 |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Is this a real product? It reads like an April Fool's joke. They're
talking about giving you 1,000 mbit/sec access to the Internet. That's
10x faster than our LAN! That's crazy. Most people's Internet bandwidth
is more like 2mbit/sec, or maybe as much as 8mbit/sec. I thought it was
nuts when our house got upgraded to 80mbit/sec. But 1,000? That's insane!
On the other hand, does anybody remember back when email services would
offer you, like, 2MB of storage space? And then a "premium option" to
upgrade this to maybe 10MB or something? And then Google Mail came along
and said "Hey, here's 1GB of storage. For free." And suddenly everybody
else was like "WTF? They can DO that?? Holy cow, we're losing all our
customers!!!"
When Google first proposed it, it sounded insane. I can personally
remember micro-managing my inbox to delete old cruft to prevent it
filling up. Today, having "only" a piffling 2MB to play with is the
terabyte? So if each customer has 1GB, that's 3p per customer. That's
peanuts.
I still remember with some amusement Hotmail suddenly upping their
default mailbox size from 2MB to 250MB to 5GB. So, um, if you could do
that all along, why didn't you? Basically, it seems Google did something
revolutionary, and everybody else scrambled to catch up.
Internet access is different though. You can't just suddenly say "ah,
sod it, let's just increase the speed 500x". It requires completely
replacing the entire infrastructure of the Internet - a presumably
impossible task. So... is this really real?
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Le 02/08/2012 12:23, Invisible a écrit :
> Internet access is different though. You can't just suddenly say "ah,
> sod it, let's just increase the speed 500x". It requires completely
> replacing the entire infrastructure of the Internet - a presumably
> impossible task. So... is this really real?
you only have to change the access part.
The Internet is already on fiber, excepted for the access part.
Here, we went from telephony-modem (9600, then 28.8k (last symmetric
one), then 56k), to ADSL, and ADSL2 and ADSL2+ (with re-adsl and other
tricks in the middle).
Yet, if you are 6km away from the telecom building, you get a low 2mb/s
(download, upload might be 512k to 1024kb/s). If really unlucky, you get
a 512#128kb/s line for a fortune per month.
If you are very lucky to be less than 100m from the building, you might
get 28#1mb/s.
(at 2 km, I get a 13#1 mb/s, not bad to see all your big picture in p.b.i)
And some happy few have already the fiber at home (with a fight for
standard: 2 telecom companies have chosen GPON, 1 has chosen P2P, a
fourth is ready for both, and a cable operator is trying to get a bit of
jackpot within its monopoly) (and its even more complex)
Proposal for fiber so far are about (for home user):
* 100#10 Mb/s
* 100#50 Mb/s
* 100#5 Mb/s (that's the cable one, notice the low upload)
Main issue: coverage is low. A study from March 2012 showed that only
10% of home were connectable today, with 80% of them by the cable
operator: i.e. only 2% of the normal country is reachable so far with a
real fiber.
A bit more about numbers: on GPON, the signal is shared (and encrypted)
on a single fiber between 64 ( or 128) end users, via a passive optic
splitting tree. Which means that all offers with 100 Mb/s download are
already fed by a faster fiber.
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
On 02/08/2012 02:49 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Le 02/08/2012 12:23, Invisible a écrit :
>
>> Internet access is different though. You can't just suddenly say "ah,
>> sod it, let's just increase the speed 500x". It requires completely
>> replacing the entire infrastructure of the Internet - a presumably
>> impossible task. So... is this really real?
>
> you only have to change the access part.
> The Internet is already on fiber, excepted for the access part.
Oh, well, sure. Apart from THE LARGEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE PART OF THE
NETWORK, it's already fiber. No problem. :-)
> Main issue: coverage is low. A study from March 2012 showed that only
> 10% of home were connectable today, with 80% of them by the cable
> operator: i.e. only 2% of the normal country is reachable so far with a
> real fiber.
The technology to access the Internet at gigabits per second already
exists. The problem is that it will cost a fortune to dig up the entire
country to lay hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber. Which is why
nobody is doing this. (Or at least, not very fast.)
This is what makes Google Fiber so surprising. They're not promising 3x
more speed. They aren't offering 5x more. It even 10x more like BT
Infinity just did to my house. (Did I mention my mother /works for/ BT?)
They're talking about 200x more speed. That's epic, right there.
It mirrors what happened with Gmail. Within weeks of Gmail going live,
suddenly every other provider massively increased the storage they were
offering. But that was because they had the capacity all along, they
were just trying to charge lots of money for it. Today, any webmail
service offering only 2MB of storage would be laughed out of the
building. Google actually forced an entire market to change. Over night.
Internet access is a little different. All Hotmail had to do was
/literally/ press a button and everybody got a 500x storage limit
increase. You can't do that with bandwidth.
Still, Google appears very, very confident indeed. From what I can tell,
they're only wiring on Kansas. (WTF? Why Kansas?!) And yet, they made
bold claims such as this:
"How long will the free package remain free?
The free package will remain free for 7 years. After that, it will be
charged at normal industry rates - which, if Google Fiber is successful,
will be $0."
