And this is a governmental problem. Why are existing companies allowed to "derail" anyone who wants to compete with them?
I agree. When someone mugs me, I don't blame the mugger. I blame the police.
If the mugger mugs you every day while a policeman stands by and purposely looks the other direction, you should probably blame the police more than the mugger. The mugger is looking out for his own best interests, he has a family to feed after all, but you are paying the police to look out for *your* interests.
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?
If you didn't know what internet service was like in other countries, how would you know if yours was good or bad?
Besides, as other countries get their own cheap fast internet, enough people will question their providers and government why they are stuck paying $80/month for laggy 6mbit DSL when the rest of the world pays $50 for gigabit fiber.
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.
So-net Entertainment has been in the ISP business since the late 1990's, so it's not as though they are just now entering the space.
Canada truly is the 3rd world of internet access.
Personally, I will wait for Samsung's internet services, Japan itself is failing in innovation all around.
So your country has slow internet that takes 30 seconds to load a mostly text web page, but Japan is failing in innovation because they've started deploying fast and affordable 2 gigabit internet? And you're waiting for a Korean company to rescue you from your own country's mediocrity?
2G down, 1G up is only 1.5x Google Fiber...Upload counts, dammit!
Not to most residential users. As long as the upstream can keep up with the ACK's, most people care a lot more about downstream bandwidth than upstream. Which is part of what makes residential fiber so attractive to Google - most of their pipes are sending traffic out of Google's network, so they have a lot of "free" unused inbound capacity that they can give to residential users. Youtube's ratio of outbound to inbound traffic must be huge.
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.)
Including TV's blu ray players, computers, phones, tablet, etc, I have 10 internet connected devices in my household (add another 5 to include IP security cameras which aren't networked, but not internet connected) - of those, at least 4 are gigabit ethernet capable (not sure about the TV + Bluray players)
So even if one device by itself can't use 1Gbit of network bandwidth, multiple devices can.
San Francisco has a higher population density than Tokyo
Not really. The daytime population of San Francisco is high, but the number of people who actually live there is low. If you don't believe me, try to get a bus after sunset.
Have you ever been to SF? There are a lot of commuters for sure, but a lot of people live here too. The resident population is around 800,000 - or around 17,000 per square mile. There are "only" about 400,000 commuters that come into the city each day.
Muni runs most lines until around midnight. Most lines don't drop from their commute frequencies until after 7 or 8pm. Less frequent bus service at night doesn't mean that not many people live in the city, since even city dwellers commute by Muni too.
The potential infrastructure available to deployment in the US vs Japan is vastly different. Japan has a population density of 836 people per square mile. That's over 1 person per acre. The US has a population density of 86 per square mile. The difference is a factor of ten. That dramatically reduces the cost per person to deploy, because every mile of fiber can reach many, many more people. In the US, it only becomes cost effective to deliver high speed services in very limited areas. In Japan you can reach a much greater percentage of the population with high speed services.
Then don't provide high speed fiber in unoccupied farmland and forests (to who? Birds? Tractors?) and concentrate on the cities. Rural internet is a completely separate issue from providing it in population centers.
Sure, however once the speed of the connection from your house to your ISPs PoP gets over a certain speed it stops being a significant factor in the overall user experiance. Other factors including limited bandwidth at the server, bandwidth limitations in the ISPs (both client side and server side) networks, limited speed of your hard drive, human time to select things in the user interface, time for servers to process requests and so-on become the limiting factors on the overall performance.
Gee, I wonder if Sony can possibly come up with a reason why they think multigigabit fiber to the home would be useful?
Whereas if they put it in San Francisco or New York, they'd have to expand, unless the plan is to just provide it at the Embarcadero or Manhattan. If they started in Manhattan, ultimately, they'd want/have to spread it out to Queens, NJ, Upstate, CT and so on. Or in San Francisco, extend it to the peninsula, Marin county, Oakland, Berkeley and rest of Alameda and ultimately Santa Clara counties. Not something they'd run into much of in Japan - there, each city would be an island of fiber, and not have to be extensively extended. Such an exercise would be similarly feasable in South Korea - service Seoul and Busan and a few other major cities.
Why would they "have" to expand? Is someone Forcing Google to provide fiber in Austin since Kansas City was such a success?
Which is an apples to pineapples comparison. Japan is a compact country with a high population density and that too in a few densely populated metros, so drawing fiber lines to just those major metros is nowhere near as big a challenge as getting vast open cities in the US such as Kansas City or Austin connected. Hedwards is therefore right - comparing a Sony setup in Japan w/ a Google setup in the US is therefore meaningless in terms of demonstrating that 'Google should be doing better'. Also, how are the costs being compared - like what percentage of an average family income in Japan would be spent on this, vs that percentage of an average family income in the US?
