8 ms·

1Gbps Symmetrical Home Broadband for $26 per mth (in Hong Kong)

33 points by albahk 16y ago

albahk 16y ago
As a startup, if you knew each of your customers had 1Gbps access, what could you do that you can't do now?
- DenisM 16y ago
  remote desktop for home users? no power consumption, no upgrades, no backups, no crashes.
  - ewams 16y ago
    Do you mean virtual desktops? You could do it with a regular DSL/cable connection. I have users in India connecting to us in the States through a T3. It is actually pretty sweet; they can even do things like stream audio/video and it goes through just fine.
- macemoneta 16y ago
  Backups to remote systems. Keep significant data in "the cloud". Stream content directly from a friend - why upload/download? Distributed cluster computing / rending farms - make adding FX or fully rendered animation to home movies near real-time. Redundant distributed storage - eliminate backups altogether and keep data safe and accessible. 1080p video conferencing / security monitoring. Most importantly, probably something we haven't yet thought of.
  - albahk 16y ago
    Off-site backup is a good one. If I backup to a NAS on my Gigabit LAN at home, it should be similar speed to a colo-NAS located within the same datacentre as the ISP. According to the linked site, you can download a 4.7GB DVD in 38 seconds.
- hga 16y ago
  Use lower latency video codecs so that video conferencing works better? It's hard to think about, at least when I'm paying 28 US$ for "up to" 1.5M/364Kbps. The way I'm looking at it, much of the future won't be invented in the US.
- bnchdrff 16y ago
  Customers can serve their own content to others, or proxy content to other nearby customers
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Thin clients over the internet - a gigabyte connection is faster than a laptop harddisk. This would be awesome for a lot of home users who wouldn't have to worry about virusses, spyware, etc. It would be awesome for developers because we can ensure that the servers have runtimes for all the scripting languages available and we could make it easy to test your program to make sure it works, since there is only one configuration. And whomever provide this service would be able to charge a commision fee for selling the software, plus getting money from storage, etc. I really would love to do this, so if anybody works at an ISP, please get the users some additional bandwidth.
grandalf 16y ago
Google KS has nothing on that!
jonathanmarcus 16y ago
So jealous!
dailo10 16y ago
Wow. This makes me hate the U.S. telecom providers even more. I know it's not a fair comparison considering how spread out the U.S. is, but still, I'm paying $80 for Internet and phone. Where's all my money going?
- pavs 16y ago
  You answered your own question. Its not a fair comparison. I am guessing: - its more expensive to distribute service when population is spread out over larger area. - There is no genuine competition which keeps the price and service at same rate year after year. - In major cities (like here in NY) there is no prospect of major competition since cities make long term deals with operators. - lack of proper regulation (at present but I know they are working on it), that encourages operators to provide faster connection and cheaper price. - I am 100% speculating here, but I think I remember reading somewhere that in countries like Korea and cities like HK the operators are heavily subsidized to provide faster internet connection at lower price. Not sure if its still true.
  - albahk 16y ago
    Hong Kong housing is in large clusters and extremely densely populated. Taking only three of the large private housing estates (Mei Foo, Taikoo Shing, Whampoa Gardens) gives you a population of roughly 150,000ppl. So the providers can be reasonably assured of a large market, although they commonly use some aggressive sales tactics.
pavs 16y ago
How many of you would host your servers at home if you had a connection like that (assuming your webserver is not several racks, just 1 or 2 quad cores)? I know it might seem irrational, since webhosts provide more than just bandwidth and uptime, its also about security (both physical and virtual), but there is something about having 100% access to my server that I really enjoy.
- andrewvc 16y ago
  Considering the fact that you can't buy 1gbps of transit in a carrier hotel for anywhere near $26/mo, there's bound to be problems with that idea.
- sjs 16y ago
  I like the idea but customer service and uptime guarantees could be a problem. It'd be worth paying a bit extra for customer service who will converse & troubleshoot with you knowing that you're not clueless. A proper data centre provides many benefits though. Two big ones (excluding security) are redundant networks and power. A good UPS would probably suffice for power though. I think I would try it with a hobby site or two, but nothing critical.
- tmbeihl 16y ago
  Their terms and conditions specifically prohibit operating servers. They do not provide static ip and prohibit you from bringing your own ips.
  - pavs 16y ago
