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Sony Launches Internet Service Offering Twice the Speed of Google Fiber
An anonymous reader writes "Sony Japan has announced that its own Internet service provider So-net Entertainment has launched what is thought to be the world's fastest Internet connection for home use in Japan with download speed of 2 Gbps on average. This speed is twice as fast as competing high-speed fiber connections in Japan. The ultra-fast connection, known as Nuro, will cost an inexpensive 4,980 yen ($51) per month- offering download speeds of 2 Gbps and uploads of up to 1 Gbps."
thnx sony 2x the first post power
No doubt Sony will figure out a way to ensure that you only use it for Sony approved content.
They will actually turn the internet into a series of tubes, all controlled by Sony Inc.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Japan already have better connection options than the US? I know that it's fast, but how is this particularly notable?
Is there really a noticeable difference between 1Gbps and 2?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
. . . now in 1080p with 7.1 surround!
prepare for the onslaught!
For those living in certain parts of Japan. It's also an awesome "competition" with Google Fiber, which isn't in Japan. :)
...if for any reason it causes the silentl install of a rootkit or performs some other criminal act within your enterprise, you'll be entitled to a pair of $1 iTunes gift certificates.
Take THAT, google fiber!
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
This is Sony, there's something proprietary here surely? You can only use their router? You can only connect to the service using some terribad desktop app?
Scorta futuere amo!
"Oh shit, now we have to get off our asses and actually compete.. with REAL COMPETITION!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sony_rootkit
never forget, never forgive
At no additional charge!
It's arguable that with everything that a Comcast subscription requires that we pay 2-3 times that depending on what you REALLY want and use out of your service.
I think it's an extremely reasonable price given U.S. conditions.
Unfortunately after a few years they wont let you use Linux on it anymore. Also you may get rootkits if you actually try to purchase music.
I don't know how Sony treats people in Japan, but for me Sony would be the last company I would trust as my ISP.
People who install root-kits on computers are going to go to great lengths to look out for their own interests. They also don't have the greatest track record for security.
I'm probably just a tad bitter and cynical, but there's a lot of ways in which my distrust/dislike of Sony would make me think this isn't something I'd want. They'll probably be doing DPI and everything else shady you can imagine.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Last time I was in Japan, I had a good connection, but the ISP decided to drop every ssh connection above a given traffic. My tunnels kept being broken until I set a speed limit on my side.
I tried also to seed some videos (that I created) but did not manage to get peers at more than 1KB/s
It is good to have a high speed, but it is useless if it is just to watch youtube videos. I won't trade the decent DSL I have here in France through a protocol-tolerant ISP (Free Telecom) to a fiber connection through someone like Sony who is well known for its tight control.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Even if servers can dish out content at 2 Gbps (and many of them can't), almost all modern NICs max out at Gigabit Ethernet support. Although a 10 Gbps Ethernet standard has existed for a couple years, the cabling and termination requirements are extremely tight (most existing Cat5 and even Cat6 installations won't qualify) and the network cards cost hundreds of dollars while switches cost thousands.
I think this service would be most useful to small businesses, which could easily support both their internal networks and good-quality customer-facing WiFi on one connection. (Larger businesses are going to want redundancy and SLAs which this consumer-level product doesn't offer.)
2G down, 1G up is only 1.5x Google Fiber...Upload counts, dammit!
So, I got this super-awesome 2Gbps internet connection. What cheap router (max 50E) should I buy?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
New York is very densely populated. It still doesn't have anywhere near close Asian speeds. Hell, Holland is LESS densely populated AND it has higher speeds. So does Sweden.
Not all of the US is a desolate wasteland inhabited by rednecks. Some parts are almost civilized, and still the infrastructure sucks donkey balls. Explain that?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Why do I care how fast Japanese can access content when it takes 30 seconds to load www.google.com in Canada using one of the top telco's in the country?
Canada truly is the 3rd world of internet access.
Aside from that, not sure how or why Sony is getting into the ISP fray. Could be that they are failing in every other division so why not enter a new market.
Personally, I will wait for Samsung's internet services, Japan itself is failing in innovation all around.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
WELL what a mighty wake up all this is -- bigger than Sputnik! Now Americans are going to need to watch 2x as many films/cat videos/advertising just to keep up!!
Yes, someone actually uses "or fewer" instead of "or less" when talking about countable objects!
Yes, I really am that person who hates it when supermarkets have a "ten items or less" queue....
Oh arse
But my speed tests show 13Mb down, so GREAT DEAL!
Game/Movie publisher wants to provide you with internet. Like hell that won't be filtered and monitored to hell and back even if you aren't a pirate.
Seriously, what does the average person do with all that speed? What makes that speed worth paying for? The major use I can think of is Netflix, and high resolution Youtube videos. I am able to get around on 768 kbps. I just wish it was cheaper.
..will of course be 20gb/month with an overage fee of $0.10 per gb on top of that.
