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UK's Gigaclear Launches 5 Gbps Fiber Broadband Service (networkworld.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the greased-lightning dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Broadband service provider Gigaclear announced it will offer 5 Gbps internet service beginning next year. Most homes would be hard-pressed to consume data at this rate today, but these speeds will become necessary when over-the-top television services like Netflix and HBO GO become commonplace, television pixel densities grow to 8K (7680p X 4320p) at 60 to 120 fps, and the IoT connects every other home device to the internet. “We’re offering customers the chance to access absolutely phenomenal broadband speeds,” Gigaclear CEO Matthew Hare said in an official announcement. “To be clear, this is a premium service that gives the fastest Internet speeds in the country to those of our customers who want the best connection that they can get.”

91 comments

  1. And 3 GB/month cap by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A-ha!

  2. A joke? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Is this a joke listing consumer services that won't even fully utilise a 1Gbps service in the next 10 years let alone a 5Gbps service? or are they just trying to con stupid rich consumers out of money? Our 5,000 seat organisation has a 2Gbps pipe to the internet, on that we service 30 million external transactions a day as well as the unrestricted browsing habits of those 5 thousand staff.

    1. Re:A joke? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's actually 5Gb shared between a number of customers. If no-one else is using it then you get 5Gb/sec, otherwise it will be less. On a line that fast you can support many households and businesses simultaneously.

      I've had experience of similar offerings in Japan. You can either have a 1Gb/sec line shared between 3-4 households, or for a bit more you can have 1Gb/sec all to yourself. It works as advertised. Sure, you rarely use all that bandwidth, but you don't have to think about sending large files while someone else is trying to watch Netflix in 4k etc. It's like a proper hot water system - you turn on the tap without worrying if anyone else is taking a shower.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:A joke? by msauve · · Score: 1

      I'd like to know who they peer with, at what speeds, and how many of these connections they plan to sell. I'm thinking their oversubscription rate will require exponents to express.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    3. Re:A joke? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you have the money to afford routers and devices that can handle a 5Gb/sec connection why the fuck would you want a shared service when you could obviously easily afford a dedicated service for similar prices.

    4. Re:A joke? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well yeah, this is how existing DSL lines work too. Contention ratios are nothing new.

    5. Re: A joke? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Most places around here are lucky to have one 5Mbps DSL available... we still have areas where the only coverage are satellite or dialup (not even cell service coverage).

    6. Re:A joke? by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      Next step up form 1gbps ethernet is 10gbps; and that hardware is very expensive. I've only seen 10gbps in iSCSI configuration, and I"m sure they exist in router backbones and whatnot. Point is, NONE of the consumer class hardware contains 10gbps NICs. And then there's the whole consumer class routers and the hardware needed to sustain throughput with basic firewall support.

      Basically, give it another 10 years before the 10gig ethernet becomes mainstream. Until then, everyone will be capped at 1gig per device.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    7. Re:A joke? by Bengie · · Score: 1

      But we're so close. Intel's x540 dual 10Gb chips on 45nm are about $500 and their new x710 dual 40Gb chips on 28nm are going for about $350 and consume 1/2 the power. 4x faster, 30% cheaper, 50% more efficient. Once Intel frees up some 22nm production for NICs, they'll be cheap, fast, and efficient. Soon(tm)

  3. Shame Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    This puts Australia's (alleged) 2016 rollout of 100MB 'premium' service to shame....
    We're SO ready for japan's 2009 speeds at 8x the price.
    Forget about the future as we're sticking to our copper connections to the home.
    Makes me ashamed (amongst other things) to be an Australian

    1. Re:Shame Australia by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

      So your jealous of a home connection speed that is pointless for any home in the next decade at a minimum (probably a lot longer). The vast majority of homes and users don't even come close to utilising a 100Mbps connection. I have a 50Mbps connection for my relatively heavy usage house, we only consume around 1TB of traffic a month so we don't come close to stressing our connection. In Aus the average is under 100GB a month (last I saw it was around 30-40GB).

    2. Re:Shame Australia by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      look if you put a transfer cap then average will be way under said cap. then you can lower the cap. then you can lower it again. and again. and again. and always claim the average is below the cap so you can lower it.

      by the way fallout 4 is near 30 gigs.

      just downloading one game will put you on average use - and here we get to why you would want a fast connection, if you want to play said game on the same day.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    3. Re:Shame Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      >> I have a 50Mbps connection

      What 50Mbps! In a good day I get 5Mbps in Canberra.