    Can you provide quote from the T&C where it states that you can't host servers and prohibit you from have your own ips? I just did a quick search on certain keywords but didn't find any specific that states that you can't host servers. http://www.hkbn.net/TC/00_right/pdf/HKBN_Gen_T&C_Eng%20200712.pdf http://www.hkbn.net/TC/00_right/pdf/HKBN_Gen_T&C_Eng%202... I know this is true for more US internet providers that I know of. Until recently my Roadrunner had port 80 blocked (now its open last time I checked). I still have the same ip I had 2 years ago since I moved to this house, even after flushing the modem (they replaced it after it went bad). I know this is not normal, but even with dynamic ips they don't change it that often, if at all. You could always use something like http://www.dyndns.com/services/ http://www.dyndns.com/services/ for dynamic ips. Either way, it was just a thought experiment like "What would you do if you had this much speed?". Its impractical and risky anyways. I remember reading when plentyoffish started out he used to host his server in his home. I think he moved his server to his new office now.
bnchdrff 16y ago
I'm sick of waiting for this in the U.S. How much is it to rent a microtrencher and wire up my neighborhood with fiber and then lease a university/municipal network uplink?
- asmithmd1 16y ago
  First you will need a license from your local government -- and they will want to know what you can do for them.
  - chc 16y ago
    I think offering a sweet Internet connection to the whole neighborhood would be the "what you can do for them." Makes it more attractive for people to live there — and as a bonus, if people are paying their broadband fees to you and you live locally, it keeps in the money in the local economy, which most governments like.
    - wmf 16y ago
      Providing service to a neighborhood is considered "redlining" because it discriminates against all the neighborhoods that you don't serve. Thus the local government will probably require that you serve the entire city/county or nothing.
      - scrod 16y ago
        Organize a cooperative with your neighbors to purchase the capital equipment and sustain the costs to operate it. The initial "risk" will be shared and the members will derive a superior benefit by making profit and advertising costs (however minimal) unnecessary, and by allowing anyone willing and competent in the neighborhood to carry out tech support and installations.
      - tomjen3 16y ago
        And as a result nobody gets good internet. Dammit.
- 16y ago
hyung 16y ago
There's also typically a big price difference between domestic and international bandwidth. From just quickly glancing at the website, the 1Gbps is only for local servers, and they don't seem to guarantee any international bandwidth.
dhotson 16y ago
I wonder, if you're downloading a file at this speed, your computer wouldn't be able to write it to your hard disk fast enough correct?
- wmf 16y ago
  Right. But if you have an SSD it should be fine.
  - laut 16y ago
    Not all SSDs are faster than a hard-disk for sequential writes (for instance writing a big file to disk). http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/24 http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/24
- ww520 16y ago
  Not unless you have multi-disk striping, also known as RAID 0.
- ramchip 16y ago
  I guess it could be interesting for high-quality, real-time video or online games more than downloading a file. Then again, I wonder what the latency is like.
quant18 16y ago
I'm rooting for HKBN (the guys making this broadband offer); even if you're nowhere near Hong Kong, I hope it warms your heart too to see an entrepreneur taking on slow-moving, incompetent, overfunded competitors. The extended back story here: Hong Kong also lacks genuine competition in many non-tradable goods sectors. The major real estate development families use their free cash to buy up supermarkets, cellphone companies, construction materials suppliers, and anything else that can be nailed down, and then collude to prevent outsiders from muscling in on their territory (e.g. what happened to Carrefour back in the late 1990s when they tried to set up grocery stores here). HKBN are outsiders trying to improve their position in what is basically an oligopolistic market. HKBN's major competitors are Cable TV and Netvigator, both closely linked to massive real-estate developers. They offer high prices, crap service, and speeds far below what their advertisements claim, but they survive because their salesmen have free rein to set up sales booths in their parent companies' apartment complexes and stuff fliers in all the mailboxes and harass every person walking out of the building. Netvigator in particular is a subsidiary of PCCW, which is pretty much a synonym for "inherited privilege" --- it's run (incompetently) by Richard Li, the son of Li Ka-shing (the richest man in Asia, and the founder of real estate company Cheung Kong Holdings). HKBN on the other hand is owned by City Telecom, who have monopoly-smashing in their blood: their founder Ricky Wong came out of nowhere to take on the Hong Kong Telecom long-distance phone service monopoly back in 1992, in an extremely rare example of a successful challenge to the tycoon families. (Hong Kong Telecom was later bought by PCCW. I'm sure their corporate cultures were a good match.)
- philwelch 16y ago
  I'm amused how (presumably) Hong Kong's leading cable TV provider is actually branded "Cable TV".
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
rbanffy 16y ago
I am not sure my computer can even sustain that kind of data rate. I have already hosted some low-traffic websites off small-office data plans an can tell it mostly works. Uptime is not that good and you'll spend some time on the phone explaining it's their connection and not your server that's down. In the end, it's not really worth it. As for effective bandwidth, what most telcos sell is the connection speed to their first router. Your mileage may vary.