This throws their ambition into sharp relief. They intend to build a
next-generation network today, and they expect it to force the rest of
the telecomms marked to react. They have set out to do nothing less than
transform the global ISP market.
Wow.
Um, good luck with that...
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
On 02/08/2012 11:23 AM, Invisible wrote:
> Is this a real product? It reads like an April Fool's joke. They're
> talking about giving you 1,000 mbit/sec access to the Internet. That's
> 10x faster than our LAN! That's crazy.
It appears to be real, however.
The prices look pretty insane though. They offer 3 products:
5mbit/sec FOR FREE.
1000mbit/sec for $70/month.
1000mbit/sec plus a TV package with a PVR with has an Andriod tablet
as the freaking REMOTE CONTROL for $120/month.
Then again, exchange rates don't take into account earnings. So I don't
really know if $70 is a lot of money for a typical American (much less
one living in Kansas). Anybody here know?
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Le 02/08/2012 16:24, Invisible a écrit :
> They intend to build a next-generation network today, and they expect it
> to force the rest of the telecomms marked to react. They have set out to
> do nothing less than transform the global ISP market.
Same here (France) with mobile phone. On January 2012, a new real
operator started to be available (still low coverage), it makes a big
reaction on the pricing of the 3 old historic operators.
Suddenly, price were cut...
Any historic operator has one main goal: get most of the money from
actual equipment.
And a secondary goal: track any new technology which might force to
evolve, should a concurrent used it; deploy with slowness (see main
goal) to advertise about high technology.
A fresh operator has one goal: get most of the money from newly bought
equipment. i.e. get new customers, keep them, expand as money and
customers allows.
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
On Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:32:58 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> Now, at today's exchange rate, $70 is about £45 - vastly more expensive
> than any ISP package I've ever seen advertised. (Anyone wanting £30 is
> unlikely to have many takers. £15/month is more typical.)
Our 3 Mbps DSL is $49.95/month. In the US, ISP charges tend to be a bit
more expensive.
Then again, US cable TV through Comcast was costing us $120/month. How
much do you pay for your TV license+other TV services?
Jim
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
On 02/08/2012 05:17 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:32:58 +0100, Invisible wrote:
>
>> Now, at today's exchange rate, $70 is about £45 - vastly more expensive
>> than any ISP package I've ever seen advertised. (Anyone wanting £30 is
>> unlikely to have many takers. £15/month is more typical.)
>
> Our 3 Mbps DSL is $49.95/month. In the US, ISP charges tend to be a bit
> more expensive.
Interesting. I wonder if wages are comparably higher...
> Then again, US cable TV through Comcast was costing us $120/month. How
> much do you pay for your TV license+other TV services?
Just looked it up. £145/year for a TV license. (That's around
£12/month.) If you use Freeview, this is the only recurring cost.
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
On Thu, 02 Aug 2012 18:03:30 +0100, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On 02/08/2012 05:17 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:32:58 +0100, Invisible wrote:
>>
>>> Now, at today's exchange rate, $70 is about £45 - vastly more
>>> expensive than any ISP package I've ever seen advertised. (Anyone
>>> wanting £30 is unlikely to have many takers. £15/month is more
>>> typical.)
>>
>> Our 3 Mbps DSL is $49.95/month. In the US, ISP charges tend to be a
>> bit more expensive.
>
> Interesting. I wonder if wages are comparably higher...
I found this:
http://blog.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/paye/tax/comparison-of-uk-and-usa-
take-home/
>> Then again, US cable TV through Comcast was costing us $120/month. How
>> much do you pay for your TV license+other TV services?
>
> Just looked it up. £145/year for a TV license. (That's around
> £12/month.) If you use Freeview, this is the only recurring cost.
Yeah, I knew it was about £145 (£145.50 IIRC). But you don't get 600+
channels of garbage, either. ;)
But comparatively speaking, you get off pretty cheaply.
Jim
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
>> Interesting. I wonder if wages are comparably higher...
>
> I found this:
>
> http://blog.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/paye/tax/comparison-of-uk-and-usa-
> take-home/
I made this:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average+income+Kansas
On current exchange rates, that looks like considerably more money than
I will ever earn.
>> Just looked it up. £145/year for a TV license. (That's around
>> £12/month.) If you use Freeview, this is the only recurring cost.
>
> Yeah, I knew it was about £145 (£145.50 IIRC). But you don't get 600+
> channels of garbage, either. ;)
>
> But comparatively speaking, you get off pretty cheaply.
Heh. I can still remember when I was a teenager people telling me that
"in America, you can buy a CD for just £5!" (That's 3x cheaper than the
UK.) I always wondered whether there was actually a shred of truth to
such an outlandish claim...
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> The prices look pretty insane though.
what is really insane, and brace yourself:
with this kind of high-speed connection you'll have HD content on the fly.
Movies, TV or games, whenever you want from whatever device you want. Wanna
watch "Avatar" now? No prob, just click away and start watching. Wanna play
the latest nextgen HD game? No need to buy the latest and most expensive
console or GPU, or download any executable, just click away and start playing
right away on you inexpensive android device.
really, they are making even gaming a hispeed connection cloud service... search
OnLive or Gaikai...
Post a reply to this message
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
