1 GB/second Broadband Speed !

#1
Cheap, ultrafast broadband? Hong Kong has it - The Economic Times

Hong Kong residents can enjoy astoundingly fast broadband at an astoundingly low price. It became available last year, when a scrappy company called Hong Kong Broadband Network introduced a new option for its fiber-to-the-home service: a speed of 1,000 megabits a second known as a gig for less than $26 a month.

In the United States, we dont have anything close to that. But we could. And we should.

Verizon, the nations leading provider of fiber-to-the-home service, doesnt offer a gig, or even half that speed. Instead, it markets a fastest service that is only 50 megabits a second for downloading and 20 megabits a second for uploading. It costs $144.99 a month. Thats one-twentieth the speed of Hong Kong Broadbands service for downloading, for more than five times the price.

One thing working in Hong Kongs favor, of course, is its greater population density, enabling broadband companies to reach multiuser dwellings at a much lower cost. But density is only part of the explanation. The personality of Hong Kong Broadband should be noted, too. A wholly owned subsidiary of City Telecom , it is an aggressive newcomer. It was willing to sustain seven years of losses while building out its fiber network before it turned profitable.

Hong Kong Broadbands principal competitor is an older company, PCCW, which has several other lines of business, including phone, television and mobile. PCCW also offers gigabit service to the home and benefits from the same population density. But PCCWs price is more than twice as much as Hong Kong Broadbands. Despite its low prices, Hong Kong Broadband now operates in the black.

Inexpensive pricing of gigabit broadband is practical in U.S. cities, too.

This is an eminently replicable model, says Benoit Felten, a co-founder of Diffraction Analysis, a consulting business based in Paris. But not by someone who already owns a network unless theyre willing to scrap the network.

In the United States, costs would come down if several companies shared the financial burden of putting fiber into the ground and then competed on the basis of services built on top of the shared assets. That would bring multiple competitors into the picture, pushing down prices. But it would also require regulatory changes that the Federal Communications Commission has yet to show an appetite for. Dane Jasper, the chief executive of Sonic.net, an Internet provider based in Santa Rosa, Calif., says that most broadband markets in the United States today are dominated by one phone company and one cable company.

Why doesnt Verizon offer gigabit service? Jasper asks. Because it doesnt have to.

In its earnings report for the quarter ended Dec. 31, Verizon said its fiber-based Internet service, which serves 12 states and the District of Columbia, was available to 12.8 million premises, an increase of 10 percent from the previous year.

When I asked about its lack of gig service, C. Lincoln Hoewing, Verizons assistant vice president for Internet and technology issues, said, We already offer 150 megabits, referring to a tier of fiber-based service that is marketed for $195 a month to small businesses in many of its markets. It seems to be satisfying demand, he said.

In a follow-up e-mail, a Verizon spokeswoman addressed the companys lack of a gig service by saying that it offers speeds that exceed what customers can and do use.

As long as a gig is expensive, a lack of customer interest shouldnt be surprising. In October, EPB, the municipal electric utility in Chattanooga, Tenn., introduced a gig option in its fiber-to-the-home Internet services. A spokeswoman said the option, which costs $349.99 a month, currently has only about 20 customers.

It is true that residential customers would now be hard-pressed to fully use anything close to a gig. Uncompressed, broadcast-quality HD video, for example, uses 23 megabits a second.

But it is possible to imagine situations a doctors office consultation, say, involving specialists scattered around the country, poring over the patient and her cerebral angiogram simultaneously where multiple, two-way video feeds could chew up a lot of bandwidth. All parties would need the ultrafast connections. But that level of capacity seems distant because each party needed to make it happen customers, software developers and Internet providers is waiting for the others to show up first.

Google doesnt want to wait. It and Sonic.net are preparing an experimental deployment of gigabit service to 850 faculty and staff homes in a Stanford University subdivision.

Separately, Google plans to select one or several cities where it will offer gigabit service at what it calls a competitive price to at least 50,000, and potentially 500,000, people. In a post on the company blog titled Think Big With a Gig, it says, We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra-high speeds, whether its creating new bandwidth-intensive killer apps and services, or other uses we cant yet imagine.

Jasper of Sonic.net says the history of computing shows us that no matter how much storage we have or how fast the computing processing speed or network connection speed, applications arise to utilize them.

While companies like Verizon dont seem to be in a rush, that little Hong Kong business is saying: A gig? Sure. Join this grand experiment early. At $26 a month, its a low-cost ticket to the future.
Hong Kong's population density helps its broadband companies reach users at low cost.
It is hard to believe but it is true. :spaz:

btw, what is the fasted broadband service that we can get in India ? Any serive, any plan, any location, any cost -- but what is the FASTEST POSSIBLE speed in India yet ? I do not think any one can get 1 GB/sec here.

:cheers:
 
#2
tata docomo 3g @ 22 mbps


It is hard to believe but it is true. :spaz:

btw, what is the fasted broadband service that we can get in India ? Any serive, any plan, any location, any cost -- but what is the FASTEST POSSIBLE speed in India yet ? I do not think any one can get 1 GB/sec here.

:cheers: