[qi:051] Swedish grannies are connecting to the net at 40 gigabits per second life; 100 megabit per seconds are becoming common place in Japan and Korea; and even French are dreaming of an ultra-fast fiber future. And yet, in the US we are all stuck in the slow lane, settling for speeds between 768 kbps to 8 megabits per second. I have often wondered what it would be like to have a 100 megabits per second, and what I would do with that much bandwidth.
So last month when Verizon (VZ) folks got in touch and talked about their 100 megabits per second experiments (over FiOS fiber) I was intrigued. (Of course that doesn’t mean that your FiOS connection is going to be getting an upgrade anytime soon.)
They said I could do an e-interview with Richard S. Guziewicz, one of the two Verizon employees testing this testing this experimental set-up. I just couldn’t resist asking him about the 100 Mbps-life, and if that much speed had really changed his online life. (His connection is 100 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up.) I took out some relevant bits from the email interview (sanitized by Verizon PR) for this post.
Since for the most part the Internet and most services that use the Internet don’t run that fast, it would be tough to say it’s a life-changing experience right now. The up-front answer is it works well. I use my 100 Mbps FiOS connection for typical web access (e-mail, news, etc), some online video, as well as for work (VPN access).
The applications of today are clearly optimized for our 3-to-6 megabits per second connections. From Facebook to MySpace to YouTube – they all work well on what passes for broadband in the US and Europe. Guziewicz pointed out that despite higher speeds, the usage behavior hadn’t really changed.
Nothing that new yet. I’ve found that all the things I did on my PC with 15Mbps service, I can do with 100Mbps. If I visited web sites that were optimized to allow true 100 Mbps downloads, then I might be able to say it makes a difference.
Video, rather online video would have been one obvious application where the excess bandwidth should help right away, though from Guziewicz’s comments it doesn’t seem so. (Of course no one would talk-out loud about torrentastic life on the record 😉 .)
I visit streaming sites such as YouTube, Metacafe, and CNN but they don’t require super high speeds. Some video download sites might benefit but generally they don’t support very high speeds either. For instance, I have a 100 Mbps pipe to my home, but if I try to download a file from a certain HD video site, I find I may get only 3 Mbps of download speed, which I believe is a limitation of the site and its servers.
Guziewicz’s comments dovetail with my post from last week about Internet Infrastructure. It wasn’t an “Internet is broken” dooms day post. Instead it was an attempt to point out that we need to prepare for a network that can support more immersive and interactive applications to bloom. My biggest lament was that there weren’t many next generation infrastructure companies getting off the ground.
Anyway, what would you do with 100 megabits/second connection if you had one!
It should be fairly obvious – youtube et al are going to be traffic shaped to ensure no single user gobbles up all their available bandwidth. Plus, general internet latency will also play a big part here.
So i’m really keen to see home-user speeds at the 100mb/s level, but we’re pretty close to the point where no tangible gain can be made – it’s pretty hard to overcome the physical distance between your house and the server farm.
I actually have 100 MBs and…
It’s very dissapointing. VERY VERY dissapointing. The only time I got an outstanding 8 MBs p/s download was when I downloaded nvidia’s new drivers. Other than that it’s like my old 24 MBs connection.
I found the application that would require at least 10 Mbps upload speed. Sharpcast. Since I backup my photos online one album of few 100 photos would easily take up to 500 Mb and it takes forever with my DSL connection…I haven’t found one which would use 100Mpbs download though…
Absolutely nothing; I cannot think of a single legitimate need I have for that kind of last-mile pipe, for reasons mostly made evident by the interviewee.
I’m not looking for 100 to my house..however 10/10 or 20/20 would be the cat’s meow for me. Linux iso’s and movie downloads at the same time would not kill my bandwidth for the rest of the family.
I have 20Mb FIOS. Only a few sites can keep it busy. The vast majority are doing throttling of some kind and I get 5Mb or less from them.
It does help with multiple users in the household. With Comcast a large transfer would noticeably disrupt other users.