The above story is useful in itself in describing how internet connectivity outside wireless is getting upgraded in Japan. But it's worthless if the idea is to compare it w/ Google projects in the US, or any other company's project in any other country.
If density were the real issue, NYC, Chicago, Boston, SF, Wash DC would all have cheap residential gigabit fiber.
The numbers are a few years old, but still pretty relevant.
Seoul is ~16,000 people per square kilometer with > 17.5 million residents Tokyo/Yokohama is ~4,700 people per square kilometer with > 33 million residents Los Angeles is ~2,750 people per square kilometer with ~12 million residents New York City is ~2,050 people per square kilometer with ~18 million residents
The United States has nowhere near the concentrations or densities of people that Japan and South Korea has. On top of that, the USA has vast distances of relatively nothingness that you need to account for as well... you have to look at the big picture of it all.
I think your figures are looking at metro areas, not cities -- Wikipedia says NY population density is 27,550/sq mi (10,640/km2),
Those vast areas of nothingness don't really matter if you're rolling out fiber to a city, you don't have to roll out fiber to Kansas if you are rolling it out in New York City.
I think we all understand the difference in population density and how that affects the cost to provide infrastructure services. That plays a big part in how places in Japan can offer better price and performance than places in the US.
So what's the excuse in NY, SF, Chicago, Boston and other high density cities that have a population density greater than Tokyo? If Google can wire up low-density Kansas City and Austin, why can't the telcos figure out how to make money wiring up a neighborhood full of high density apartment buildings?
Japan has incredibly high population densities relative to the U.S. (same with South Korea), this comparison is pointless. Fiber is expensive over distances, which the U.S. has a lot of.
San Francisco has a higher population density than Tokyo, yet my choices for "high speed" internet are 20mbit Comcast or "up to" 6mbit DSL service from AT&T. U-verse should be "coming soon".
So it's not just density - the USA has plenty of dense cities without ubiquitous and cheap gigabit internet.
Yes, but what's the point of comparing it with Google's fiber when they aren't even in the same part of the world?
Unless they're planning to set up their network in a part of the world where Google is also thinking about setting up a network, the comparison is completely meaningless.
Because Google is held up as the shining example of what the telcos *could* be providing us... yet in Japan Sony is offering twice the speed for less cost. So maybe Google's offering is not the holy grail of home internet and telcos should be doing better.
Certainly, if laws "currently on the books" were enforced (both "to the letter" and "in the spirit of"), we would have a better chance of preventing attacks such as this.
Ahh yes, well we can all dream of the day when each person has their own government owned drone to follow them around that can instantly issue a ticket for all infractions of the law. What a utopian world that would be!
Maybe if we had a more reasonable penal code, absolute enforcement of the laws would be a good thing, but when you can break dozens of laws in your every day life without even being aware, that's a sign that there are too many laws, giving police too much power to decide when to enforce them. No one can even tell you how many laws there are, let alone recite them all. There are thousands of criminal laws just at the federal level, spread over tens of thousands of pages. Add in the government rules that can also make you a a law breaker, there are hundreds of thousands.
And you think we'd be better off if every law was enforced "to the letter"?
Many of those devices are also self contained computers with everything you need to use them included at that price. Not making a dumb comparison, just pointing out that there are flaws in the reasoning behind the last sentence of TFS.
So you're saying that a much different device at a much different price point has much different performance?
Tell me again how gun legislation would have prevented this???
Why stop at gun legislation, I would like a full accounting of all laws that are completely unrelated to an explosion (whether intentional or not), and how those laws could have prevented this.
Yes, because conversion to and from an HVDC line 100% efficient.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
The same article said a high voltage AC line would be about 90% efficient over the same distance, so I'd guess that the conversion from HVAC to HVDC doesn't make the system less than 90% or they'd just stick with AC to keep efficiency up.
But since you must know what you're talking about, what is the conversion efficiency from HVAC to HVDC?
Electricity is not something we can efficiently transport from places where it's abundant to places where it's needed. Unused excess electricity is a waste.
A 2000km HVDC line loses about 5% of its energy to heat. 95% efficiency over 2000km lines seems pretty efficient.
Basement-dwelling usually does not go hand-in-hand with making useful stuff. There's a certain rough nature to proper engineering and being coddled in a space without a proper shop and ventilation isn't conducive to creativity in the physical dimensions.
But it *is* conducive to being coddled in a spaceship without a proper shop and ventilation. Sending a team of first rate engineers does no good if they go crazy and suicidal 6 months into a 20 year mission.
