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UK's Gigaclear Launches 5 Gbps Fiber Broadband Service (networkworld.com)
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.”
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.
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
"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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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."
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.
Live 8K tv will need a lot of bandwith
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)
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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."
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.
Clearly, you cannot offer a service anywhere in Australia unless you are prepared to offer service to every square meter of the Outback.