Some swedes are living the mega-broadband future, according to this Reuters’ article. One of them is Rainer Kinnunen, a 31-year-old student who has a 10-megabit per second people into his house. He buys the service from Bredbandsbolaget, which offers a 100 megabits per second monthly package for $80 a month as well.
Since going superhigh-speed, Kinnunen has set up two computer servers in his apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Eskilstuna. One supplies his digital photos to friends and family. On the other, he duels it out for hours a day with other players of the “Half-Life: Day of Defeat” online war game. “If my child wants a movie, I can download it instantly,” he said. “And I haven’t been to the neighborhood music store in years.”
In Asia we know the high speeds mean over 20 megabits per second, but the trend is catching on in Europe as well. TeliaSonera sells an 8-megabit service that analysts refer to as multimegabit broadband, and so does Italy’s e.Biscom. I wonder when our companies are going to wake up and say, dude here is a few more megabits of bandwidth at no cost to you. I mean I pay $50 a month for 1.5 megabit/second connection to Speakeasy, but I would gladly spend another $25 if i could get a 10 megabit connection.
I was checking Speakeasy’s pricing last night and was surprised to see that they’re offering 6Mbps / 768kbps service at my location. It’s not cheap, but it’s not horrible either.
yup i saw that too. it seems quite enticing – 6 megabits per second, but in the end i decided the price was too much for the speed. add another 10 megabits and yeah, i will pay more
Om,
Speakeasy is overpriced. Their 1.5 mbps connection is only half as fast as Comcast in the Bay Area and they’re close in price. You might want to consider switching, especially if Comcast has a bundled package.
In regards to the article, this is definitely a trend catching on in Europe and hopefully U.S. companies will upgrade their service in the next few years. I know that in Sweden you can get a 10 Mbps connection for the same price as a cable/DSL line here in the states.
Mike – good points you bring up. well i am now stuck with the deal because of the stupid annual contract i signed with them. it hurts to be locked into that deal.