India Gets its First 1Gbps Internet Connection. | Hacker News Reader

India Gets its First 1Gbps Internet Connection.

news.efytimes.com

86 pointsBrajeshwar40 comments

Second place in the world is a bit presumptuous. Besides that, Google in in Kansas City wasn't the first provider with 1G FTTH project by a long shot.

Helsinki Finland: I have had FTTH 1 Gbps link for years. Price 89€/mo including taxes and all costs and hardware. Now operators are also offer 10G/10G option, if someone really needs it at home. 10 megabits is usually more than anyone actually needs in normal situation. Then you'll notice that some sites are too slow and do not provide data quickly enough. Of course you can fix that by running 100-10000 parallel HTTP sessions, which seems to create DoS situation for most of smaller sites. One image hosting site was so slow, that I decided to mirror it, but actually I took it offline. ;( Remember, if you run out of sockets / sessions before hitting bandwidth limit, you can use multiple public interfaces to get more sockets.

even 10 years ago when we only had dsl with 1MBit i looked in envy to scandinavia with their 10Mbit connections everywhere..

You guys are still far ahead, but today i have 120Mbit at home which is plenty even for a heavy user like me! Still 1Gbit is exciting for me :)

Yeah I wonder where they got that from. Swedish ISPs have had 1 GBps options for years now if you live in a properly equipped apartment complex. Did the original source mean something more specific, and it just got mangled by the reporter?

In the Czech Republic, there is 1Gbps option in some places too, for $50 / month.

Googles Fiber in Kansas City wasnt even the first in America. Chattanooga, Tennessee had the first gigabit network in the country http://chattanoogagig.com/

sonic.net has had a couple of trial locations in CA; Sebastopol is the location I recall. I don't know about the relative timing of their offer.

I believe they were also the/a possible partner when Google was considering 1 Gbps in one or another location in the South Bay. Maybe someone else knows/recalls more about this.

I'm not in the position, myself, but in my opinion, if you are in Northern CA and sonic.net is an option, they deserve your business -- or consideration, at least.

Also in Minneapolis us internet has been doing selective fiber rollout for a year or so. http://fiber.usinternet.com/

I'm pretty sure many developed countries (including those in Asia) have had 1Gbps FTTH for at least a few years now.

What an ignorant author.

I am a network engineer and have had routine access to 100 Mbps and multi-gigabit Internet connections for years. I honestly have no idea what home (or even business) users are going to do with gigabit connections -- including HD video, which is only 15 Mbps. Even with a building full of senior software engineers, it's hard to break 30 Mbps except for 1-2 minute peaks. Even when everybody is streaming media, Pandora only takes about 256kbps, Netflix takes a few Mbps, etc.

With existing tech? Probably not a whole lot. I think that once more people have faster connections we'll start seeing new tech to take advantage of it.

> or view a video in YouTube at this lightning speed!

What does that even mean?

Well, it means that it doesn't work. It has been major subject of laugher and cry in Helsinki. Even if you have 10Gbit/s connection, it's "too slow" for streaming youtube videos (at any resolution) reliably. Yep, unfortunate but true. "Too slow" in this case means that the bottleneck is some where else in the network, but it still means that it simply doesn't work properly.

Any ideas where the bottleneck is? Is this a latency issue? What is your ping to s.ytimg.com like?

Its true, I can confirm that 1GBPS connection is available to general public, given your ready to pay the cost of it, and are in a well connected area, near a telecom center or something.

I remember a proper news was about a 300GBPS connection for academic use between US and Europe, though I don't remember the fine details of that. If it were to be India, yes, that would definitely be a first!

As a fellow Indian, I feel bad of how some people brought the malnutrition and poverty as a topic here. Its quite common for a lot of Indians to have that perception. I will not further engage that topic though. So lets concentrate on why we are here.

Peace!

FYI Its not 1 GBps it 1Gbps!

This is surprising. My university (DA-IICT) in Gandhinagar, India has had a 1 Gbps internet connection for quite some time now (over a year). Of course, the bandwidth is distributed and no individual gets all of it. I am not sure about the ISP, but I think it is BSNL, an Indian state-owned telecommunications company.

I think educational institutions are provided with high speed connections at subsidized rates by the BSNL, while other private companies had an upper bound on the max bandwidth they can get. The original post must be about the removal of this constraint.

1Gbps internet is always welcome, but almost 50% of the malnourished children of the world live in India. Everyone seem to have forgotten them. Thats what indian politicians are good at.

This comment comes often in online forums. India is not run by one person. There's no need to only solve one problem. Why can't they have technological progress like space programs, high speed Internet and at the same time work on other problems too?

In another news India's number of AIDS patients are fallen by 57%. See other statistics and you will realize that addressing malnourishment, infant mortality rates, middle class expansion all are underway together.

> See other statistics and you will realize that addressing malnourishment, infact mortality rates, middle class expansion all are underway together.

I remember reading that the malnourishment problem in India has gotten worse, not better.

Exactly because india is not keeping up with the population growth.

Perhaps some population control measures need to be implemented.