The backbone is supposed to have plenty of spare capacity, I have spare capacity, so where is the bottleneck? Is throttling being used to avoid bandwidth costs with 95% billing?
It will definitely benefit P2P applications and that’s the area where you will see some big innovation first.
P2P2P2P2P2P2P2P2P2P2P2P2P2P
(For those of you choking, there are plenty of LEGAL uses for P2P!)
Alas, if other apps, sites and the servers that they run on had the backend technology to actually make use of the 100 Mbps FiOS then Woot! As it is, I spend a great deal of time online in Second Life hosting events that requires streaming audio as well as multi-tasking with other graphic apps, playing iTunes, downloading music (legally of course!), chatting on Yahoo, Gmail, MSN and answering the odd Skype call all within the same time frame. If having a 100 Mbps FiOS would make these tasks any better ….. then hey.
Are you kidding? 100 mbps might be overkill but I don’t want latency even for basic surfing, downloading files, research, etc.
Many of us make our living online and slow definitely impedes personal productivity. Any time you are waiting you are probably unproductive because there is only so much leverage to be had from multi-tasking, we just can’t switch contexts that fast.
Jon, bandwidth and QoS costs are very much an issue (peering agreements aren’t cheap, either); also, building infrastructure to handle the additional bandwidth isn’t cheap, either (look at how much Level-3 is paying to build their own national fiber network in the United States).
I’m just wondering whether those speeds are just for local traffic (and maybe just “in theory speeds”), while their international speeds are much slower (but still fast).
Honestly though, if you think you guys in the US are stuck in the slow lane, come down to Australia!
Most plans here start from about 256kbps up to 1.5Mbps. Although, some areas do provide an ADSL 2/+ connection, it’s not available everywhere and it tends to be not very economically viable.
Here’s a few ADSL plan prices (from whirlpool.net.au):
– 256/64 (up/down): $29.95 w/ 15 GB data.
– 512/128 : $39 w/ 25 GB data.
– 1.5Mbps/256k : $49 w/ 15 GB data.
And if you want cable:
– 10Mbps*/256k : $79.95 w/ 20 GB data.
Also, Australia doesn’t have many undersea cables that reach out to the rest of the world, so that makes internet data more expensive. From memory, in operation today are Southern Cross Cable (links to the US via Hawaii), and AJC (Australia Japan Cable). Two local telcos (Optus and Telstra) have major shares in the aforementioned cables (Optus in Southern Cross, and Telstra in the AJC).
Microsoft mentions in one of their Windows Vista whitepaper that
“Without window scaling, you can only achieve a throughput of approximately 5 megabits per second (Mbps) on a path with a 100 millisecond RTT, regardless of the path bandwidth.”
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/cableguy/cg1105.mspx
Coast to Coast RTT is around 100 millisecond.
Maybe faster broadband speeds need to be experienced with a refresh of network infrastructure (routers/firewalls) some of which may be preventing Window scaling
One site that I would like to try out on that 100Mbps connection is the Apple movie trailers website. I visit it quite frequently and downloading the 1080p HD trailers maxes out my 15Mbps FiOS connection, and considering the trailers are often 150MB+ something that fast would be nice.
Another interesting thing to think about in the future is once YouTube upgrades to the new Flash player that allows H.264 encoding. I think this will allow Google to ramp up video quality and resolution in the future, especially as more and more people get HD Camcorders. Maybe in the not too distant future we’ll see a YouTube with the quality of the new .Mac Web Video Galleries? (hey, one can dream!)
I would more happily share my connection with others in my household.
Windows Scaling is an issue. As yusufg says, 100ms latency would slow down your speed.
I can think of few uses:
* P2P sharing (perhaps downloading HD DVDs)
* Content pre-fetching (using Firefox add-on)
Either way, I don’t believe speeds over 8Mbps are neccessary for regular Joe connected from home.
Yeah, right now, there really aren’t any apps that need all that bandwidth. I’ve got an 8 Mb/s down connection and it’s hard to max it out.