One of the barriers to a higher acceptance of telecommuting is IMO the (low) quality of telepresence, which is mainly due to a lack of bandwidth. Imagine what will be possible with Nuro. Of course, it won't make much of a difference on the whole if only a few people in a few areas have access to this kind of bandwidth, but if it ever becomes the norm I think it will make a difference.
I pay 50 bucks a month (plus taxes) for a whopping 5mbps down on average (supposedly it's 7, but I'd say on average it's about 5; I do see close to 7 occasionally). At least I got free long distance out of verizon as a "we're sorry" present for them having completely fracked up our order and making me take a whole day of vacation to be on the phone with them trying to fix it, even though I told them in advance several times that it looked like my order was messed up, and they promised, several times, that they had fixed it, until the guy came down to turn on our phone and discovered, what a surprise, that no they totally hadn't, and he couldn't do anything about it. Ugh.
Not that I would trust Sony to be any better, but they could hardly be frelling *worse*. (Yes, I don't think I could really use 2 gbps, but I could definitely use at least in the hundreds of mbps range... but not for hundreds of dollars a month, I couldn't.)
This is CAPITALISM?
No. But feel free to bandy the term about until it becomes meaningless.
As better explained above, the higher price we pay is not solely due to monopolistic practices.
I just bought a Yamaha receiver, RX-V673, on Amazon that has 4K upscaling AND 4K pass-through for.... $399. If Yamaha were an American monopoly what would it have cost me? There is NO free Market Capitalism in Amaerica.... never has been... Just BIG monopolies and trusts.
And yet Yamaha isn't an American monopoly, so your point you were trying to make there falls a little flat.
Has anyone actually used the internet in Japan? It's mostly awful if you're doing anything that is not domestic. As soon as you hit an international line, your "awesome" 100-1000mbps connection starts crawling like a T1. Basically, Japan has a really big MAN.
In addition to that, all ISP's seem to use significant filtering mechanisms and drop connections if they don't like them.
Gbps?
I can remember using 110 baud dial-up. With a 64-column fuzzy CRT terminal. And I spent two weeks wiring up the modem, from scratch. Modem design supposedly could do 300bps but my poor resistor-matching skills made it work poorly, like one wrong character out of every 10.
So I'm reasonably happy with comcast internet service. 8, maybe 10 mbps on a good day. Much faster than i can read or watch.
Sony's offering in Japan is... also capitalism.
There is free market capitalism in the US. The problem is, most of it is in the fast food business. The few ISPs that have the go-ahead from the cities aren't interested in improving their offerings, and the small WISPs that fill in the gaps are either unable to do any better, or only willing to match the status quo.
sig: sauer
Honestly instead of a pissing match and comparing highest speeds for bragging rights why don't we focus more on getting gigabit connections throughout our country. What good is a gigabit connection if it's only in a select few spots of the country. Good for Sony, but as everyone mentioned before, they'll find some way to make things proprietary like they always do.
I'm quite interested to hear what, if any, new and interesting things people are doing with their 1 and 2gbps fibre connections, in Google neighbourhoods and in Japan.
While incremental increases in speed are nice, big jumps like this make whole new uses possible. For example before ADSL and cable we could do most of the things we do today just slower, but usable quality video wasn't really feasible, certainly not on-demand. I have a 120mbps (10mbps up) connection which is great for video on demand, and synching large files with Dropbox etc, but mostly it just lets me do the same old things, but quicker.
Are there any interesting new ways of using the internet that are coming out of these super high-speed areas with their 1 and 2gbps fiber connections. I'm especially interested in the effect having a symmetric connection of that speed, I can see it making video conferencing much, much nicer.
Paul Leader
Great. Given Sony's history in online security all that means is you can be hacked at an awe inspiring speed. Here come multigigabit botnets.
Get back to me when they wire up the US ;)
TheVeryBest
Is that they cap your download speed, so you can only use your internet for about a minute a month. :-)
Japan #1 in technology as always. They are the most progressed country in the world, not just technology-wise. Keep up the good work!
Yet they forget to mention that only a fast SSD, or a RAID 0 configuration, is capable of receiving/writing files that quickly.
Instead of rolling out ridiculous speeds why don't you roll out better average speeds? 100mb would suffice.
Not to forget that at 2Gbps there are very few things that you would download and see a great benefit from the speed - I'm sure people wouldn't mind waiting a few extra seconds for large files..
It is not just internet access, the whole telecommunications industry is a joke. Slightly more so than even the US which is really depressing. We make fun of about the US government being in bed with big business, yet they are getting screwed slightly less somehow by their telcos. When I was overseas on a group vacation, all the other folks from various countries balked in wonderment when the Canadians and Americans told them what they pay for cell plans and service, and that none of us could use them anywhere else but our home country without outrageous fees.
I get the second fastest retail internet connection available in Ontario. I pay +80$ a month for that privilege. It is 30 MB/s with a 175GB cap (although I recently got a letter saying they were going to up my cap by 100GB which was nice). The fastest that isn't some sort of specialized business connection (which is even more $$$) is 50MB/s and 275GB cap. For perspective that Japanese service is 51$ for 2000MB/s...
