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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."
At my apartment in Osaka it's $20 for 1GB, actually.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
$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.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
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.
I honestly can't believe that people bitch about paying $200 a month for speed comparable to an OC3 ($20k/month).
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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.
SSC
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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).
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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.
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.
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.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
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.
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.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
http://www.newnetworks.com/FCCCITIbroadband.htm
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
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".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256