    4. Re:Shame Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      by the way fallout 4 is near 30 gigs (...) and here we get to why you would want a fast connection, if you want to play said game on the same day.

      And here we get to the real reason we need 5 Gbps connections... and it's not because people have true needs that demand them, it's because instant gratification has created a generation of brats who can't wait for anything.

      How many Fallout 4s do you need per month? After all, once that download is done, there's no more massive download to do. And can't you wait two more hours before you get to do something? Can't you plan ahead and start the download today in order to play it this weekend? Or do you really need to be the first kid on the block to do something? What car do you have at your doorstep? A Bugatti Veyron?

      PS - I'm aware your mid-range 6 digit ID probably puts you in your 30s.

    5. Re:Shame Australia by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

      I get 50 Mbps in Canberra. basically the only way I even manage to push my usage to 1TB is by finding a heap of torrents the last day or two of the month. 50Mbps is easily enough to bring down 3-5 TB a month without even noticeably stressing your bandwidth.

    6. Re:Shame Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This AC misses the point. The amount of data for Fallout 4 is just an example of the size of content users want to have access to. On an impulse decision you may decide to buy a game (irrelevant if it's on launch day or not) on Steam. In years gone by, you would drive to the store, PICK UP A PHYSICAL DISK, take it home and instantly install it and then play it.

      The way content is consumed has changed and if you have a slow internet connection, it could take you DAYS to download it. Comparing this to the physical model of years gone by, it's actually slower.

      You don't have a point.

    7. Re:Shame Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Public service announcement: Remember that Mbps means "megabit per second", not "megabyte per second" (and yes, that's "mega", 10^6, not "mebi", 2^20.)

    8. Re:Shame Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I do have a point, the point being you can still wait until you get stuff. When you went to the store to buy it, not only you needed it to be available in your country, you needed to be available near you and have the stores open. And even if it was faster, what does it change? Once again, my question, and my point: can't you wait?

      Any other use, even 8K TV, can be had with a much slower internet connection, since you don't need to download the entire movie before watching it. So you're taking the one extreme case where it may be of dubious use (downloading a game right now because I'm craving some shitty game that is buggy as usual), and saying this is why we need fast internet. When games take 1 TB, what then? A cable direct to a CDN for everyone? That stuff is never going to be doable instantly as it never has been, because the moment you have 5 Gbps at home, they'll make the games even bigger. What about when games came in 15 floppy disks and it took you 2 hours to copy all that stuff to your hard drive? What about when they came in 2 DVDs and it took god knows how long to install?

      In any other domain in life, you have to wait for stuff anyway, can't you exert some self-control here? Want to go to university? Well, go through 10+ years of schooling before. Want to go BASE jumping? Go through 500-1000 skydiving jumps before. Want to climb El Capitan? Wait until the weather is good, if you ever have the skills. And if your answer is "no, I shouldn't have to wait!" then I go back to what I said about the sizes of games. They will always grow, there will never be the ideal connection.

    9. Re:Shame Australia by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      2009? My ex had 100/100 symetric fibre back in 2004. The Australian system doesn't even seem to be symmetric, so it's over a decade out of date already. If it's any consolation, this offering is not widely available in the UK and most of us are stuck on much less than 100Mb down and 10Mb up.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    10. Re:Shame Australia by dave420 · · Score: 1

      We have the technology for 5Gbps connections, so why not let people use them if they want? They're not taking anything from you.

    11. Re:Shame Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      most of us have no issue with someone having 5Gbps.... As long as they are completely paying for it themselves, be fucked if I am funding them through government investment which is what most people object too.

    12. Re:Shame Australia by Bengie · · Score: 1

      100Mb is not enough unless you like ping spikes while someone is watching YouTube or Netflix. They like to microburst 1gb/s+. Using some tools, I can see this jitter for tens of milliseconds. Sometimes even into the 100ms time range. Of course your ISP may suck so much that they can't pass these bursts on to you because they have bottlenecks in other areas.

      I'm seeing about 75GiB per day and during Blizzcon, about 100GiB both days. Netflix alone is about 3.5GiB/hour, and that's mostly for background noise during the day for my wife. By the time I get home, we're easily into the 20GiB range. Later in the day, we both have Netflix running, many times monitoring Twitch streams. Even more fun is when I'm hunting for a new show to watch. Jumping through a timeline can keep my 100Mb connection saturated for nearly 30 seconds as Netflix or YouTube buffer. Click around the timeline again, another 30sec of saturation. It adds up quickly. YouTube also has this nasty habit of buffering entire 5 minute clips of 1080p@60fps videos. By the time I'm 15 seconds into the video and decide I don't want to watch it, too late, already downloaded the entire thing.

