

Backing up to the cloud is a test of your up speed, not your down speed, and I agree more is better. I currently have 20/5, and would get 20/20 if the price was reasonable. (It isn't, at the moment.)

I do understand it's about peak capacity. What I'm trying to say is that the average user doesn't come anywhere near that. We're being trained by the ISP marketeers that faster is always better, and like processor speeds, at some point you reach the point of "fast enough".

Charging depending on peak achievable data rate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Charging depending on peak achievable data rate? How quaint.

My ISP charges the same regardless of peak data rate is achievable.

Oh wait a minute, North America you say? Well that explains it then.

I stand by my statement above:

[falconwolf]

I cannot understand why people find this "expensive."

Because, despite how much people use they see people in other nations paying far less for more speed. The US can't be much of a leader with higher costs.

Who would ever need more than 640K RAM?

Falcon

I think Congress could help too.

[falconwolf]

Great, we need bigger not smaller government. NOT!!!

The federal government already gave cable and phone companies $200 Billion to upgrade their infrastructure. What did these businesses do? They padded their pockets.

Falcon

Typical Verizon PR BS

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't offer regular speed Fios to their Small Business clients already. I work in NYC in an area labelled Silicon Alley and you can't get Fios. Nothing to do with the wiring but more with the money loss. My company currently has 2 T1 and we would drop at least one or both in a heartbeat for Fios which means less money going to Verizon. Note: Fios is available in a residential building on the same block just yards away.

Time Warner would provide us with Cable based internet but they want us to pay to get the lines thrown into the building ($3000) and then $1000 per floor to get up to the 6th floor. WTF! We are just coping with a T1 for data and a T1 for voice until WiMax can be obtained.

Re:Typical Verizon PR BS

[willzzz]

I see you're in Manhattan and if you're willing to pay up to $200-$800/month (enterprise class with SLA) you can get dedicated IP-transit of 100M/1Gbps+. This is NOT consumer/small business internet. This is 100% dedicated bandwidth. It may require a BGP-capable router with a network engineer handy if you don't have the experience or get the Tier-1 ISP upstream provider to service it for you. If it's a High-rise most-likely VZ/Cogentco/XO and a few other Tier-1 and upstream providers probably already have GigE/OC-X fiber termination router in the basement and it doesn't cost them much to hook it up. There are a few carrier hotels with Internet exchanges there (Equinix, 111 8th street, a few others, I frogot.) If this is for a business. Check with your high-rise mgmt. and see what carriers have fiber in the basement. Every single high-rise these days has a fiber-termination gear of GigE/10GigE/OC-X in Manhattan due to business needs of certain firms in certain buildings. Bandwidth is available in NYC at reasonable costs, you need to go engineering mode and not buy consumer internet and go dedicated. The costs have dropped dramatically. Your in Silicon Alley in Manhattan and are on 2xT1? WTF? Screw Time Warner, their crap is HFC anyways. Go buy real fiber dedicated IP-transit for your company for usually $1k/month all costs included in Manhattan. There are some big financial/media firms using a shit-load of bandwidth so the costs go down for small businesses. You need to go buy real internet and talk to a network engineer.

Re:Because broadband internet is an essential serv

[careysub]

If we followed this argument earlier in the 20th century, much of the US would still not even have electricity service...

That is absolutely right. It was government intervention, and government subsidies that created rural electricification (and also brought in telephone service). The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was abolished in 1994 after having completed its task of extending these two services to all of rural America.

Ironically it is that same rural America, which is also currently being heavily subsidized by the more industrialized blue states, that is raging against "socialism".

Finding a place where FiOS is available

[Mike Van Pelt]

FiOS has always sounded like one of those things I'd love to have. It's not ever going to be available where I currently live.

A couple of years ago, when it looked like I was going to be moving out of state, I thought that, all other things being somewhere near equal, I'd sure like to move to an area that had FiOS service. So, I tried to find out where in the general area of my possible destination it might be available.

No one at Verizon was willing to talk. I could randomly stab in the dark with a street address and get a yes/no answer, but no coverage map. "Trade Secret" or something. That was annoying.

Re:Finding a place where FiOS is available

[antdude]

Try users' FIOS map: http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios ...

However, not ALL areas in the cities have it. For example for me: I am in Verzion area. My city has FIOS, but not in my neighborhood on the hills. There's FIOS down the hills! I can't even get DSL (20K ft.!). :(

In france...

[Anonymous Coward]

30€ per month gets you 100/50 fiber with good quality of service.
now the updates are longer to install than to download on debian.
=]

Pr0n So Fresh ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... It Hasn't Been Made Yet..

Now THAT'S fast!

Please come here!

[Anonymous Coward]

FIOS please come to Seattle!

The broadband market is near dead with no competition. For a place with some major tech companies, Home broadband in Seattle proper sucks!

Why aren't they rolling this out to more places?

[jonwil]

I see all these stories about how GOOD FiOS is and all these stories about how many people have switched from their previous crappy service with the cable company and gotten FiOS as soon as it was available yet Verizon has chosen to stop the roll-out.

Is it not as profitable as it appears at first glance?
Are the numbers of people switching to FiOS not enough?
Have the cable companies managed to out-lobby Verizon and get governments to shut them down?
Are old fart NIMBYers kicking up a stink and saying "we dont want Verizon digging up our streets to lay more cables"?

States?

[SteeldrivingJon]

Saying FIOS is available in various states is a bit of an exaggeration. It's available in some parts of some states. It's available in some parts of Massachusetts, but not where I live, in North Quincy, minutes from Boston.

150 Mbps sounds nice

[the_arrow]

And 35Mbps downstream is ok, but the price seems a little way off. I'm happy with my 100/100 Mbps for $30/month. (And no, I'm not from USA, I'm Swedish.)