But right around the corner, there are potential killer apps lurking – simply waiting for the average residential bandwidth to rise.
What are we talking about? Here’s two:
I’m betting that as soon as 100 Mb/s connections are common, we’ll see Blockbuster and NetFlix and all the rest offering downloads. In fact, they’re positioning themselves in that market already.
As soon as it’s fast and convenient, movie downloads will take off big. Really BIG.
Why go and fight traffic and then stand in line when you can sit at home in comfort, browse the same movie catalog, and point and click? You start the download, go pop some popcorn, make a drink, come back and it’s done. Burn it onto a DVD, insert into machine and let’s go!
Yeah, I know about the DRM problems the major studios have. But I’m sure all that will be resolved by the time downloads are feasible.
This is a natural extention of VoIP. Look at Skype. Their present video service doesn’t work that well – it’s buggy (from all the compression and what not) and the video maxes at about 15 FPS. But Skype shows the promise of things to come if everyone had sufficient bandwidth.
I’ve used Skype Video to talk to my dad, and actually, even with all it’s problems and limitations, it’s cool as all get out. It’s like being there with him – way different than talking on the phone. Way better!
If everyone had 100 Mb/s connections videophones with full-motion 30 FPS large-format (better than 1600×1200) video would flourish – why would anyone want to do a voice only call when you could SEE the person you were talking to?
Better yet, they can incorporate videophone hardware/software into the next-gen Playstation and Xbox consoles – then you can make calls using your widescreen HDTV!
That’s just two killer apps that will quickly come into their own as soon as there’s bandwidth to support them. I’m sure there are many others.
I’m itchin’ for that time to come…
We all need 100 Mb/s! RIGHT NOW!
Netflix offers movie downloads (“instant watching”) now. I’ve been catching up on The Outer Limits using this – it’s great!
Usenet!
I use a second residence in Stockholm (Kista) Sweden which has 100 Mbps included in the rent (Ethernet coming off fiber??). I have tested the line to around 50+Mbps to Swedish test sites, but there really are few servers that can handle 100 Mbps transfers. But 24 Mbps DSL is not bad — that is the capacity in Riga, where I spend most of my time, but it is throttled to around 10 Mbps (Lattelecom, I guess, is saving the extra capacity for future HD IPTV or the like). On the 10 Mbps DSL lines, they take around 4 Mbps for ordinary IPTV when one uses it.
I have 20mbit residential service with SureWest Broadband. It’s a chunk of change every month I GLADLY part with, and it’s the primary reason I bought my house.
The service is AWESOME, but I have found 20mbit is about optimal for me and 3-5 other people doing hardcore data work during the day. It’s enough. 100 MBIT is probably more than you need for all but the highest bandwidth applications.
But, more telling than anything else was that my startup employees stopped going to the office and started hanging out at my house to take advantage of the speed.
My 2c.
This is some news, it may get anyone jealous of her… lucky her !!
fine, main thing is usage of such connection, as there are lots of things one can do with such a speed, not many (a normal user) would have perfect idea to go for…
last note, I hope India will have some good speedy connection (I’m fed up with 256 kbps), in near future ?!!
For years I had 100Mbps at Twente University in The Netherlands. It’s not relevant that you can max out the line. It’s what you can do in parallel. You can stream a movie to one pc and at the same time stream a movie from that pc to somewhere else. At the same time you can still have a chat/cam session running, download a new linux distro etc. (That was just one person in a dormroom, think of the average american family with teens, 3.2 televisions a Tivo and 2 PC’s) And the great thing is all these actions feel like they are instantaneous.