    13. Re:Shame Australia by KGIII · · Score: 1

      I don't think the issue is that people have it if they want. I think the issue as that people are complaining that their country doesn't have it or that they don't have it in their locale and this is seen as a personal slight or conspiracy. I've for about 15 Mb/sec at home on my DSL. I'm actually content with that - it's more than I need. I have patience.

      That's a comparison, I guess. I also have enough bandwidth so that I am able to seed some 143 compressed/ISO distros. Of course, I can use a second line but I seldom feel compelled to do so. (What I will do, when getting home again, is probably move a whole server to a second connection and just use that for seeding and guest access. I'll have an additional user in the house.) But, I guess, I don't need it.

      That shouldn't mean that I begrudge others - I don't. Nor do I think that folks couldn't make legitimate use of that bandwidth (who am I to determine what they do?) But, I think they were because one of the above posters was citing it as an example to be ashamed of their whole country. I'd say that makes their point a bit more valid. There's no reason to claim it brings shame upon your house for a thousand generations because you can only download the game in ten minutes and can't download the game continuously for a whole month without exceeding your bandwidth caps.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    14. Re:Shame Australia by sims+2 · · Score: 1

      What kind of dsl do you have? The highest upload speed I can get is 1mbps on att uverse dsl. Assuming each iso is 1GB in size on average it would take roughly 3 hours for each one.

      Although if I could saturate my upload 24/7 I could use 300GB a month but bittorrent does not seem to do a good job at maxing out the uplink unless there are a lot of peers and very few seeds.

      --
      Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
    15. Re:Shame Australia by KGIII · · Score: 1

      It's rated for 12.5 Mb/sec and I get about 14.5 at or so with various speed tests and downloads. I do have multiple connections but I'm only counting the one. (I have a separate connection for the garage/workshop and one in the house that was on the property when I bought it.) I use, currently, Fairpoint but I can use an DSL provider that is willing to service my area. The torrents all are enabled to be active at all times and I still have plenty of bandwidth to watch my documentaries - I don't bother with the high def stuff, I don't need it for a documentary. I think YouTube is set to auto-quality at 480 if available.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    16. Re:Shame Australia by sims+2 · · Score: 1

      You have synchronous dsl?
      $45/mo gets me 12 Mbps down 1 Mbps up

      It takes me a very long time to maintain a 1.0 ratio let alone a 2.0 considering it takes me 12 times longer to upload the same amount of data than it does for me to download it.

      --
      Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
  4. hard to use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "internet of things" is unmitigated bullshit pushed by electronics manufacturers desperate to find a market for useless products.

    4K television is already well into the zone of high priced screens chasing diminishing returns on human-visible image quality. It may eventually catch on, but it will be a very slow process, the cart pushed from behind by the horse of oversupply rather than pulled by damand.

    Individual conventional hard drives have a peak write speed barely over 1Gb/s. So anything over a gigabit is useful only in the following cases:
    -download files to a fast ssd or raid array (from one that can keep up, and to which access is not contested by other users)
    -consolidated trunk lines serving multiple users (e.g. shared cable modem for a multi-person household)
    -ram to ram transfers of bulk data which is then consumed and thrown away without touching a hard drive, (but not video to a screen, because it's not bandwidth intensive enough.)

    1. Re:hard to use by dave420 · · Score: 1

      In precisely the same way "cars" are unmitigated bullshit pushed by car manufacturers? Obviously not. The "Internet of things" is just a name for putting devices ('things') on the internet, and having them all talk to each other to perform tasks. You not liking how a term is used, or that businesses are selling products to people under such a term, does not automatically make the term bullshit. You're going to have to actually put up an argument if you want to look less APK-y.

    2. Re:hard to use by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      Putting my fridge, lights, or thermostat on the internet isn't going to take any appreciable amount of bandwidth. About the only IoT device that could use a decent amount of internet would be security cameras, and if you have somewhere on the order of gpbs transfer rates, even that won't make a dent in your usage.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    3. Re:hard to use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Internet of Things is today's Web2.0. There, how's that?