You're very optimistic. You're talking about humans who lived and survived in harsh environments.
Most modern humans haven't walked hundreds of miles to more survivable areas, and couldn't even feed themselves if given a knife in the wild. In an ELE, a high guess would be a handful of small tribes per continent surviving. In an ELE, the dead don't just disappear. They leave massive fields of rotting flesh, feeding disease ridden bugs and other scavengers.
I don't think the main problem is knife wielding skills, most people can learn how to hunt and fish, or learn by example from others. But food supply. The ecosystem has changed significantly since the American Indians lived off the land -- there's a lot fewer game animals than there used to be. Modern agriculture relies heavily on technology, so any post apocalyptic agriculture production will yield a fraction of the food that it does today.
It would take a die-off of around 90% of the North American population to get population levels back to the level before the Europeans became the first illegal immigrants in the "New World".
Or, learn how to survive on this planet before going out and colonizing another one.
There are things that could happen that would make it very difficult if not impossible to survive on this planet no matter how much we've learned about surviving. Like a supervolcano eruption putting enough ash in the air to shade the entire planet, sudden release of ocean methane stores, a large asteroid strike, etc.
Any of these events are unlikely, but any of them could happen tomorrow. Even if they don't lead to extinction, the collapse of civilization would prevent us from leaving the planet for a long long time.
Humans don't actually handle low G all that well.. Vision degrades. Bones weaken. Muscle tone is lost. It would be many generations in that environment before we adapted or evolved to live comfortably in it. We need gravity. We need bugs (and the whole ecosystem). We need changing weather. Without the later two, you won't have well sustained food crops.
You don't have to live in zero or even low gravity for long-term space travel - just design the ship to provide 1G of artificial gravity. it would take a large ship, but you'd probably want a large ship if you're going to be living on it for your entire life. You could design it as a large rotating ring, but It needn't be a complete ring, you could have 2 living pods connected by a long beam.
You'd need a radius of around 225m to provide 1G at 2rpm of revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is a governmental problem. Why are existing companies allowed to "derail" anyone who wants to compete with them?
I agree. When someone mugs me, I don't blame the mugger. I blame the police.
If the mugger mugs you every day while a policeman stands by and purposely looks the other direction, you should probably blame the police more than the mugger. The mugger is looking out for his own best interests, he has a family to feed after all, but you are paying the police to look out for *your* interests.
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?
If you didn't know what internet service was like in other countries, how would you know if yours was good or bad?
Besides, as other countries get their own cheap fast internet, enough people will question their providers and government why they are stuck paying $80/month for laggy 6mbit DSL when the rest of the world pays $50 for gigabit fiber.
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.
So-net Entertainment has been in the ISP business since the late 1990's, so it's not as though they are just now entering the space.
Canada truly is the 3rd world of internet access.
Personally, I will wait for Samsung's internet services, Japan itself is failing in innovation all around.
So your country has slow internet that takes 30 seconds to load a mostly text web page, but Japan is failing in innovation because they've started deploying fast and affordable 2 gigabit internet? And you're waiting for a Korean company to rescue you from your own country's mediocrity?
2G down, 1G up is only 1.5x Google Fiber...Upload counts, dammit!
Not to most residential users. As long as the upstream can keep up with the ACK's, most people care a lot more about downstream bandwidth than upstream. Which is part of what makes residential fiber so attractive to Google - most of their pipes are sending traffic out of Google's network, so they have a lot of "free" unused inbound capacity that they can give to residential users. Youtube's ratio of outbound to inbound traffic must be huge.
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.)
Including TV's blu ray players, computers, phones, tablet, etc, I have 10 internet connected devices in my household (add another 5 to include IP security cameras which aren't networked, but not internet connected) - of those, at least 4 are gigabit ethernet capable (not sure about the TV + Bluray players)
So even if one device by itself can't use 1Gbit of network bandwidth, multiple devices can.
San Francisco has a higher population density than Tokyo
Not really. The daytime population of San Francisco is high, but the number of people who actually live there is low. If you don't believe me, try to get a bus after sunset.
Have you ever been to SF? There are a lot of commuters for sure, but a lot of people live here too. The resident population is around 800,000 - or around 17,000 per square mile. There are "only" about 400,000 commuters that come into the city each day.
Muni runs most lines until around midnight. Most lines don't drop from their commute frequencies until after 7 or 8pm. Less frequent bus service at night doesn't mean that not many people live in the city, since even city dwellers commute by Muni too.