When I left campus I stopped downloading. It was just too slow. When you can download a movie and immediately watch it (same with Youtube, but then with files of 300MB or more) it becomes very intuitive to do so. Time is also an important factor. It just takes less time to do something when you have more bandwidth. You won’t max it out all the time, but it will save time. Don’t forget that when it takes only 3 minutes to upload a home made movie of 1 GB to a buddy across campus or at another uni you will do it. On your DSL it will take forever and you won’t. (Just like you scaled down pictures when you were on dial-up and now just send the full 5 megapixel shot, because you’re on broadband and have Gmail)
In short: More Bandwidth == more in parallel == less time per activity
I would share the connection with as many people who cannot afford one – and not just in the household. Think neighbourhood.
Adding on to William Luu’s comment. In India we have broadband starting from 256kbps and all ISP’s have a cap on free downloads/uploads. Typical rates being –
1) 256kbps-2Mbps/1GB ~ $7/month (your bandwidth can be anywhere between 256kbps and 2Mbps)
2) 2Mbps/30GB ~ $85/month
3) 256kbps/unlimited* ~ $25/month
I wonder if putting a cap on your free downloads/uploads is practiced worldwide or its unique for India (though I see it happening in Australia as well).
In case of bandwidth, the more you get the more you consume, so thinking that we won’t be able to consume 100Mbps may not be correct. I started with 56kbps dialup shared over various computers in a cyber cafe and there were no youtubes in those days and now I am happily eating 2Mbps and yearning for more. I am sure I will get something appropriate to consume at 100Mbps and then my son won’t believe me if I make him read this post and my comment herein.
~Mks
Online Backups…assuming the upstream transfer rate increases proportionately (asymmetric); you mentioned 10 Mbps Up!
“And yet, in the US we are all stuck in the slow lane, settling for speeds between 768 kbps to 8 megabits per second. ”
I thought we in Malaysia are in the slow lane. Didn’t think that we have company in your country.
Yeah, in india, its NOWHERE even CLOSE to what the ENTRY-level internet services are out there in the US…. the saddest part is that 50% of the population is still on dialup !! — a 256k connection comes for around $35 a month !!
100Mb/s in Japan is rather standard, they are pushing 1Gb/s here now. I only have the 100Mb/s line and love downloading DVD iso’s in 3-4mins from Japanese mirrors 😀
I would run my own servers at home with 100mbit upstream for SURE! I really do not care about the downstream, that is already more than plenty at my current 10mbit, it’s just that sucky upstream which is doing my head in.. As a consumer you can’t run a reasonable server without co-locating in a real datacenter.
GIEF 100MBIT & TF2 NOW PLX!!
I teach English in South Korea, and I have a 100 MBPS connection that I pay roughly $40USD for each month. I have to say, it’s pretty nice. I’ll be sad when I have to go back home and have a slow as a turtle connection. Hopefully we can beef things up in the US.
How about online gaming? Imagine using a 100mbps line for gaming — you could play on servers all across the world but it would seem like you were on LAN.
It would be great if Usenet also upgraded their servers to handle 100 Mbps.
I think that before we optimize the web for 100 Mbps speeds, we need to make sure that everybody who will connect to the internet is able to have the 100 Mbps speed. Im stuck with dial up and surfing the web just gets slower and slower. So instead of focusing on faster speeds, how about getting everybody cable or DSl internet first and then upgrade the internet for higher speeds.
What would you do with so much bandwidth?
I dunno what you would do, but I would definitely download all sortsa pr0n from everywhere and start my own pr0n ring and makes loads of illegal cash! HA!
Just kiddin… If one is in a creative field, no amount of bandwidth is enough and I believe you know that better than I do, aye?
Must be Peter Lothberg’s mom!! The inventor of IP over SONET (aka Packet Over SONET aka POS)! First it was OC-3c, now OC-768. Gr8!
Spare a thought for South Africans who’s only telephony/internet provider still believes that a 512kbps line qualifies as broadband and defines usage of over 1gb per day is “abuse”. At $10 a gig, it’s not really that easy to abuse either. $10 gets you about 3 big mac meals here.
Maybe one day the government will realise that the key to economic growth is better broadband penetration.
Sigh.
I envy you, broadband man.