  5. Meanwhile in sunny Oz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "..but these speeds will become necessary when over-the-top television services like Netflix and HBO GO become commonplace.."

    Well our farcical government in Australia in it's wisdom is rolling out a national broadband network with fiber to the node (connection to the home is via shitty old degraded copper) with an approx speed (if you're lucky) of 46Mbps on current technology. Mind you this network is costing upwards of 60 billion dollars and counting. Yes, clever aren't we !

    1. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The farcical part is actually the article. HBO GO Netflix are not going to need those sort of speed in the foreseeable future. beyond a few high density population countries anything above 100Mbps is extremely rare. most countries all around the world are still well and truly sub 50Mbps and will be for a long time to come.

    2. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh the Horror. How dare they not spend an extra 50+ billion so you can have 10 8k streams instead of the horrific limitation of just 3-4 4k streams. how will you ever survive. mind you at that cost you can just directly pay one of the Telco to install a fibre for you. depending on distance it will be a similar cost to the government doing it (5-10k) and you can have as fast as you like without the rest of the country bankrupting itself so you can have multiple 8k video streams.

    3. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Advertised and implemented bandwidths aside, the true divide is in the technological approaches that these networks are taking: One is investing a lot of money to overhaul the network, but will still be limited by the copper lines into the homes, for which 100Mbps is a technological limit, and it's usually an asymmetric connection with a much less upstream bandwidth. This is an investment into a technology that has no room to grow. The other approach builds microduct networks for fiber to the home, for which 100Mbps is the lowest speed available. Fiber to the home can grow to 1Gbps and more easily and with very little additional cost. They could offer 1Gbps now. The technology is available and cheap, but without the demand, even the little additional cost is too much for the market to bear. But it's ready when people will need it, and they will.

      HBO and Netflix may not need more than 100Mbps (debatable, if you consider multiple concurrent high resolution streams), but the upload of your 4K video to Facebook or Youtube will be a lot less painful with more than the typical 10 to 20Mbps upstream on "fast" DSL.

    4. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      seriously you want the government to spend another 50 billion dollars it doesn't have so your upload of 4k youtube videos is faster? It isn't "debatable" whether HBO and Netflix will need more than 100Mbps, they don't and won't for the foreseeable future, cost to them aside. Have you any concept of how much 100Mbps is? if a video took all that bandwidth and was 2 hours long that is 90GB, if you are consuming a 1Gbps connection that would be 900GB in 2 hours.

    5. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't want them to waste 60 billion on a dead end technology which will be inadequate within a decade, and then spend much more than 50 billion to get what they could build now. Fiber to the home was a gamble just a few years ago, but now the technology has matured and the topology and technology battle is over. Microduct networks have won. Now it's just a matter of making the investment and doing the work. You can upgrade these networks easily and cheaply: Replacing active components is even easier than on DSL networks, because with the long fiber lengths, the active components don't need to be scattered all over the network to be close enough to the subscriber. Even adding more fibers for additional services is as easy as pulling the old fiber out of the microducts and blowing in new fibers.

      Netflix requires 15-20 Mbps for a single 4K video stream. That's about twice as much as the bandwidth requirement for a 1080p stream. So the technological maximum for DSL only allows for 4 concurrent 4K streams, with no fast start buffering or other bandwidth overshoots. Two 4K videochats at the same time? Forget it. 4K@60Hz, 4K in 3D? Only if you have exclusive use of the line. And the real question isn't even if 100Mbps downstream is enough. What you need to ask yourself is whether 20Mbps upstream will be enough in 10 years. Do you need 1Gbps upstream? Maybe not, but will 20Mbps be enough? Certainly not.

    6. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by dave420 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Waaah waaah high population density". That is nonsense. There are plenty of sparsely-populated countries with fantastic internet access. The "population density" argument is abject nonsense.

    7. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by KGIII · · Score: 1

      And most of those (all?) countries are smaller than my home state or not much larger than it. Australia's huge. They're not running out top-spec fiber to the home in the near future. (They are doing a partial roll-out, IIRC. It just isn't top-end. IIRC the news articles they're aiming for 50 Mb/sec.)

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    8. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Australia is going to run fiber close enough to the homes that copper can do the rest. Fiber is the only way we know how to carry broadband over long distances aside from wireless links. Considering how close the fiber is going to be to the homes out of sheer necessity, population density and the size of the country really do not matter at all with regard to bringing it into the homes or dropping to copper for the last mile. Any place with access to broadband has a fiber cable within a radius of at most a few miles.

