How do you use 1Gbps Internet links? Chattanooga residents find out | Hacker News Reader

How do you use 1Gbps Internet links? Chattanooga residents find out

arstechnica.com

68 pointsevo_947 comments

$350 a month for an unmetered 1 gbps connection? That is cheaper than you can get it at a colo. Anyone want to get an apartment there with me and split the cost? Contact in profile. Nooga Apartment Colo servers :)

The colo likely comes with an SLA, though.

Location, location, location.

Related analysis from 2008: "a radical suggestion: rather than design and develop massive data centers with 15 year lives, let’s incrementally purchase condominiums (just-in-time) and place a small number of systems in each." http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/04/06/DiseconomiesOfSc...

That's literally 10 times what a similar service costs in Hong Kong. Tokyo also has a gbps offering for about 60USD/month.

I really don't understand why this keeps getting submitted to HN. Yes, it's a good connection, but it's nothing amazing and it's ridiculously expensive.

In North America it's a big deal. Smaller, denser areas [Japanese cities] make it easier to afford rolling out networks. Younger infrastructures [the Nordic countries with 100Mbit to each home, IIRC] took the opportunity to roll out a more advanced infrastructure when they could. Here in NA, the incumbents are perfectly happy charging us for slower speeds over cable or ancient twisted pairs, with no need to invest in new infrastructure.

You can't use the population density argument when places like New York and Chicago have the same options as rural Iowa.

You'll find that US broadband/technology/cell-network/healthcare/alt-energy apologists trot out every excuse and make pretzel-twisting arguments for other first world countries having arguably superior things than we do. Some of the arguments are valid (we're a really geographically big country), but some are specious.

My favorite is "because such-and-such place has a monoculture while we are a melting pot". Huh? How in God's name would that prevent us from getting high speed rail or gigE internet? So, because people have different colors and beliefs, we can't get broadband coast to coast? That just doesn't make any sense.

Another is the "our government is corrupt/monopolistic/fascist/corporatist/name-your-own-damning-description". So, if there's corruption, there must be somewhere we can ram through gigE speeds through back-alley deals and nepotistic dealings like (supposedly) Hong Kong.

Just the first Google results:

New York (City): http://www.fiberexperts.com/new-york-fios.html

Iowa: http://www.fiberexperts.com/iowa-fios.html

Observation: For coworking and hacker spaces, apparently it reduces latency but that's about it for a business-class connection. Surprisingly, the issues of abuse tend to go away as multi-TB hard drives are self-limiting.

Potential Uses:

1. Adaptive media streaming protocols that minimize frame skipping and buffering, and instead gradually reduces quality seem obvious.

2. Outbound streaming to mobile perhaps.

Questions:

1. What is the oversubscription of the various upstream connection(s)? In other countries other than the US, this is a required bit of disclosure.

2. Which port(s) are blocked?

3. What's the bandwidth, ping and packet-loss like?

My Internet connection at home and at work comes from EPB Fiber.

1. oversubscription. I have no idea, honestly, but I do not have any problem maxing out my connection. I have the slowest they sell (30Mb). That is data throughput not bits over the wire so my actual connection is closer to 40 according to my network card. I can usually pull down 3.2MB/s.

2. As far as I can tell only outgoing 25 (to other than their server) is blocked. Incoming 25 works fine.

3. I kinda answered that above. I went to Alexa and tracerouted the top 10 Internet sites (that responded) from my Comcast connection before the install and then EPB right after. Comcast average: 14.5 hops 92.397 ms EPB average: 13.5 hops 37.891 ms

Hope that helps.

Could you run tests on speedtest.net and pingtest.net out of curiosity?

Symmetrical downlink and uplink is the really exciting part to me. Imagine being able to transmit GB-sized files point to point in a matter of minutes. There are so many opportunities for stuff you can do with that :)

No opportunities while Comcast, et al. impose caps.

Article doesn't really answer the question: how do you use a 1Gb/s internet link? My crappy Comcast connection can stream full-screen HD video from Netflix, and what more could a consumer reasonably want?

3D 5K resolution porn.

Obvious next step is 3D HD.

Also Onlive. Also more than one TV at the same time?

Live streaming HD video cameras from inside the house to outside when you're at work?

3D video telephony.

I'd be running a TOR node, personally.

I do that on a 30/30 fiber connection and surprisingly it only goes about 100kb/s in both directions.

Your crappy connection can stream HD video, but what happens when you are streaming HD video, someone else is downloading some large files, and another person is trying to get in some online gaming?

Edit: Hell, nothing stops you from doing all of this at once yourself.

3D HD and 100 HD channels. In some years, SuperHD. Easy and instant sharing of files with your friends across town, and later across state and country.

I had the chance to meet with some EPB execs who said that for the most part the residents who had the 1Gb/s service got it for bragging rights or because they could. One gentleman does use it to stream HD movies from his server at work to his house.

Multi-participant HD video conference?

In the Netherlands optic fiber is being rolled out by independent companies, who then rent it out to internet providers. The way they decide where to do it is quite smart: you can vote for your own city, and if it gets enough votes, they'll provide it to the whole city. This way they can make sure they don't spend their money on a city where nobody wants it (yet).

"Those who have ordered face challenges; if they want to experience the full 1Gbps speed they're paying for, standard WiFi connections aren't fast enough. Some customers have switched to wired gigabit routers in order to access their full bandwidth."