33 points by albahk 16y ago

albahk 16y ago

As a startup, if you knew each of your customers had 1Gbps access, what could you do that you can't do now?

DenisM 16y ago
remote desktop for home users? no power consumption, no upgrades, no backups, no crashes.
- ewams 16y ago
  Do you mean virtual desktops? You could do it with a regular DSL/cable connection. I have users in India connecting to us in the States through a T3. It is actually pretty sweet; they can even do things like stream audio/video and it goes through just fine.
macemoneta 16y ago
Backups to remote systems. Keep significant data in "the cloud". Stream content directly from a friend - why upload/download? Distributed cluster computing / rending farms - make adding FX or fully rendered animation to home movies near real-time. Redundant distributed storage - eliminate backups altogether and keep data safe and accessible. 1080p video conferencing / security monitoring. Most importantly, probably something we haven't yet thought of.
- albahk 16y ago
  Off-site backup is a good one. If I backup to a NAS on my Gigabit LAN at home, it should be similar speed to a colo-NAS located within the same datacentre as the ISP. According to the linked site, you can download a 4.7GB DVD in 38 seconds.
hga 16y ago
Use lower latency video codecs so that video conferencing works better? It's hard to think about, at least when I'm paying 28 US$ for "up to" 1.5M/364Kbps. The way I'm looking at it, much of the future won't be invented in the US.
bnchdrff 16y ago
Customers can serve their own content to others, or proxy content to other nearby customers
tomjen3 16y ago
Thin clients over the internet - a gigabyte connection is faster than a laptop harddisk. This would be awesome for a lot of home users who wouldn't have to worry about virusses, spyware, etc. It would be awesome for developers because we can ensure that the servers have runtimes for all the scripting languages available and we could make it easy to test your program to make sure it works, since there is only one configuration. And whomever provide this service would be able to charge a commision fee for selling the software, plus getting money from storage, etc. I really would love to do this, so if anybody works at an ISP, please get the users some additional bandwidth.

grandalf 16y ago

Google KS has nothing on that!

jonathanmarcus 16y ago

So jealous!

dailo10 16y ago

Wow. This makes me hate the U.S. telecom providers even more. I know it's not a fair comparison considering how spread out the U.S. is, but still, I'm paying $80 for Internet and phone. Where's all my money going?

pavs 16y ago
You answered your own question. Its not a fair comparison. I am guessing: - its more expensive to distribute service when population is spread out over larger area. - There is no genuine competition which keeps the price and service at same rate year after year. - In major cities (like here in NY) there is no prospect of major competition since cities make long term deals with operators. - lack of proper regulation (at present but I know they are working on it), that encourages operators to provide faster connection and cheaper price. - I am 100% speculating here, but I think I remember reading somewhere that in countries like Korea and cities like HK the operators are heavily subsidized to provide faster internet connection at lower price. Not sure if its still true.
- albahk 16y ago
  Hong Kong housing is in large clusters and extremely densely populated. Taking only three of the large private housing estates (Mei Foo, Taikoo Shing, Whampoa Gardens) gives you a population of roughly 150,000ppl. So the providers can be reasonably assured of a large market, although they commonly use some aggressive sales tactics.

pavs 16y ago

How many of you would host your servers at home if you had a connection like that (assuming your webserver is not several racks, just 1 or 2 quad cores)? I know it might seem irrational, since webhosts provide more than just bandwidth and uptime, its also about security (both physical and virtual), but there is something about having 100% access to my server that I really enjoy.

andrewvc 16y ago
Considering the fact that you can't buy 1gbps of transit in a carrier hotel for anywhere near $26/mo, there's bound to be problems with that idea.
sjs 16y ago
I like the idea but customer service and uptime guarantees could be a problem. It'd be worth paying a bit extra for customer service who will converse & troubleshoot with you knowing that you're not clueless. A proper data centre provides many benefits though. Two big ones (excluding security) are redundant networks and power. A good UPS would probably suffice for power though. I think I would try it with a hobby site or two, but nothing critical.
tmbeihl 16y ago
Their terms and conditions specifically prohibit operating servers. They do not provide static ip and prohibit you from bringing your own ips.
- pavs 16y ago
  Can you provide quote from the T&C where it states that you can't host servers and prohibit you from have your own ips? I just did a quick search on certain keywords but didn't find any specific that states that you can't host servers. http://www.hkbn.net/TC/00_right/pdf/HKBN_Gen_T&C_Eng%20200712.pdf http://www.hkbn.net/TC/00_right/pdf/HKBN_Gen_T&C_Eng%202... I know this is true for more US internet providers that I know of. Until recently my Roadrunner had port 80 blocked (now its open last time I checked). I still have the same ip I had 2 years ago since I moved to this house, even after flushing the modem (they replaced it after it went bad). I know this is not normal, but even with dynamic ips they don't change it that often, if at all. You could always use something like http://www.dyndns.com/services/ http://www.dyndns.com/services/ for dynamic ips. Either way, it was just a thought experiment like "What would you do if you had this much speed?". Its impractical and risky anyways. I remember reading when plentyoffish started out he used to host his server in his home. I think he moved his server to his new office now.