    9. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      In fact, this offering is only available to sparsely populated rural areas that are not served by BT (which has a near monopoly on phone lines) and Virgin (which has a near monopoly on cable). They ask for people to sign a contract agreeing to take service in advance, and when enough people do they lay in a cable.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    10. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Who's going to pay for that extra 50M AUS? If it's that close then you can probably pay to splice into it for your residence or business. What is with you people, anyhow?

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    11. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by Bengie · · Score: 1

      1Gb fiber is much cheaper than DSL or Cable. And 10Gb fiber is still cheaper than DSL or cable. Going from 1Gb to 10Gb fiber is about 1 year of the extra cost of maintaining a copper network.

    12. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can keep your last mile copper if you want. It's not my money either way. Just don't tell me that the size of a country or its population density have anything to do with the choice between fiber to the neighborhood or curb and fiber to the home. Make no mistake: If it's broadband, then it's at least fiber to the neighborhood. How big the country around that neighborhood is and how many people live there is completely irrelevant.

    13. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by radarskiy · · Score: 1

      Clearly, you cannot offer a service anywhere in Australia unless you are prepared to offer service to every square meter of the Outback.

    14. Re:Meanwhile in sunny Oz by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      you are fucking clueless. the difference between fibre to the node and fibre to the home in a place like Australia is absolutely massive. you are looking an additional expense in the order of 50+ billion dollars. to put that into perspective Australia only has around 8 million houses. So that increases the cost for every house by over $6,000. You don't seem to understand that once you get beyond Sydney Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia population density plummets to the point where we are the most sparsely populated continent out of Antarctica on the planet, that "last mile" is more likely to average that "last 10 miles"

  6. Wow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I just downgraded from 100Mbit cable to 16Mbit DSL because cable is fucking unuseable (~0.1mbit) and 16Mbit is the maximum i can get.

    16Mbit. In 2015. In Germany. Merkel and Telekom, please die a firy death.

    1. Re: Wow. by EnglishDude · · Score: 2

      Be glad. I've got 6Mbit here in the UK only a mile away from a major city. BT has said they have no plans to upgrade our exchange until well past 2020, probably not even until 2025. All neighbouring exchanges in all compass directions has already been upgraded to FTTC this year.

    2. Re:Wow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here's the flipside: I live in a region where Deutsche Glasfaser offers fiber to the home (100Mbps symmetric, truly unlimited and managed to be congestion free), for 35EUR/month, but they only build it if 40% of the households in a given town subscribe. It's saddening to watch town after town fail to pass that threshold. What happened? Shortly before the fiber to the home offer from Deutsche Glasfaser, the former state monopoly Telekom, after years of ignoring pleas for better internet access, finally upgraded these towns to 50Mbps VDSL. People who have been pressuring the local politicians to subsidize a fiber connection that Telekom deemed necessary for faster internet in those towns but didn't want to pay for themselves, these same people are now offered fiber to the home at a very competitive price, but think "meh, VDSL is good enough." With consumers like that in my neighborhood, I honestly find it difficult to blame politicians for the slow internet access.

    3. Re: Wow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you've got a local rural / northern / other source of pork-barrel cash-to-deliver-broadband group try getting onto them. Mine is Coventry, Solihull & Warwickshire Broadband and they are actually pretty good at what they do.

      They will certainly give you a bit of a nod and a wink with regards to BT's unofficial timetable, and they are very interested in creating more accurate (per premises) broadband availability maps rather than rely on rural posts-codes that may cover half a square mile.

    4. Re: Wow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Upgrade to FTTC will not help if the copper / aluminium is crap between the street cabinet and your house.

  7. Capped by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At 100gb. I have to add more letters so this crap doesnt whine.

  8. Great but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So, 10gbit switches are still a bit pricey, not to mention 8K content at 60hz, (including the video cable standards) to support the bandwidth are non-existent at the moment... this is just PR. If your a company with the money for the 10gbit backend and the content to justify it, hey cool.

  9. Not in my street by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Whenever some company talks about super wonderful mega-fast Internet access, I get a bit of a rush.

    I then go and look at their website and discover that the latest offering is not offered in my area.

    Such is life!

  10. Opposite to Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Down Under we are the only developed country to be installing copper to ensure that by 2025 everyone has a 20mbps connection because our pollys are so smart they know how much of a fad this internet thing is.