Apparently everyone is not thinking how bad ass this would be. This is not so, by far not so! if 100 mbps beccomes widely available, to the point that we average schmucks get access, then of course servers will have it! I mean a big DUH! why would it only be offered to consumers?
shon
well…right now i am in Finland, though an Indian by nationality..I was offered 24Mbps connection for a trial of 4 Months at a cost of 14Euro per month…As of now i am having a 4Mbps connectivity which is cable…some of the stuffs which i really feel worth for 100Mbps are P2P (We download minimum 4GB of data per day and we are 3 in our room), online gaming, and of course high end video streaming and personal web hosting rather than paying for hosting services. Some weeks back i called up my friend in India, the topic strike across network speed. I asked about his connection. He told “dude its 256Kbps”…holy S$$$…i asked him to open a online network speed test site..alas it took 5 min for him to open the page :-)…i was laughing and making fun of him…he just replied “U gonna come to this place only in near future. Mind tht dude”…now i got panic…Oh my god after having such a speed for browsing how i gonna handle it back in India…
The best use I can think of would be for off site backups of large files, everyday we backup all our current work to a hidden hard drive, but if the building caught fire this would still be lost, an off site backup would make of files much safer and currently isn’t feasable because each day we have between 4 and 12 Gb to backup
I am on a 20Mbps/20Mbps connection in the USA and I can max it out all the time. I upload and download things daily from 100Mbps FTPs. Another big plus of having higher speed and greater international bandwidth when downloading and uploading to people overseas. I know some people who have servers in Netherlands, Amsterdam, France, as well as Japan and have no issues maxing out my connection. On a side note, it’s kind of sad but it seems that I have more trouble maxing out my connection on most US servers (Some of the fast ones are Sourceforge, Gametrailers, Filefront, Flickr, Microsoft, etc.) then on international ones (its basically an issue with overloaded servers + qos throttling on popular sites). Another big plus is ultra low pings. Once you get a really fast connection the main limitation on your pings becomes the internet backbones.
I had 100Mbps in Korea and leaving was taking a big step back it was 100Mbps up and down. Imagine a torrent going at 1MB/s. Dowloading a DVD in 13 minutes. I was able to update my gentoo system quickly. They have things setup for streaming TV and download services for the country. Why does the U.S. decide to remain behind. Piracy and torrents would be a big problem for the RIAA/MPAA and the NSA would have a hard time spying on all the data. What is good with a 100/10 when you can have 100/100. Almost all of Seoul has 100/100. In Japan they have 1Gbit and 10Gbit connections.
Perhaps the best way to answer this question is by Bill Gates’ (approximate) quote “640k will be enough for everybody”. Stifling innovation just because you can’t see an immediate use for it is not the right attitude to have toward technology.
100/10Mbit?
Heh, I’m on 100/100Mbit right now (7-10Mb sec), and in a week or so, we’re upgrading to 1Gbit. God, I love Sweden! 🙂
The only thing I can think of that actually utilizes the bandwidth is BitTorrent. Other than that, I have fun running webservers and media-servers at home.
I have a 1gig fiber connection in San Jose, California from Paxio.net and it’s fast, but as the Verizon customer said, the infrastructure on the net does not necessarily support these kinds of speeds. Distance matters, the speed of the servers you are connecting to matters and the route and it’s latency also makes a difference. But, I can easily download Linux ISOs from the local LUG server at 100mbps. 🙂
I haven’t read all the comments, so I apologise in advance if this has already been said.
I think the big opportunity provided by very high bandwidth is not in internet access, it’s in the provision of additional services by the service provider. I know that vertical integration is a cussword to some, and I understand why, but if you’re going to offer 100Mb/s to your customers, you’d better be thinking of which services you’ll provide with it, on your own servers.
Customers are savvy. If it takes ten times less time to download a movie from their ISP platforms at the same price as it does from Amazon Unbox, where will they get it ?
