6 ms·
1Gbps connection now costs $26 a month in Hong Kong
- swombat 17y agoI realise that Hong Kong is much smaller than the average country, but is there really any excuse why major city centres in the western world can't match this, other than generalised incompetence?
- jacquesm 17y agoSure: profits. 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.
- potatolicious 17y agoYes, government-granted monopolies. This going beyond things like spectrum regulation, but also to exclusivity deals that municipalities sign with various providers. In Asia this just doesn't happen. 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.
- anigbrowl 17y agoOK well obviously we'd prefer to avoid 10 different companies digging up the street to put in their own cables (and I'm sure they'd rather not have to do that either), so how does the competition manifest in practice?
- jacquesm 17y agoThe usual way is by 'right of way' on a competitors infrastructure for a minimum fee.
- jacquesm 17y agoIt hasn't got anything to do with spectrum regulation at all, since these are land lines and spectrum issues deal with mobile usage.
- dualogy 17y agoTo be fair, he said "going way beyond spectrum".
- edj 17y agoThis is so depressing. I pay $25 for 12mbps. And even that's a half-off special only good for the first six months.
- tvon 17y agoThat is depressing, I pay more for a lot less via Comcast in the US.
- edj 17y agoSame here. Comcast in Portland, a city that allegedly has competition among ISPs. 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.
- ascuttlefish 17y agoI pay $39.99 for 10mbps. And I only seem to get it on speedtests... everything else is pokey as heck.
- sophacles 17y agoI have good results by using opendns and my own local caching dns server. Throughput is great, unless of course your DNS lookups add giant lag.
- thingie 17y agoHm, I have no idea how much I pay for the connection (it's included in the rent, I don't pay for it separately) and don't even know exact parameters. It seems to be enough. (Certainly not more than 12mbps or so, but that's enough for me). I am quite happy (about this, otherwise quite depressed, but that's unrelated).
- Sadranyc 17y agoWe pay around US$35 for 3mbps in Argentina. And you only get that speed from 12am-9pm. THIS is depressing.
- meroliph 17y agoSome notes: 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.
- swombat 17y agoMy broadband is also subject to a contract (12 months) and has no guarantee whatsoever... They say it's 24 Mbit, but in practice, even to London it's only about 10 - and to other parts of the world it can be a lot lower.
- kierank 17y agoThey say it's 24 Mbit 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)
- yeti 17y agoUsually they waive the install fee. 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.
- _Lemon_ 17y agoSubtle change in the headlines here: GB/s to Gb/s. Things get confusing quickly but B is bytes, and b is bits. (Except when it says something like MBits). </pedantic>
- grosen 17y agoWhat use is 1Gbps when you are sitting behind the GFOC?
- yeti 17y agoIt's Hong Kong, not China. No firewalling here.
- sliderr 17y agoWondering why it's such a big deal to set up fast internet in metro areas in the u.s. I got 100 MBit VDSL FTTB for 35€ here in Cologne and I could get about the same speed from 3 other ISPs.
- spamizbad 17y agoUS telcom companies have assured us we're receiving the best internet access in the world. 100MBit VDSL may seem impressive to you, but can you claim that each packet is lightly-dusted with American Exceptionalism before being hand-delivered by the invisible hand of the market? I think not!
- notauser 17y agoEmigrating to Hong Kong should be pretty easy, their migration process is points based and most people with a Masters degree probably qualify. It's a great city so the WiFi wouldn't be the only attraction. Has anyone had any experience doing that? How hard is it to find work if you don't speak Cantonese or Mandarin?
- yeti 17y agoYou can get a regional job without Chinese language skills (what I did), or if you're a specialist in a niche field here is another way to go. Or invest and setup a new business here.
- notauser 17y agoHow did you find the job? Did you go through an agency of some sort?
- setori88 17y agoyeah I have, having a blast out here. People are great, food, life and the net is good. In comparison to South Africa it is heaven broadband wise. But you tend to miss the sticks and bush, constantly being surrounded by concrete. From that perspective it is hard. Also those Gbps lines are only in built up areas - so you cannot have the best of both worlds.... unless someone on this forum knows of a sweet spot. Please let me know someone if you know of Gbps area in a natural spot - I am due for a house move soon.
- mdasen 17y agoI hope someone has an answer to this. In a lot of places (like Hong Kong or Japan), users are likely connecting to local servers a lot of the time for reasons of language or geography. So, it's potentially easy for an ISP to offer a high speed to those local servers just like it could be easy for an ISP in Boston to offer high speed access to servers in Boston. However, most Americans would be connecting to servers that are usually far away from them geographically. 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 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.
- ww520 17y agoThe ISP only guarantees the 1Gbps speed for outgoing and INCOMING traffic out of your house to their network. It can't guarantee the same speed at any destination servers in the world. If the destination server in US has a slow ISP, you can't get 1Gbps to it. There are also a number of routers and gateways in between your house and the rest of the world. It's worse when going across Continents. They all impact the speed. 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.
- acangiano 17y agoToronto, $40 a month: http://www.speedtest.net/result/787507214.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/787507214.png
- martythemaniak 17y agoI fucking hate Bell and Rogers internet :(
- faragon 17y ago3mbps (509kbps upload) 41.64 euro/month (~56 USD/month) Spain (Europe); ISP: Jazztel (in my opinion is too much expensive)
- chwahoo 17y agoOT (but related): I pay for a 20Mbps connection in the DC area through a cable provider. On a number of speed-test sites, I only get around 6Mbps. I tried calling tech-support, but my representative went down a script asking me about clearing my cookies, etc. I was unable to convey to him that my speed wasn't "slow", it was just less than the advertised rate. Is it normal to get far less than the advertised speed for a residential cable connection?
- dzlobin 17y agoTry the test at an off-peak hour. Cable speeds go down as usage in the surrounding area picks up. My 30mbps is usually 12 or so in the evening and the full 30 at night.
- DaemonHN 17y agoWhat you have is a plan that provides _up_ to 20Mbps. Since you're most likely a residential customer, there are no service level agreements that you can hold your ISP to.
- henriklied 17y agoOslo, Norway. $65/month: http://www.speedtest.net/result/787586116.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/787586116.png
- sirrocco 17y agoRomania - 10euros for cable, phone and internet : http://www.speedtest.net/result/787608943.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/787608943.png (on one server I'm getting close to 45Mb.)
- bond 17y agoHere in Portugal i pay $74 for Tv 116channels+unlimited phone calls+internet50MB. http://www.speedtest.net/result/787781349.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/787781349.png Wireless test. Cable goes to 30-35