  11. necessary ? think not. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Netflix current best offer is Full HD, 1920x1080, at 6mbit H264 codes.
    Being generous and some Middle school math tells us the datarate for 8K@120fps will be 384mbit.
    This ignores the the datarate reductions that can be achieved because of a better codec (H265) and scaling advantages. For example: higher FPS means you usually have to encode less and smaller changes per frame, after all most of the time things are not moving very fast, or even at all. Same thing for the resolution.
    In other words, they will likely fit this in 100mbit, when they will finally offer this, in 10 years or so.

    1. Re:necessary ? think not. by ledow · · Score: 1

      One of them.

      In case you haven't noticed, an awful lot of households have not only broadband but multiple devices - PC in the lounge, several laptops across kids and parents, a handful of tablets, not to mention a smartphone each most likely. And not just in the richest households. The number of "Posted from device-name"'s I see on Facebook by people who claim to have no money is stupendous.

      Add in Netflix, CCTV, phone services, streaming TV, etc. and it quickly adds up.

      As time goes on, the bottleneck will be the wireless first - admittedly - but it won't be long before we'll have to get on-board with things like 5Gbps.

      One of those stream you describe will wipe out most UK household's standard broadband today. That means dad can't get online because of kids streaming their movies. Multiply by the number of people in the house and you can easily use up even the top "home" broadband available by someone wanting to watch the football while someone else is watching their favourite movie (we max out somewhere around 152Mbps before you get into specialist packages for the UK).

      How long would 1Gbps buy you? Not much. 5Gbps might buy you more.

      But until there's a product you can actually buy, this is just a pre-Slashvertisement from a never-heard-of company.

    2. Re:necessary ? think not. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Add in Netflix, CCTV, phone services, streaming TV, etc. and it quickly adds up.

      No it really doesn't. your CCTV phone service etc have an almost neglible effect. Streaming adds up some but unless you have 10 people all streaming different stuff even that isn't going to soak up a 100Mbps connection. people seem to have no concept on how much bandwidth most devices and streams actually need.

    3. Re:necessary ? think not. by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      Wireless is certainly a bottleneck for me, but i generate a lot of LAN traffic...
      That's why i wired my house with cat6a, so that everything which can practically be wired, is wired. Even my laptop when i'm sat at my desk is wired, although it will switch to wireless when i disconnect it and move it.

      The problem is that wireless spectrum is shared with close neighbors, and lots of people use wireless for everything because cabling the house is too inconvenient or expensive. I have a bunch of devices which support wireless (tv, audio receivers, set top boxes etc) but otherwise never move anywhere and some of them are quite bandwidth heavy (e.g. streaming video to the stb), having such devices on wireless reduces the available bandwidth not only for your own wireless devices but also your neighbors.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    4. Re:necessary ? think not. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why cat6a? you are never going to have a 10,000BaseT jack on your laptop. Cat5e works just fine and is a lot cheaper. and it is a whole lot easier to manage and run. ends are cheaper, it bends easier, etc...

    5. Re:necessary ? think not. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      difference in cost is not significant at all. you are looking at maybe double the price but even at that it might an extra $100 when cabling your house. Still not much value added but the cost is not significant when cabling your place.

  12. Headline by ledow · · Score: 1

    Sounds more like:

    "Unheard of start-up announces that next year they may have a highly-contended 'up to' 5 Gbps fibre* broadband service available for the price of pretty serious leased line now which would probably give you better service overall anyway"

    The business one is £1500 a month. I can get quite a lot of leased line for that. And quite how many people could afford even the personal one, I'm not sure. I'm a geek and I couldn't.

    *They are British, spell it the British way.

    1. Re:Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The headline-grabbing press release misses out that this is only available to select rural villages, typically where the length of the local loop vastly exceeds the limits of ADSL and the cost of leased line installations is a joke.

      For perspective, with an install location in a town and across the road from a BT exchange, a 100Mbps leased line will set you back £1600/month with a £4000 install. 1Gbps costs £8600/month. 5Gbps for £1500 suddenly looks pretty good, especially if you resell it throughout your village

  13. With a price tag! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    For homeowners, the 5 Gbps H5G package is expected to cost £399 per month.

    At that price, I doubt this will be commonplace even in the few areas they will be available.