That’s where the multiplay model will shine. Voice+IPTV+Broadband is what you get now. Voice and Video on your TV+ HD IPTV+Very High Broadband is what you could get at the very least, and there’s a whole wealth of services you can imagine on top of that, many of which haven’t been thought of yet.
One last point: the upload makes as huge a difference, if not more, as the download. Is the FiOS trial a 100/100 or a 100/10 ? Has the tester uploaded stuff as well ? Anyone who has contributed anything to Youtube knows it takes ages. What if it took minutes, or even seconds? Wouldn’t you be uploading as well ?
Richard is a little bit small minded here. Of course no server can deliver you 100 MBit/s. A good server can maybe deliver you 2-4 MBit/s at most. Okay, but who says I can’t access 50 servers at once???
Spending 100 MBit/s is easy. I keep a VPN tunnel to my company, that only runs well if it can have at least 2 MBit/s in both directions at least. Then I want maybe have streaming Internet Radio at really high quality. At the same time I’m phoning with my g/f over Skype (which would sound much better if Skype was allowed to use three time the bandwidth it does now, less compression). While doing all this, I still browse the web (and I tend to have 12 tabs open at once, since whenever a server is slow and bores me, I open another one) and have a downloader download some file in the background I might be interested later on (that might be 20 files from 20 different servers, e.g. a new Linux Live CD, some software updates, a video, etc.). Then I’m connected to 4 Chat networks at the same time and people sometimes send me funny files via Chat or other useful information (sometimes I get whole CDs of pictures that friends share with me – 700 MB each). And on top of all that, I could maybe play a nice online game 🙂
Right now, I have 16 MBit/s download (in theory, in practice maybe 12-14) and about 1 MBit/s upload (1 MBit/s is really accurate, though) – ADSL+ in Germany. If I’d try all the above at the same time, nothing would work anymore, it would kill my line. With 100 MBit/s, well, no big deal.
No imagine I had a family, a wife and two kids, and they all want to do the same thing as me at the same time. I guess 100 MBit/s would be nothing.
Om,
Any news on the general availablity of FiOS in the bay area? 100MBps is nice to hear. But I would love to see 15 to get started 🙂
–S’l
Salil
FiOS is not going to be available in the Bay Area. Verizon doesn’t offer services in this part of the country. Our incumbent is AT&T and they have no fiber plans
When downloading a java installation file from java.com I always get a speed over 50Mbit/s.. this with a 100/30 connection.
Akamai servers were really fast too back in the day. Now they´re ok. So you don´t have to be illegal to use a 100Mbit connection.
This was written in Sweden, where 100Mbit fibre connections are normal.
(Check the link)
70$ CAN / month for 10Mbps (100 GB combined upload / download limit)
Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
The USA should rewire for 100 megs/sec and at the same time install all lines including power lines underground.
“Swedish grannies are connecting to the net at 40 gigabits per second life.”
What does that sentence mean? Is it that Swedish grannies are using their high speed connection to enter the virtual world of Second Life, or is it that the Swedish grannies have come back from the dead to connect “at 40 gigabits per second life” as zombie grannies? I wonder what speed they would connect at during their third life or fourth life.
I find the latest TV commercials by the cable industry amusing as far as bullshit goes. They have “regular people” just like you and me talk about how much competition there is in the US now compared to the bad old days of dial-up. One woman says how she is delighted to have her phone, internet, and TV service all through one company. Then she tells how that is great competition. To me that sounds more like Orwellian double-speak.
The fact is, competition was harmed significantly when the US government told cable companies and phone companies that they don’t have to let other companies use their pipes (aka tubes) to deliver cable or DSL broadband service. That is why in the days of dial-up, you could shop between tens to hundreds of different ISPs in your area, but now you have two or three options at best.
Lack of competition is the number one reason why we don’t have higher broadband speeds, lower prices, and less shitty customer service from ISPs in the US.
