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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.
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 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!
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