Anyway, something has been wrong with our telecommunications industry in Canada for a very long time. The CRTC who are supposed to be regulating the industry need to be gutted and replaced. The Minister in charge of the file should be placed under intense pressure to answer the key question and propose a solution. Why are telecommunications so expensive in Canada relative to other countries, and how can this be addressed.
And don't give me the big country, low density BS. 1) Most of our population lives in cities, all within a very narrow strip close to the US. 2) It is not like those rural areas are getting good coverage now anyway. 3) There are plenty of examples of countries with similar population densities that are able to provide much faster and cheaper telecommunications, like Finland for example.
Yeah it sounds good but can you trust Sony even in japan? I mean after all the bullshit years ago with the rootkit software distributed on cd's and later on the ultimate screwing up of the PS3 when you used to be able to run Linux on it then eventually it got locked down more and more I just couldn't trust sony much anymore.
that will stream Sony content at extra optional cost all day long, to the router if not to your PC.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
It's a trap!
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I've been on a 1 Gbps connection for about 5 years now. The nice things about it are:
- you don't need to find that DVD, downloading is faster
- moving around disk and VM images is a one minute job
- you can do everything over remote desktop including video playback and editing
- low latency is nice for interactive applications like videoconferencing (no stupid late echoes)
- a large torrent downloads while you are using the toilet
- video on demand is a non issue, thats just a few Mbps, you can stream quite a few IP cameras all the time just for fun
I can tell you what I'd do! I'd hook it up to my wireless G router and only use 55Mb of it. And I'd be soooo happy.
~Craig
Sorekara watashi wa Nihon ni idÅ shitai.
does it come with atrac?
I remember when DSL (SDSL AND ADSL) first came out years ago. ISPs were falling over each other to give the fastest service at a decent price. I was with Telocity for about 1 year before their SDSL 768K service went under. It was the best at the time and I paid $50 a month happily for it. They gave me too much for too little and they couldnt support it. T1s were still big then and I was getting half of that consistently for 5% of the cost of a T1. Its great to offer someone the world for cheap, but when everyone jumps on that bandwagon, can you support it? How long is your return on investment? Keep in mind, technology changes faster everyday and by the time you get the bugs worked out of a solution, it might be old news. You need to recover quickly to stay in the game.
My point is, I think we are way over reacting to this google fiber thing. Hell, do we even know if fiber is the future?? What about wireless? There is a lot of overhead in running wires of any kind. What are you going to do with all that bandwidth? What are you going to do with all that fiber when we move away from that technology? I can watch movies just fine with my 20 MB service. Again, I just dont think its worth all this BS. Are the current ISPs charging more and not innovating enough, sure, to a point. Keep in mind, price is what the market will bare. Dont like that? Dont hate the player, hate the game. The game is capitalism!
I'm not subscribing unless it supports the "OtherOS" option as well as rootkit installs. If it does, I'll get two.
Holy cr*p, I can't even get gigabit at work! Blah blah the switch, blah blah the ports, whatever. 2 Gbps is powerful strong even if it's asymmetric.
I had 1Gb/s fiber to my home in Tokyo for the last 5 years at least. That Sony is providing 2Gb/s now is not particularly noteworthy, except that thanks to Google recently offering 1Gb/s in the US, it's now in the public consciousness, whereas beforehand most of the world hadn't realised just how far ahead Japanese internet service was.
I wonder what they get in Korea... it wouldn't surprise me if they 1Gb/s was standard there for years already.
What is noteworthy to anyone with such a fast connection, is that most of the internet as we know it is throttled at speeds way below that anyway. It takes 40 or so connections to max out my download speeds from usenet.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Those non NTT Fiber services only work if you can directly put the Fiber in your house. So if you live in your one single home, no problem, if you live in a small Appartment block below the 4th floor, then it is sometimes possible. But if you live in a big Appartment block, unless there is a Fibre from Sony going in your block, this won't fly. In most Appartment blocks you have the last Meter (into your place) as normal copper. I do have Fiber, but I do not have a Fiber going into my place, I have my Router hooked up to the normal Telephone jack, and have 100Mbit. In my old place I had Fiber directly into my place, but that didn't change, that I only had 100Mbit there too.
There are rumors going around of having an update to 200Mbit, but I haven't heard anything in detail about this yet.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
In other news, Australia is offering National Broadband 5 years later at a whopping 25 Mbit/s.. bloody Japs only have 2, hahaha.. uh wait..
That's nice, but it's like megaherz, over a certain minimum, it doesn't really matter. Especially not small differences like factors of two.
I've got a fibre-optical link, and yeah, there's GB available for it, but I, like 90%+ of the subscribers opt to subscribe for only 100Mb/s, because a) it's slightly cheaper, and b) there's few practical differences between 100Mb/s and 1Gb/s.
Yes sure, in some situations it matters. Are these situations worth an extra $15/month subscription-fee ? Not for me. And not for most people.