I’m in an early roll out area for FIOS. Here’s what you get, “Why wait? With FiOS, upload pictures and movies in a flash! Serious gamer? We’ve thought of you too. Play games with the other side of the world as if they were next door… lag-free!” It’s an improvement but…
Korea is rocking, Europe too and what do our telephone companies give us? Delay and substandard service. The innovative Internet companies have been squashed or acquired by the your friendly telephone company. The telco folks lived in a price support/price control structure for years with guaranteed profits.
They’ll take their sweet, the service will be substandard, and our country will be even further behind. Just another story to prove that we’ve got Socialism for the rich and survival of the fittest for the rest of us.
Stop whinning – we in India live on 256 kbps internet that goes up and down several times during the day.
I used to work for Cogent Communications (AMEX: CCOI). We had our own network and had 100 mbps into our office computers.
It was nearly instantaneous…and a beautiful thing. I miss it… 🙁
“It should be fairly obvious – youtube et al are going to be traffic shaped to ensure no single user gobbles up all their available bandwidth”
But you’d only be using that bandwidth for a fraction of the time. Netflix has some of their movies available online at near DVD quality (5Mbps streamed) so the main bonus I see is streamed HD content.
I imagine a lot of HD torrents would start popping up if this became popular.
I work a lot with networking infrastructure, and the reason the US is lagging behind is not because of the telecommunications industry but because of the size of our nation! Korea, Japan and all these other countries are much smaller and much easier to adapt to newer and greater technology, that is why now telecommunications in the us is looking towards wireless. It is cheaper, and easier to upgrade, no wire to replace every 20 years. Right now there is a big thing going on with lasers and that being the next big thing with the internet in the us. I know it would be great to have a fast wired connection in the us, but it isn’t tangible if you look at it from a longterm and economical standpoint.
Jason-
Usenet sucks, Kazaa is the best.
😛
There’s lots of ways to use such a connection: online backup (or remote access) and P2P and gaming as some of you said seems right, as well as distributed computing, over-the-network thin clients, remote desktop, virtualization, and even more… Think about all the cool stuff you can do over your LAN!
One more: I’ve never really understood what Parakey and others mean by “Web OS” but whatever that might be, it’s probably going to be bandwidth-hungry.
I can’t wait to see all this happen. And if US ISPs stick to their slow connections then it might happen overseas first…
Many of the channels here http://www.narrowstep.com/channels/internet-tv-channels.aspx broadcast at 1.8Mbps. Open several and see what happens! I still don’t know what to suggest for the other 90megs…! Also, I’d imagine that the local PC is a real bottleneck for this type of bandwidth.
I’d love to know what the upload speed is on a 100Mbps down connection – serious upload speeds are the next holy grail for SlingBoxes and P2P services like Joost..
I dont know y u guyz are complaining about 8 megabits per second.
I am in africa and i have 56k dial-up connection.
they obviously have never heard of tabbed browsing … when you have 30 tabs of pages opening so you can streamline reading, speed is everything.
and video … well that is obvious, they should get a 1080p video server connected to their aggregation point so they see what happens then !
If you build it, they will come (the applications, that is). Imagine the potential FUTURE use of 100 Mbps download speeds (not just what you can do with it today).
Sure, Yahoo hasn’t invented a craptastic, spyware-pushing “service” that works at 100 Mbps down yet, but you know they would if they thought they could (finally) make some money. Similarly, Google would take Yahoo’s poorly-implemented idea and make it cool enough for geeks… and offer it for free. Eventually, of course, seeing the green handwriting on the wall, Steve J. from Apple would steal the guts of the new 100 Mbps killer-app and repackage it with some clever marketing and half-hidden DRM. Then people would say, “100 Mbps, of course! Couldn’t live without it.”
I wish I could have that line. I’d be backing up everything from my documents to my client’s web sites to my home storage and then to Amazon’s S3… Just to make sure.
Man,if only my crappy country provided speeds of above 10mbps,then I would be happy.Even now the highest speed you can get here in Delhi is a mediocre 512kbps,otherwise the maximum speed of 2mbps comes with limited downloading,what’s the point of a high speed connection if you can’t download to your hearts content.Damn this third world country to hell.