Technological progress is always great news and it could help improve quality of life eventually. However you should know one thing about India, Its a country of extremes. Extreme technological progress exist as few bright spots in India but extreme poverty exists everywhere. Most indians who live in the cities simply have no clue how poor india is. The numbers might be improving but no where near at the rate of quality of life that is improving for upper middle class. Indian stock market grew by 1 Trillion dollars from 2007 to 2012 but only 4% of indians hold any form of equity.

Depends on how you see it: http://www.tehelka.com/story_main54.asp?filename=Ne011212Onc...

Thanks for that link. I have been wondering about it for several years myself. This needs to be brought up more often.

This really is a classic example of a false dichotomy. It is not like people can't multitask or the fact that they are working on a space program or getting faster internet means that they completely decide to drop everything else that they could work on.

I mean saying what you just said is exactly identical to the following:

1) Bill Clinton may have been a great president but the fact that his personal life was not up to mark clearly shows that he was a complete failure in life.

2) Sure it is nice that we have so many new entrepreneurs in China but the fact that they don't have democracy is important and we shouldn't forget that.

Would you rather a car deliver the food or a bullock cart?

The tradeoff between between spending money on high speed internet and spending money on the malnourished children is lessened by spending it on the internet.

The internet helps grow the infrastructure that helps the malnourished children sustain the rest of their lives.

You don't deserve a downvote, it's a valid point. I wish the downvoting system on here required a reason.

India is an Asian country which was once colonized and liberated with more than enough problems which ever existed on the subcontinent. Among all other countries she tackled almost all those problems, not just for herself but for the entire place in just 60 years. Catching up with Industrial/Technological/Economic/Social development just like the rest of the world.

Give her a little more time, just might leave you in awe!

> India is an Asian country which was once colonized and liberated with more than enough problems which ever existed on the subcontinent. Among all other countries she tackled almost all those problems, not just for herself but for the entire place in just 60 years. Catching up with Industrial/Technological/Economic/Social development just like the rest of the world.

How long is this excuse going to get trotted out? There are enough examples of countries (South Korea, China for example) out there that went through the process of colonization, liberation and have still been able to get more people out of poverty and move faster up the ladder.

"How long is this excuse going to get trotted out?"

That's a very valid question, and just like you, I also bristle at this excuse sometimes. But you have to remember: India is not a homogenous country; with 15(?) official languages, 1000 different dialects, 100s of ethnic groups, etc. it is very difficult to steer the country as one. Despite the chaos and anarchy, India is making progress. And India's progress is not a forced one like China's (which is "unstable" in an equilibrium way). India just needs a couple of smart, good leaders. Unfortunately, the cult of personality is strong in politics, and it's holding the country back.

> And India's progress is not a forced one like China's (which is "unstable" in an equilibrium way).

Other Asian countries whose economies grew rapidly under non-democratic governments, like Taiwan and South Korea, moved to democracies after the populace had attained a certain level of wealth and education. I would guess that China is headed down that same path. To put it figuratively, rather than being surpassed by the tortoise in the long run, the hare turned into a tortoise after it had sprinted ahead, allowing it to have the best of both worlds.

> But you have to remember: India is not a homogenous country; with 15(?) official languages, 1000 different dialects, 100s of ethnic groups, etc.

Maybe the solution is to have a looser confederation where states can experiment economically to figure out what works for them? This might get some places develop faster.

1Gbps help make solving problems easier.

For the Indian government it also makes an entirely new set of challenges(problems)

Internet companies that promises a 7.5 mbps provides 2 mbps in reality. To bring a 1 gbps line to the general public is a distant dream.

I consistently get the advertised speed with Comcast. It probably helps that Metro Atlanta has several competing companies.

Sounds to me, someone is trying to 'advertise in disguise' for startupvillage.in

Just a feeling though.

1. Really? 2. Malnutrition, Really? 3. Time for "Show HN: Hacker bloody News!"

This is a very welcome update. Anything that promotes web, and thereby free speech and information dispersal, in this otherwise largely offline and corruption-stricken land is great news.

Malnourished children, as someone pointed out below, is definitely a serious problem. But I think that with better means to disperse information (better internet) people can find their way to places where they can get food, better work opportunities and even meet other people from different parts of the world to share their problems.

Better Internet is definitely the right way to go forward. Just my 2 cents.

> Malnourished children, as someone pointed out below, is definitely a serious problem. But I think that with better means to disperse information (better internet) people can find their way to places where they can get food, better work opportunities and even meet other people from different parts of the world to share their problems.

Sorry but just because the pipes for delivering information are getting larger, it doesn't mean that bad laws, corruption go away. Voters who still make decisions based on bad logic (Religion, Ethnic and cultural similarities) irrespective of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (It doesn't take many bytes to highlight corruption and those bytes have been floating around the Indian internet for a decade now) will always mean that these systemic issues will never disappear.

Overall, I am not disagreeing with your thesis that better internet is good, I am just not sure that internet is going to fix farmer suicides in states or religious motivated violence or even in feeding malnourished children (which the experience of Africa should tell us is not a mere matter of shuttling food around).

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