Gigabit Internet Access Now Supported By 84 US ISPs

An anonymous reader writes: According to Michael Render, principal analyst at market researcher RVA LLC, 83 Internet access providers have joined Google to offer gigabit Internet access service (all priced in the $50-$150 per month range).Render's data shows that new subscribers are signing up at an annualized growth rate of 480 percent each year. That "annualized" is an important thing to note, though; this is early days, and adding a few households, relatively speaking, means an impressive percentage change.

Comments

84 US ISPs offer ***RESIDENTIAL*** gigabit access

[gavron]

The article summary needs to specify that it's about offering RESIDENTIAL service. Thousands of ISPs offer gigabit Internet access in datacenters and businesses all over the US. 84 of them also reach the home.

Of note - ALL current US ISPs offering RESIDENTIAL gigabit service do so on the oversell model, such that they CAN deliver UP TO 1Gbps to a customer, but likely will be delivering less as they share upstream bandwidth across facilities, areas, and customers. This is not a Bad Thing -- it's how the costs are leveraged across multiple residential customers so it is 7-10x lower than business-grade gigabit service.

This is a really great thing!

E

Gigabit speeds, though?

[Gaygirlie]

I'm curious as to how close to actually getting that 1 Gbps the people are. The people I've seen showing screenshots of Speedtest or similar stuff are mostly getting 1/3 of the advertised speeds, but is that the norm or are they just unlucky outliers?

Re:Gigabit speeds, though?

[Bert64]

Speedtest sites don't tell the whole story, especially at higher speeds...
Some of the speedtest sites are only on 100mbit themselves, even those on gigabit are usually sharing the bandwidth at their end... And then there's peering, the interconnect between your isp and the speedtest site might not have 1gbit of free capacity at the time your testing. The end devices (or the software running on them) might also not be up to the 1gbps rate - lots of cheaper gigabit nics can't handle wire speed, long or bad cabling, flash based speedtest apps etc.

I've had a box with 1gbps in a data centre for a few years now, and i can quite happily pull 1gbps doing torrent downloads and from some linux mirror sites, but i get a lot less from speedtest sites and many things download a lot slower because the other end or something in between can't handle it.

You need to test a variety of different things, and at different times of the day...

Re:Gigabit speeds, though?

[bbn]

Most speedtest servers are hosted on 1 gigabit/s which means you will probably never be able to get a clean 1 gigabit/s reading from those. That would require that you got the server all by yourself and that wont happen.

We are an ISP that sell gigabit. We host our own speedtest.net server on a 10 gigabit/s. It might be considered "cheating" as the user will only be measuring our internal network. But there is simply no other speedtest server nearby that is able to give consistent good readings. There are a couple that will give you ok readings ("almost 1 gig") but that depends on the time of the day and you might have to try several times.

And no, our transit connections are not congested. However ISPs that do not market themselves as selling 1 gig or more will have no reason to establish 10 gigabit/s at all interconnections. But that also means traffic to them will be limited by the interconnection.

Take a look at any IX member list and notice how many companies have only 1 gbps or slower ports. Our users will never get 1 gig to those guys if the traffic goes that route. Remember there will always be other traffic on the port as well.

However, if a user has traffic to multiple destinations he will usually be able to take full advantage. So it is good for families. You will never be slowed down by what others are doing in your household.

Whats left unsaid...

[jonwil]

Whats left unsaid is how many ISPs (including those that dont yet exist except on paper or in someones head) would LIKE to offer super fast broadband but are unable to because local or state authorities have been convinced by dinosaur companies like Comcast and Time Warner to block alternative ISPs comming into the area and providing good access.

If governments at all levels stopped listening to the dinosaur ISPs and their friends in Hollywood and started listening to the people who elected them, the number of people able to get gigabit service (or even just super fast service) might start to be a meaningful percentage of the total population.

Re:Whats left unsaid...

[jbolden]

How is someone going to track an ISP in someone's head? Townships are not going to allow some ISP to pull out the 15% most profitable customers so that Comcast or Time Warner pull out and 85% of their township has no internet or all. Which means the contract is going to highly regulated and expensive. Someone is going to have to come in with a credible claim. To do that they are often going to need to provide other utility services cable TV and phone being the most common. Those are both regulated industries.

The business internet market is a much less regulated market and while the quality is much higher, the prices are many times higher. Commercial gigabit connections are generally a few thousands not a few hundred dollars a month. Connection charges can range from say $1500 to $11k, they aren't $99-129.

Smart people are doing a very good job weighing the various interests in networking and putting together compromises that meet most of them. Those dinosaurs are doing a very good job of providing tremendous bandwidth at low cost to 99% of America's 130m households. There is no conspiracy and there are no easy fixes. Government is tremendously supportive to increasing bandwidth almost everywhere. I'm sure there is some corruption but corruption is a lazy excuse for people who have no clue about the economics of the industry to pretend that things could be fixed if only the government got out of the way.