The potential infrastructure available to deployment in the US vs Japan is vastly different. Japan has a population density of 836 people per square mile. That's over 1 person per acre. The US has a population density of 86 per square mile. The difference is a factor of ten. That dramatically reduces the cost per person to deploy, because every mile of fiber can reach many, many more people. In the US, it only becomes cost effective to deliver high speed services in very limited areas. In Japan you can reach a much greater percentage of the population with high speed services.
Then don't provide high speed fiber in unoccupied farmland and forests (to who? Birds? Tractors?) and concentrate on the cities. Rural internet is a completely separate issue from providing it in population centers.
Sure, however once the speed of the connection from your house to your ISPs PoP gets over a certain speed it stops being a significant factor in the overall user experiance. Other factors including limited bandwidth at the server, bandwidth limitations in the ISPs (both client side and server side) networks, limited speed of your hard drive, human time to select things in the user interface, time for servers to process requests and so-on become the limiting factors on the overall performance.
Gee, I wonder if Sony can possibly come up with a reason why they think multigigabit fiber to the home would be useful?
Plus most American cities have much older infrastructure under ground, making wiring more costly, difficult and time consuming.
Many cities in Japan are older than the country of the USA. Tokyo is over 400 years old.
Ok, to be fair, Tokyo underwent significant rebuilding after the war, but still, that was 60 years ago.
Whereas if they put it in San Francisco or New York, they'd have to expand, unless the plan is to just provide it at the Embarcadero or Manhattan. If they started in Manhattan, ultimately, they'd want/have to spread it out to Queens, NJ, Upstate, CT and so on. Or in San Francisco, extend it to the peninsula, Marin county, Oakland, Berkeley and rest of Alameda and ultimately Santa Clara counties. Not something they'd run into much of in Japan - there, each city would be an island of fiber, and not have to be extensively extended. Such an exercise would be similarly feasable in South Korea - service Seoul and Busan and a few other major cities.
Why would they "have" to expand? Is someone Forcing Google to provide fiber in Austin since Kansas City was such a success?
Is there really a noticeable difference between 1Gbps and 2?
I'm not a network engineer, but by my calculations, 2 Gigabit fiber is twice as fast as 1 Gigabit. But please double check my numbers:
2 / 1 = 2
Which is an apples to pineapples comparison. Japan is a compact country with a high population density and that too in a few densely populated metros, so drawing fiber lines to just those major metros is nowhere near as big a challenge as getting vast open cities in the US such as Kansas City or Austin connected. Hedwards is therefore right - comparing a Sony setup in Japan w/ a Google setup in the US is therefore meaningless in terms of demonstrating that 'Google should be doing better'. Also, how are the costs being compared - like what percentage of an average family income in Japan would be spent on this, vs that percentage of an average family income in the US?
The above story is useful in itself in describing how internet connectivity outside wireless is getting upgraded in Japan. But it's worthless if the idea is to compare it w/ Google projects in the US, or any other company's project in any other country.
If density were the real issue, NYC, Chicago, Boston, SF, Wash DC would all have cheap residential gigabit fiber.
If you look at cities instead of metro areas:
NY: 27,550/sq mi (10,640/km2)
Tokyo: 6,000/km2 (16,000/sq mi)
The numbers are a few years old, but still pretty relevant.
Seoul is ~16,000 people per square kilometer with > 17.5 million residents
Tokyo/Yokohama is ~4,700 people per square kilometer with > 33 million residents
Los Angeles is ~2,750 people per square kilometer with ~12 million residents
New York City is ~2,050 people per square kilometer with ~18 million residents
The United States has nowhere near the concentrations or densities of people that Japan and South Korea has. On top of that, the USA has vast distances of relatively nothingness that you need to account for as well... you have to look at the big picture of it all.
Source: http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-125.html
I think your figures are looking at metro areas, not cities -- Wikipedia says NY population density is 27,550/sq mi (10,640/km2),
Those vast areas of nothingness don't really matter if you're rolling out fiber to a city, you don't have to roll out fiber to Kansas if you are rolling it out in New York City.
I think we all understand the difference in population density and how that affects the cost to provide infrastructure services. That plays a big part in how places in Japan can offer better price and performance than places in the US.
So what's the excuse in NY, SF, Chicago, Boston and other high density cities that have a population density greater than Tokyo? If Google can wire up low-density Kansas City and Austin, why can't the telcos figure out how to make money wiring up a neighborhood full of high density apartment buildings?
Japan has incredibly high population densities relative to the U.S. (same with South Korea), this comparison is pointless. Fiber is expensive over distances, which the U.S. has a lot of.
San Francisco has a higher population density than Tokyo, yet my choices for "high speed" internet are 20mbit Comcast or "up to" 6mbit DSL service from AT&T. U-verse should be "coming soon".