bnchdrff 16y ago

I'm sick of waiting for this in the U.S. How much is it to rent a microtrencher and wire up my neighborhood with fiber and then lease a university/municipal network uplink?

asmithmd1 16y ago
First you will need a license from your local government -- and they will want to know what you can do for them.
- chc 16y ago
  I think offering a sweet Internet connection to the whole neighborhood would be the "what you can do for them." Makes it more attractive for people to live there — and as a bonus, if people are paying their broadband fees to you and you live locally, it keeps in the money in the local economy, which most governments like.
  - wmf 16y ago
    Providing service to a neighborhood is considered "redlining" because it discriminates against all the neighborhoods that you don't serve. Thus the local government will probably require that you serve the entire city/county or nothing.
    - scrod 16y ago
      Organize a cooperative with your neighbors to purchase the capital equipment and sustain the costs to operate it. The initial "risk" will be shared and the members will derive a superior benefit by making profit and advertising costs (however minimal) unnecessary, and by allowing anyone willing and competent in the neighborhood to carry out tech support and installations.
    - tomjen3 16y ago
      And as a result nobody gets good internet. Dammit.
16y ago

hyung 16y ago

There's also typically a big price difference between domestic and international bandwidth. From just quickly glancing at the website, the 1Gbps is only for local servers, and they don't seem to guarantee any international bandwidth.

dhotson 16y ago

I wonder, if you're downloading a file at this speed, your computer wouldn't be able to write it to your hard disk fast enough correct?

wmf 16y ago
Right. But if you have an SSD it should be fine.
- laut 16y ago
  Not all SSDs are faster than a hard-disk for sequential writes (for instance writing a big file to disk). http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/24 http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/24
ww520 16y ago
Not unless you have multi-disk striping, also known as RAID 0.
ramchip 16y ago
I guess it could be interesting for high-quality, real-time video or online games more than downloading a file. Then again, I wonder what the latency is like.

quant18 16y ago

I'm rooting for HKBN (the guys making this broadband offer); even if you're nowhere near Hong Kong, I hope it warms your heart too to see an entrepreneur taking on slow-moving, incompetent, overfunded competitors. The extended back story here: Hong Kong also lacks genuine competition in many non-tradable goods sectors. The major real estate development families use their free cash to buy up supermarkets, cellphone companies, construction materials suppliers, and anything else that can be nailed down, and then collude to prevent outsiders from muscling in on their territory (e.g. what happened to Carrefour back in the late 1990s when they tried to set up grocery stores here). HKBN are outsiders trying to improve their position in what is basically an oligopolistic market. HKBN's major competitors are Cable TV and Netvigator, both closely linked to massive real-estate developers. They offer high prices, crap service, and speeds far below what their advertisements claim, but they survive because their salesmen have free rein to set up sales booths in their parent companies' apartment complexes and stuff fliers in all the mailboxes and harass every person walking out of the building. Netvigator in particular is a subsidiary of PCCW, which is pretty much a synonym for "inherited privilege" --- it's run (incompetently) by Richard Li, the son of Li Ka-shing (the richest man in Asia, and the founder of real estate company Cheung Kong Holdings). HKBN on the other hand is owned by City Telecom, who have monopoly-smashing in their blood: their founder Ricky Wong came out of nowhere to take on the Hong Kong Telecom long-distance phone service monopoly back in 1992, in an extremely rare example of a successful challenge to the tycoon families. (Hong Kong Telecom was later bought by PCCW. I'm sure their corporate cultures were a good match.)

philwelch 16y ago
I'm amused how (presumably) Hong Kong's leading cable TV provider is actually branded "Cable TV".

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

rbanffy 16y ago

I am not sure my computer can even sustain that kind of data rate. I have already hosted some low-traffic websites off small-office data plans an can tell it mostly works. Uptime is not that good and you'll spend some time on the phone explaining it's their connection and not your server that's down. In the end, it's not really worth it. As for effective bandwidth, what most telcos sell is the connection speed to their first router. Your mileage may vary.