Re:84 US ISPs offer ***RESIDENTIAL*** gigabit acce

[jellomizer]

It is in theory... However right now I am not seeing the need for it. I am currently at 10-15mbs about 100x slower... I am able to stream HD video, while browsing the web at the same time. Unlike the old days of dial up when I started at 2400bps and even when I went to 14.4k and 28.8k even when I got to college and we had about 1-5mbs It was a point where we wanted more speed. However now unless I am downloading the latest Linux/BSD distribution ISO that I feel like playing with. It doesn't feel slow or non-responsive any more.

However I expect once a good portion of people switch to GB speeds, I will need to upgrade, because sites and services will be designed to handle the new average bandwidth Streaming 8k video, more teleconferencing tools etc...

So you have it.... Now what???

[Your Average Joe]

How many sites will let you download an ISO at gigabit speed?

So this Gig speed will only be used by a junkie with a 4K TV, or a dozen kids with 802.11ac laptops with malware. Maybe you will try to use it for work so they can replicate the SAN to your house? Maybe you will try to run your own mail server or serve up ammeter porn?

How many SOHO WIFI routers can really do GIG on the Ethernet ports or even supply 802.11ac at full speed for 1 client? Sounds like a lot of clueless home users calling into the ISP bitching about how the "Internet" is slow. Are those clueless chaps really going to fork out more than $200 on a good WIFI router or an Enterprise device?

Me 60/4 meg Charter because that is the slowest they sell. I never see even 7 meg per second when downloading files but the speed test they do always show I should be able to do 60. ;)

Re:So you have it.... Now what???

[SuricouRaven]

The general rule I use is to divide mbps by ten to get MBps, rather than 8. The slight over-division compensates for various overheads - headers, dropped packets, etc.

It'd be better if we weren't stuck on such tiny MTUs still, but backwards compatibility demands it: Anything over 1500 bytes is probably going to run into an ethernet segment somewhere and go wrong.

craptastic

[l3v1]

"83 Internet access providers have joined Google to offer gigabit Internet access service (all priced in the $50-$150 per month range)."

Meanwhile, people still pay ~$40 for a 4mbit at&t line. There being lots of smaller regional players providing some service to a limited population doesn't mean crap in the more global view of how things are standing. Reality is, very many cties how only 1 to 3 choices, none of them really good, and absolutely none of them priced realistically. I don't care about statistics, when we can see the reality wit our own eyes.

"Gigabit service" is FRAUD.

[Futurepower(R)]

"... the oversell model ... CAN deliver UP TO..."

At OSCON 2015 last week, I talked with several people about technology companies being wildly mis-managed and very poorly communicated.

There is apparently no "Gigabit" service. "Gigabit" only refers to the electrical connection speed. The real speed of actual data delivery is whatever the providers want it to be.

My experience is that speedtest.net exaggerates the actual speed of delivery. Numion is realistic.

Re:"Gigabit service" is FRAUD.

[Shinobi]

I found that Numion did not realistically measure my connection. In fact, when I do manual tests of my own, I easily reach 110Mbit/s on actual transfers(downloaded a game from GOG for example), at 15:09 Swedish time on a saturday, on a nominally 100Mbit/s connection. Upload, I get 105Mbit/s. However, running the Numion tests, it claims I only get 1Mbit/s.

Re:1st post !

[ArcadeMan]

Guess who's not using a gigabit connection?

Re:84 US ISPs offer ***RESIDENTIAL*** gigabit acce

[Bengie]

I don't see why a file download or upload should be done in seconds

Years sound fine to me. Why do we even need to communicate in the first place? The quicker the better, within reason. 1Gb/s is cheap, 10Gb is still expensive, but not for long. There's no reason we should have the fastest cheap networks.

Re:84 US ISPs offer ***RESIDENTIAL*** gigabit acce

[Bengie]

Of note - ALL current US ISPs offering RESIDENTIAL gigabit service do so on the oversell model, such that they CAN deliver UP TO 1Gbps to a customer

My Midwest USA ISP sells 1Gb/s residential, and they do not say "up to". Instead they guarantee that you will not get congestion on their network or to their transit provider. I have called in on 10ms ping increased and they have fixed the issues. They take congestion spuriously.

Taken from marketing
1 Gbps Symmetrical. It’s dedicated symmetrical fiber so speeds never go down or change.

Extremely large online backups
Web hosting
Webinar hosting
Cloud computing
Online gaming
Uninterrupted HD streaming (Netflix, YouTube, Hulu)

Taken from terms and conditions
No Unreasonable Discrimination
The Company does not unreasonably discriminate in its transmission of lawful traffic over the broadband Internet access services of its customers.

The Company does not block, impair, degrade or delay VoIP applications or services that compete with its voice services and those of its affiliates.

The Company does not block, impair, degrade, delay or otherwise inhibit access by its customers to lawful content, applications, services or non-harmful devices.

The Company does not impair free expression by actions such as slowing traffic from particular websites or blogs.

The Company does not use or demand “pay-for-priority” or similar arrangements that directly or indirectly favor some traffic over other traffic.

The Company does not prioritize its own content, application, services, or devices, or those of its affiliates.

The Company does not retain, store or provide customer traffic information, except as required by law under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act