  14. British market needs more competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I was unfortunate enough to move into a newly built estate a few years ago, obviously during the planning stages in the late 90s or early 00s robust broadband connections were not high on the agenda, meaning I get 6-10Mbit maximum depending on the time of day. And because this is a new built estate there are no plans to upgrade the infrastructure any time in the next decade or two. I only live a few miles from a huge city too.
    My 4g phone gets higher bandwidth.

    More competition is a good thing.

  15. A deceptive joke by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Even if your NIC and storage can handle 5 gbit per second, you'll only ever receive that transfer speed when it's between you and another customer who fell to the same fraud. You'd be lucky to get even 1/10th of that transfer speed from any service external to Gigaclear's own tiny network.

  16. Finally by kirskau · · Score: 1

    As far as I have heard, most parts of the UK have the worst connections ever. Good to see some improvement there!

    --
    I'm new, what to do?
    1. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Most parts? This is untrue.

      You're from Finland; your internet is, on average, a little bit faster than ours. But you have less than a tenth of the population to cover.

      Cable: quite a lot of the country is outside cable internet range, but then cable is shit and hasn't traditionally been part of UK culture.
      DSL: Most of the UK lives within a reasonable distance of an exchange and is getting good ADSL on a global scale; the average consumer internet speed in 2015 is around 11Mbit/sec, believe it or not (it actually surprised me).

      2014's speeds: UK avg 10.7 Mbit/sec (population 65ish million). Finland: 11.7 Mbit/sec (population 5.5ish million).

      A not-statistically-insignificant part of the population lives in geographically difficult locations, though -- on hillsides, on islands, in small villages in places like Cornwall. We have thousand-year-old winding roads, one of the longer-established phone systems in the world, and a very high population density, so there are problems to solve for sure; a small proportion are stuck with satellite internet or wimax. But 'most' and 'worst ... ever', not at all.

  17. Yet in the USA.... by Lumpy · · Score: 1

    Most people cant get more than 25mbps. Even if Comcast is selling you more, you CANT GET more than that in most places.

    Honestly, the govt needs to force those assholes to spend money on their backbone.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:Yet in the USA.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nonsense. Most people can get 100mbps if they can afford it. Whereas most areas cannot get decent network speeds. The majority of the populated live in densely populated areas, which is where the infrastructure is needed the most. If your sole option is Comcrap, do something about it.

    2. Re:Yet in the USA.... by jratcliffe · · Score: 1

      Pretty much everyone in the Comcast, Time Warner Cable, or Charter footprints (about 2/3 of the US, combined) can get at least 100Mbps, if they want it. Charter doesn't even sell anything below 60Mbps anymore, and Comcast and TWC's standard package is now 50Mbps.

      The competitive issue is the much lower speeds that most telcos offer.

      Also, the backbone isn't the issue, it's the last mile.

    3. Re:Yet in the USA.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are several cities suing comcast for not being able to deliver what they say they can. Or are you our Comcast PR rep here on slashdot and slinging made up crap to help the company PR?

    4. Re:Yet in the USA.... by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      Because they sell it does not mean you get it. I strongly suggest you learn about the subject first.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    5. Re:Yet in the USA.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've got 115-120 Mbps from Comcast (I regularly download YouTube vids at 14 MB/s). And CenturyLink has gigabit fiber in my city.

      That said, all this shit about data caps and refusal to expand services is correct. If you've already got electric or telephone lines, you can get a fiber line. Yeah, it'll cost money, but it cost money to run telephone/electricity out to farms in North Dakota anyway.

  18. 8K isn't going to need these kinds of speeds by jratcliffe · · Score: 1

    Even if there's zero improvement in compression by the time 8K rolls around, it'll take around 30Mbps. So, unless you have 170 TVs in your home, 5Gbps is going to be overkill.

  19. Channel Bonding by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1

    Until then, everyone will be capped at 1gig per device.

    That's not actually correct. Thanks to channel bonding I have a Synology Disk array which has 4 Gbps connection all using inexpensive consumer grade hardware. Channel bonding 1Gb is far cheaper than 10Gb ethernet although with the new 10Gbase-T format this too is now becoming more affordable.

    1. Re:Channel Bonding by Bengie · · Score: 1

      10 1Gb ports is more expensive than 1 10Gb port, but 5Gb ports are slightly cheaper than 1 10Gb port. The bigger issue is getting channel bonding that works at Layer 3/4 and not 2. Many implementation of bonding load balance on destination MAC addresses, and your gateway only has on address, so all WAN traffic uses the same link and does not get distributed.

