Rocket Fiber Launches 100GB/s Internet Service in Downtown Detroit

but the convention that network connections are rated in bits per second is very strong, and largely solves this sort of confusion

There are other operators which are even less expensive (but 4G coverage and upstream fixed network peering changes a bit).

~$20 for 1gbps in Bucharest. That's the equivalent of around $80-$100 adjusted to US incomes.

edit: added income reference

Try Australia. $80/month for 8mbit/1mbit if you're lucky.

For reference, our business connection (50/50) costs ~$1200/month.

In urban NZ we pay almost this much for 100% shitty ADSL with data caps. Speeds vary wildly but it'd be rare to get more than 50 down / 10 up. 1Gbps is not available to consumers anywhere in the country no matter how much you pay AFAIK.

I can understand it from employee point of view - large city - big job market and naturally those places are also more desirable. But if you're going down the startup route you're already going to sacrifice things for a potentially big payout down the road (assuming you have stocks - right ?) which is why I would have no problem relocating to a cheaper/less desirable area in order to lower the operational costs and increase the chance of success.

Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong but unless you are doing B2B or direct sales location shouldn't matter more than having funds to stay operational/becoming profitable ?

One explanation I can come up with is that if you are looking for investors instead of profitability it makes sense to be closer to them - but at the same time that kind of feels like perverting incentives.

I was under the impression that the costs differences can be huge (2x) between regions - maybe that's not the case ?

Very few places will be able to stream anything to them at 10GbE. Most regular harddrives have a bandwidth substantially below that - it takes an expensive RAID or high end SSD to feed a single user at that speed....

For an apartment complex, though, it might be useful to take 10GbE link...

Even on the business side - I run racks of servers handling dozens of clients running booking services for several hundred restaurants, and we're using tens of Mbps including really excessive amounts of regular disaster recovery syncs and backups between our two data centres.. Some companies will benefit, but most won't get anywhere near...

I think this is more of the case that it doesn't cost them that more to offer to set things up for 10GbE, since these users will mostly be limited by upstream servers that won't send them traffic enough so their bandwidth usage won't go up nearly as much as it theoretically could, so it's part a long term view, part a competitive move to make 1Gbps or less from competitors seem too little or too expensive for what you get.

http://fiber.usinternet.com/

Even the usual suspects (Netflix, Google, etc.) have their own criteria before they will peer with you.

100G connectivity comes in different flavours. Some use MTP and multiple fibers to transport 100G others use normal LC connectors and transport 100G over multiple wavelenghts on a single fiber pair.

Takes a pair of fibers... and now you have some very high data rate switching ;-)

The difference between 10Gbps and 1Gbps last-mile is almost completely meaningless compared to how well the rest of the network is connected. And somehow I imagine that Google might have slight edge on that side...

Also to note Google Fiber uses a lot of nLayer/GTT for their eyeball traffic.