Facing challenges? Really? Of the handful of people to order the service, some of them didn't realise they would need more than a 10/100 router to use it? That's idiocy, either on the part of a technical user who didn't think of it, or on the part of the ISP who didn't explain it to a non-technical customer purchasing the service. It's not a challenge.

Honestly, my guess is they will be disappointed by how little difference there is between a 100mbit internet connection and a 1gbit connection in practice.

And, yes, setting up a gigabit wireless network counts as a challenge, even for non-idiots.

Wireless, sure, wired, not so much.

Disappointed because they would be thinking "wow facebook will load so much faster now"? Presumably they wouldn't be disappointed if their reason for upgrading is, say, for torrents or another type of filesharing, etc.

Maybe you missed it, but that's what the article mentioned. Wireless wasn't fast enough ("standard WiFi connections aren't fast enough"), so they switched to wired networks. It wasn't that they didn't know they would need a gigabit router, it's that they saturated the wireless network and upgraded to a faster wired network.

That's still the same issue. The router I have here at home isn't capable of handling a gig of traffic, wired or wireless. If my ISP sold me a gig connection, I would expect them to realise that, most likely my router won't support it, and to explain that to me (and, more likely than not, try to sell me a new router themselves).

It doesn't matter that they went from wireless to wired - even when moving to wired, the issue was still that they hadn't realised they would need a new router.

I guess we're reading it differently. I read it as "before getting gigabit internet I had a wireless router that worked fine, but after I had to use a wired router to get the new faster speed I'm paying for." I don't think they went through multiple wired routers because they were unable to realize that 100 != 1000 (regardless, many new wireless routers are also gigabit ethernet routers).

I read it same as you, but to me needing a new router isn't "a challenge", it's an obvious requirement that you know about before deciding to upgrade your connection. Same as needing to own some sort of networked device such as a computer in order to use any internet connection.

It might not be a new router. My wireless routers at home and work both support gigabit ethernet. But it could be a challenge to have to run wire and what not. I think it makes complete sense.

I consider moving a business from WiFi to wired ethernet a challenge. If the business was larger than micro (25+ employees) and renting office space, then converting from WiFi to wired ethernet could pose some problems.

Your suggestion of idiocy is neither warranted nor considerate.

If the reason for it being a challenge is "large business" then you could define so many easy things as a challenge.

The way it was worded in the article didn't suggest "it took a lot of work because it was such a big network they were having to upgrade", it was "some people found themselves unable to use the network and found themselves with the challenge of having to buy a new router".

While perhaps a little mean to call it idiocy, wouldn't you agree that, if an ISP sells a gig connection to a user, and the user ends up not having the correct home networking equipment to make use of it, one or both parties ought to have seen that coming?

Some applications that might be able to make use of that kind of bandwidth... You could do a lot of high-fidelity virtualization with HD Video editing, image editing, even 3D modeling.

Telepresence is an obvious application.

Oh gosh, if you combined this kind of bandwidth with a bunch of Kinect sensors, things could get REAL. :-D

Can anyone point me to a howto? I'd love to spearhead something like this for my small community.

AFAICT, from a number of attempts I've read about in many communities:

1. Get the tech people together

2. Have a sensible plan to roll it out, backed by a utility or municipal government (so that they can levy a charge on all residents for initial costs), supported by your community, and with all due diligence done and paid for

3. Get your pants sued off by whoever is currently providing high-speed

[edit: formatting]

The hidden cost is having a switch/router/both to handle the rates, as well as using Gig-rated cabling which is surprisingly not the same as 100Mb. When I hand crimped a number of cables and tested they weren't suitable for Gig.

Full Disclosure: I'm a shitty crimper.

Meanwhile, Comcast has no plans to run fiber to homes.

https://twitter.com/#!/ComcastBill/status/45843247490273280

It kinda seems like they've slowed deployment of high-bandwidth cable connections. I've got a 50mbit comcast business account now, but I've been promised that 100mbit will be available "soon" for quite a while now.

But by the time 100Mbit rolls out Google will have continued to roll out their 1Gbps fiber connections to rural areas. Not to mention Comcast's 100Mbit connection only has 10Mbps of upload speed. Comcast is slipping more and more behind every day.

The 100Mbit connection has only 10Mbit uplink? My 50Mbit Comcast connection has 15Mbit up. How disappointing that they would reduce the more important half of the service on the "higher" tier.

Really? Mine is definitely 50mbit/10mbit. Maybe it varies by location?

Unless they changed it and I wasn't paying attention, it's 15Mbit/s uplink in the Salt Lake City area. The only reason I'm paying for 50Mbit/s down is so I can get 15 up.

I knew this was part of the strategy once they started the process to acquire NBC.

Now it's doubly against their best interest to improve broadband adoption:

1) file sharing now impacts their infrastructure spend 2) file sharing impacts media arm's profitability

Please tell me why this merger was even allowed?

Next up: Lowered bandwidth caps (hell, follow AT&T and apply overages to a formerly unlimited plan!), and "tiered" access. Soon, internet will be indistinguishable from cable television.

Other cable companies aren't doing FTTH either... because it doesn't make sense. The existing HFC plant can support 100 Mbps with DOCSIS 3.0; why spend billions to install FTTH that your customers don't even know what to do with?

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