    2. Re:Channel Bonding by DamnStupidElf · · Score: 1

      After dealing with channel bonding where one link would spontaneously become 100% busy while the other three hung around 10% busy every time one VM wanted to copy files somewhere, I decided channel bonding is basically useless.

    3. Re:Channel Bonding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Channel bonding doesn't really help when you have single stream (like single VM copying stuff to somewhere), but it is useful with multiple (e.g. file server serving 20 clients or between two switches).

    4. Re:Channel Bonding by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      NIC Teaming and NIC bonding are two different things. What you're talking about is NIC Teaming. What's needed is Bonding. But that has to be supported all the way from the NIC, to the modem, and everything else in between (switch, router, etc)

      What is the difference between NIC Teaming and Bonding

      >NIC Teaming uses one of two methods, failover, and load-balancing with fail over. With a team you do not get a single 2gb connection (with two 1 gb NICs). You get two pipes that act as one, but merely are load balancing the traffic over each NIC, and each NIC acts as a fail over to the other. If you transfer a 100 gb file, you are not going to get 2gb of throughputyou still only get 1 gb, but you will not kill the network performance because the second NIC is still available to service other traffic.

      True bonding would be taking two NICs and bonding them together to get a single fat pipe. This requires the switch to support this as well. I have not seen much bonding in the server worldmore done at the network level.

      VMWare acts the same way. It is purely load balancing and fail over. Since VMWare is done at the OS level, you can mix and match different vendor NICs in a team. I have done this without issue. Just make sure they are on the HCL.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
  20. "Gigabit service" is FRAUD. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 1

    "5 Gbps" is only the electrical connection speed. The actual speed of delivery is dependent on many factors. Nothing over the internet is delivered at that speed.

    1. Re:"Gigabit service" is FRAUD. by skovnymfe · · Score: 1

      "Nothing" is a very big word that should be used with care and only by people who know what they're talking about.

  21. The bitchslapping of Dave420... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Everyone who does use HOSTS files (myself included) doesn't use your software" - by dave420 (699308) on Thursday November 05, 2015 @07:30AM (#50869743)

    Some /.'ers made you "eat your words": They use my hosts file engine saying it's good vs. your bullshit:

    "his hosts program is actually pretty good" - by xenotransplant (4179011) on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:34PM (#50287195)

    "I like your host file system." - by Karmashock (2415832) on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @03:57PM (#50489401)

    "APK is kinda right... I've given up on JS based adblocking and gone to blackholing in /etc/hosts, just like it was back in the 90s. The computational load has gotten intolerable for any ad-blocking using JS. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works." - by bmo (77928) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @11:30AM (#50736071)

    "his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources" by alexgieg (948359) on Friday September 25, 2015 @09:57AM (#50596461)

    (LMAO... you FAIL as usual, again, vs. me!)

    * What's that you said I have quoted from you above Dave420?

    APK

    P.S.=> Thanks for making me look good: You always say something I can put away with undeniable facts that prove you wrong... lol!

    ... apk

  22. Lot's of borads don't really have the PCIe to make by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    Lot's of borads don't really have the PCIe to make full use of 10GB-e other then server ones.

    X16 to video and then X4 dmi shaded with storage and other I/O.

  23. Live 8K tv will need a lot of bandwith by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    Live 8K tv will need a lot of bandwith

    1. Re:Live 8K tv will need a lot of bandwith by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Live 8k TV is not even on the horizon. hell even 4k is rare. 8k also would only be looking at around 100Mbps with current tech and still we won't be seeing that as a common stream for a decade or more, it certainly isn't enough to justify this sort of bandwidth even if it was available now.

  24. Oo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And my ISP will still be charging me £20.31/month for 500 kB/s down, 100 kB/s up...

  25. Trufax by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A lot of people seem to think this will be for the end user, watching Netflix videos, etc.

    It's actually so the UK government can snoop on people more effecitvely when they install bandwidth heavy CCTV in every home to "prevent child abuse and terrorism."

  26. IoT "telemetry" uses a LOT of data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The toasters and toothbrushes of the future equipped with ultra mega high resolution 360 degree hyperspectral light field creep vision "sensors", sophisticated "voice control" able to locate footsteps anywhere in the home while continuously "streaming" high resolution 64k holographic advertisements for even "better" toasters and toothbrushes.

    I can't wait to fax in my order for a new 8k NSA approved spy-o-vision TV ... the future is going to be AWESOME.