1Gbps connection now costs $26 a month in Hong Kong
convergenceconversation.com
convergenceconversation.com
1. This pricing subject to a 24 month contract and an installation fee.
2. They only guarantee this speed locally(read: within the network), so they're not getting 1000mbps everywhere.
Are you talking about headline speed or actual sync speed? The latter is beyond the control of the ISP (apart from laying FTTC or FTTH of course)
Connection is pretty fast to US (eg video streaming), although of course not at 1G rates. P2P is popular as is online gaming, so having high speed locally works out well.
Paradoxically, the high speed Gig / Ethernet connections are much cheaper than the old DSL slower speed broadband connections (even within the same provider!), which sucks when you're in an apartment building like mine which isn't fibre wired yet.
If you can sell your users the old stuff at inflated prices why bother to upgrade.
An area where I lived could not get broadband internet at all, only dial up at a ridiculous per minute rate. Then some local entrepreneurial type put in high speed wi-fi with a long distance link to a better connected place.
Within weeks suddenly all those old lines could run at dsl speeds, something that before had been 'theoretically impossible, and very expensive to remedy'.
Telcos hate competition.
When your customers need to be online, and there's no one else but you that offers service, you can sell them whatever the hell you want.
We have loud outcries about Goldman Sachs and other sorts of corporate shenanigans, yet we make no noise when our city governments blatantly jump in bed (publicly admitted as such!) with telecoms.
</pedantic>
My question is, are those Hong Kong users getting 1Gbps access to the internet or a small portion of the internet located within 5 miles of their position? If I had a server in Japan, would they be able to connect at 1Gbps? If I had a server in San Francisco?
I know that when I was in Israel a few months back, access to major sites like Facebook was terribly slow even over a connection that was fast when tested using Speedtest.net to a server within Israel (even accounting for latency).
If that's the case, would you want/accept an American ISP who offered you 100Mbps access to servers within your metro area and much slower speeds to the greater internet? For example, in Boston we have the Northern Crossroads (http://www.nox.org/background/index.html) and my ISP could probably easily and cheaply give me very high speed access to servers within it, but that's a tiny fraction of the servers that I'd want to use since, as an English speaker, the servers I'd want to connect to are very spread out. If they moved the bottleneck to 2 hops out, would that be helpful? Would you accept them selling you 100Mbps or 1Gbps internet service that was actually 10Mbps to the greater internet and only that fast to servers nearby? I'm really just musing here and am really interested in people's thoughts on the matter.
Hopefully someone who knows about the situation (like where ISPs costs are, whether it costs more for an ISP to get/build capacity to go across the country for me, whether it's significantly cheaper for my ISP to deliver higher speeds to a nearby server, etc.) can speak to this.
I've only tested 100mbit in Japan (that was free with the apartment) and that was 100mbit to anywhere.
It's like the ISP forms a 1Gbps-island. When all the islands in the world have gone to 1Gbps and the inter-links between them have beefed up, you will get 1Gbps to anywhere in the world. Keep dreaming.
The most galling thing for me is that my parents get 100 Mbps fiber with phone service at their house for around $60 or $70 month. And this is in a small town (<10,000 people) in the midwest. The difference is they're lucky enough to have a visionary small ISP that chooses to reinvest in its product rather than sit back and milk a quasi-monopoly.
Edit: I shopped around, inspired by this post. Comcast advertises much lower rates, however they are "for the first 6 months" and they are for TV subscribers only. Verizon offers some staggeringly bad deals. You're just kind of SOL when it comes to good broadband in most of the US (just like mobile phone options).
Is it normal to get far less than the advertised speed for a residential cable connection?
(in my opinion is too much expensive)
Has anyone had any experience doing that? How hard is it to find work if you don't speak Cantonese or Mandarin?
http://www.speedtest.net/result/787781349.png Wireless test. Cable goes to 30-35