For someone I have never met, I sure am jealous of Sacramento, CA.-resident, Jim Husman, who according to his phone company, SureWest Communications has one of the fastest residential Internet connections in America.
Actually make that the fastest symmetric residential connection – for there are some parts of the country where Cablevision and Verizon FiOS have similar asymmetric speed offerings.
SureWest’s press release claims (a boast that hasn’t been really verified) that Husman is the first customer of the independent telecom operator to get a over 50 megabits per second upstream and downstream speeds on this new broadband network.
Now this ain’t cheap: $260 a month! Throw in extras like digital TV, high definition TV, local and long distance telephone, and PCS wireless and your monthly bill could hit a whopping $415 a month. Given that Sacramento is a couple of hours away from San Francisco, we wonder when our local incumbents – Comcast and AT&T – will boost our speeds. We are still stuck at 6 Mbps! Sigh!
Lol, I am on vacation in india and broadband here means 256k or 512k. I am using my blackberry on airtel’s gprs network to respond.
What we need is highspeed wireless 🙂 Then I can work anywhere – say like south beach.
Okay when I get back to Miami I am going to look for 50mb up and down. Go surewest …Sweeeet.
The speed in SF area is still much better than whats availabe in India (in the name of broadband)at the moment…
One of my co-workers lives in Sac Town and has service through SureWest. While he doesn’t get 50mb (not sure what rateplan he’s on), he regularly gets 10mb in both directions. Furthermore, his upstream is frequently better than his downstream. Still very impressive, if you ask me.
Wow, 50mb.. and to think Time Warner Cable here in Nebraska just allowed us to get a premium 10mb service for an additional $9.95/mo. Road Runner Turbo Service with Cable AND/OR Digital Phone = $54.90/mo. That doesn’t include my digital cable, 20 HD channels, movie channels and DVR box. So I won’t even mention what my current monthly total is.
Where I live in Sweden, I can get 100 Mbps symmetric Internet access for $60 a month.
The US is way behind Europe in this respect. I currently have 24/8, in my previous apartment everybody had 100mbps (fibre, even) synchrounous. I expect about 20% of swedish broadband cusomers can get 100mbps, usually at a pricepoint around $40-60/month.
Move to Sweden! 🙂
Here in Latvia, I get 5Mbps down, 512kbps up on DSL for around USD 35 per month. My wife and I keep a place in Stockholm where 100 Mbps down and 10 Mbps (??)up is part of the rent (the fee for a coop apartment). In parts of Riga, Lattelecom already offers 10 Mbps, as do several competing ISPs. It looks like my Riga connection will jump to 10 Mbps as IPTV is launched (for ordinary TV sets, with new modems and decoders). 24 Mbps DSL is around the corner. 3.6 Mbps HSDPA is available from three mobile operators, as is 1 – 2 Mbps EV DO internet. Both of these wireless services may see speed leaps during 2007. Alas, poor Om :).
how on earth are you people getting these blazing speeds? surely you’re not using pots lines or cable, but fiber?
And in the UAE, residential broadband remains at 512K with some lucky people on 1 mbps
Marketing information is sometimes deceiving so here are a couple things to note about Surewest offering; the 50mbps is on their network, not on the internet, meaning you aren’t guaranteed a 50meg pipe to the internet, it would only take 80 subscribers to eat up their entire upstream capacity. They purchase upstream transit and have around 4gigs of capacity connecting their network to the rest of the world, two from L3 and two from someone else…i think Sprint but could be mistaken. They use the fiber to the home to deliver every service they offer; VoiP, HDTV, data, etc.
Considering how many FTTH projects meant to deliver triple play, this isn’t that big a stretch really.
This is only impressive if you consider there to be a wealth of content and service available at their head end…. Internet performance would likely be as poor as any other oversubscribed ISP.
Om, you forgot about the other Cable TV company serving San Francisco and some of the cities in San Mateo County – Astound.Net, formerly known as RCN of California.
Today, Astound/RCN is offering Internet Cable Modem downstream speeds of 10 Mbps in parts of San Francisco, Daly City, South San Francisco, Burlingame, Redwood City and San Mateo.
REMEMBER – Everything that we are WOWing and OOOHing and AAHing over at the moment – will probably be mainstream in one decade
I just wanted to say hi and I liked your article about me. One thing i wanted to add was its actually 260 a month with the tv included in the bundle. I use a voip service to save a bit. It really was worth the upgrade tho.
Thanks for the nice read!
Once again, I have FiOS at 30 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up for $54.95 / month.
It’s not actually $170 a month anywhere that I know of. For some crazy reason, Verizon advertises that insane rate as their “national” rate, but here in Northern VA at least, it’s much cheaper in reality.
Japan too has had 50 Mbps since 2004, for $30 a month
Actually, I think might have the fastest residential internet connection in the US. I have a fiber gigabit connection to my home from Paxio.net and I easily hit the download limits of local servers (eg: the local LUG’s ftp server that can only do 100mb). Sorry, FIOS folks, but your connection isn’t that uber.