I personally would set up the connection and share it with a WiFi router and Amplified Anntennas, hand out a couple of leaflets and share the cost with the rest of the street. In my opinion due to the bandwidth limitations that web servers have, its just not worth it at the moment (in the UK anyway).
Eventually web content and delivery will catch up, like it did when adsl first arrived. None of us should worry about that. IPTV will take advantage, film download rentals will take advantage, video in general will be the great beneficiary. Now whether 100 Mbps is available to all or whether each one of us wants to pay for the extra speed availability at this early stage is another story. But I do not think that the companies that provide 100 Mbps haven’t done their homework before bringing it to the market.
http://electronrun.wordpress.com/
To South African victim. Don’t worry, you’re surfing in luxury. My ISP’s cheapest plan is $50 a month for 100kbps. With a data allowance of 1GB a month. That’s right, per MONTH. And if you are so selfish as to exceed this, you have to pony up $21 extra for every 250MB you use on top. According to the ISP, this is aimed at ‘those who are affecting quality of service for the rest’.
When my girlfriend moves in, I’d certainly like 100 Mbps! I’m a gamer and she’s a photographer/graphic artist. I run a website and she’s a tech writer. We have files! Lots of files!
I am board member of a small cooperative in STockholm, Sweden (24 apartments) who just installed a fibre network in our house. Fibre up to each apartment and a CPE converter capable of splitting traffic for IP TV, Internet & IP telephony.
The network in itself of course have capacity for Gbit traffic. My questions i if anyone reading this has recommendation for reading on how to optimize your own environment, as the bottlenecks now will emerge on other places. Any good source of reading for this?
I provide tech support for Utah’s largest FTTH provider, Mstar. A common complaint that we get from our 50 mbps customers is that they’re not getting the advertised speed. What most people don’t realize is that even if they’re connection is personally capable of that speed, most of the web’s capabilities are far below this. You’re only as fast as the slowest server you’re connected to. And if you’ve ever done a trace route you know that just to get connected to something like google, you’ll hit at least 15 or 16 servers along the way, very few of which will be fiber linked.
However, if you manage to find a pure fiber connection… WOW! Makes you sick to think you ever waited around on dial up all those years ago.
Here in South Africa I pay R1050 per month for my 384kbs (uncapped – Very rare) connection. 1,050.00 ZAR = 142.066 USD ….. This is crazy, why oh why does the internet cost more here then anywhere????? Telkom and the SA government thinks the internet is their cash cow.
I leave my connection on 24/7 all the time. I get about 60gig a month… which is funny because my $142.066 is actually a great deal in South Africa. Most people pay about R250 or $39 for 3gig. So I should be happy but I’m not! I could fill a few TB hard drives with a sweet 10mbs let alone 100mbs. Come on speed.
Well fellow sufferers, we’ve cracked the 100Mbps barrier here in Palo Alto, California. And it will not cost users an arm and a leg – less than 500/mo USD with a cubicle included. No, we can’t get it to your home yet but we can probably get you 40Mbps if you are line of sight from an optical cable provider by using antenna technology.
There’s no particular reason to put up with low speeds. The problem is two fold: (1) large companies can’t adopt latest technologies rapidly; (2)technical knowledge is usually broadly spread out among technical employees who can’t get the ear of the number crunchers.
In our Mom & Pop shop we have the technical know-how in his head and the financial risk-taking mentality in her head. Drop us a line at Fiberhigh@gmail.com and we can tell you about it. We’d invite you to visit our web site but we’re too busy pulling wire and putting up antennas to get it on line. It will be http://www.FiberHigh.com when we get around to it.
Bottom line: don’t wait for some huge commercial organization to provide you with the technical solutions you want. Pool your resources with some local hackers and build what you need for yourselves. Remember, “Small is Beautiful”
wow i would be using torrents like crazy
i could imagine downloading 50 GB blu ray movie in minutes
and i would have a good share ratio on the pirate bay