So it's not just density - the USA has plenty of dense cities without ubiquitous and cheap gigabit internet.
Yes, but what's the point of comparing it with Google's fiber when they aren't even in the same part of the world?
Unless they're planning to set up their network in a part of the world where Google is also thinking about setting up a network, the comparison is completely meaningless.
Because Google is held up as the shining example of what the telcos *could* be providing us... yet in Japan Sony is offering twice the speed for less cost. So maybe Google's offering is not the holy grail of home internet and telcos should be doing better.
Certainly, if laws "currently on the books" were enforced (both "to the letter" and "in the spirit of"), we would have a better chance of preventing attacks such as this.
Ahh yes, well we can all dream of the day when each person has their own government owned drone to follow them around that can instantly issue a ticket for all infractions of the law. What a utopian world that would be!
Maybe if we had a more reasonable penal code, absolute enforcement of the laws would be a good thing, but when you can break dozens of laws in your every day life without even being aware, that's a sign that there are too many laws, giving police too much power to decide when to enforce them. No one can even tell you how many laws there are, let alone recite them all. There are thousands of criminal laws just at the federal level, spread over tens of thousands of pages. Add in the government rules that can also make you a a law breaker, there are hundreds of thousands.
And you think we'd be better off if every law was enforced "to the letter"?
Many of those devices are also self contained computers with everything you need to use them included at that price. Not making a dumb comparison, just pointing out that there are flaws in the reasoning behind the last sentence of TFS.
So you're saying that a much different device at a much different price point has much different performance?
Tell me again how gun legislation would have prevented this???
Why stop at gun legislation, I would like a full accounting of all laws that are completely unrelated to an explosion (whether intentional or not), and how those laws could have prevented this.
Yes, because conversion to and from an HVDC line 100% efficient.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
The same article said a high voltage AC line would be about 90% efficient over the same distance, so I'd guess that the conversion from HVAC to HVDC doesn't make the system less than 90% or they'd just stick with AC to keep efficiency up.
But since you must know what you're talking about, what is the conversion efficiency from HVAC to HVDC?
Electricity is not something we can efficiently transport from places where it's abundant to places where it's needed. Unused excess electricity is a waste.
A 2000km HVDC line loses about 5% of its energy to heat. 95% efficiency over 2000km lines seems pretty efficient.
Basement-dwelling usually does not go hand-in-hand with making useful stuff. There's a certain rough nature to proper engineering and being coddled in a space without a proper shop and ventilation isn't conducive to creativity in the physical dimensions.
But it *is* conducive to being coddled in a spaceship without a proper shop and ventilation. Sending a team of first rate engineers does no good if they go crazy and suicidal 6 months into a 20 year mission.
You're very optimistic. You're talking about humans who lived and survived in harsh environments.
Most modern humans haven't walked hundreds of miles to more survivable areas, and couldn't even feed themselves if given a knife in the wild. In an ELE, a high guess would be a handful of small tribes per continent surviving. In an ELE, the dead don't just disappear. They leave massive fields of rotting flesh, feeding disease ridden bugs and other scavengers.
I don't think the main problem is knife wielding skills, most people can learn how to hunt and fish, or learn by example from others. But food supply. The ecosystem has changed significantly since the American Indians lived off the land -- there's a lot fewer game animals than there used to be. Modern agriculture relies heavily on technology, so any post apocalyptic agriculture production will yield a fraction of the food that it does today.
It would take a die-off of around 90% of the North American population to get population levels back to the level before the Europeans became the first illegal immigrants in the "New World".
Or, learn how to survive on this planet before going out and colonizing another one.
There are things that could happen that would make it very difficult if not impossible to survive on this planet no matter how much we've learned about surviving. Like a supervolcano eruption putting enough ash in the air to shade the entire planet, sudden release of ocean methane stores, a large asteroid strike, etc.
Any of these events are unlikely, but any of them could happen tomorrow. Even if they don't lead to extinction, the collapse of civilization would prevent us from leaving the planet for a long long time.
Humans don't actually handle low G all that well.. Vision degrades. Bones weaken. Muscle tone is lost. It would be many generations in that environment before we adapted or evolved to live comfortably in it. We need gravity. We need bugs (and the whole ecosystem). We need changing weather. Without the later two, you won't have well sustained food crops.
You don't have to live in zero or even low gravity for long-term space travel - just design the ship to provide 1G of artificial gravity. it would take a large ship, but you'd probably want a large ship if you're going to be living on it for your entire life. You could design it as a large rotating ring, but It needn't be a complete ring, you could have 2 living pods connected by a long beam.
You'd need a radius of around 225m to provide 1G at 2rpm of revolution.