5 ms·

World’s Fastest Broadband at $20 Per Home

65 points by hko 18y ago

dkokelley 18y ago
Did I miss it, or did that article not explain how it somehow cost $600 more per American home to upgrade here than in Japan? They touched on competition, but it seemed like that was only for the final service, not necessarily for the supplies. I thought maybe homes were more compacted so it was easier to upgrade multiple homes.
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
  I would assume that the combination of denser residentials and fewer suburbs in Japan has everything to do with the cost difference. When you can upgrade 10 homes in Japan with the same space of 1 home in the US, and there are no sprawling suburbs to lay long runs of cable, it's easy to grasp that per-person price gap. That's still no excuse for the floundering broadband speeds in this country. I live in Rochester, NY, where Time Warner announced that on top of the "10Mbps" that I never get as it is, they'll be introducing capped plans, with a maximum cap of only 40GB! And I can't just take my money elsewhere, because the city granted them a monopoly; my only other options are horrible DSL that has a 25GB cap, ClearWire broadband at 1/10 the speed I have now, or dial-up. There's absolutely no competition! It's no wonder Time Warner chose my town for second-round "evaluations"; nobody can leave Time Warner because of this policy, so of course they'll "find" that people are "happy" with the caps. It disgusts me!
  - anamax 18y ago
    > And I can't just take my money elsewhere, because the city granted them a monopoly Did the city grant the monopoly to help you or because they got paid off? Someone mentioned torches and pitchforks. Tar and feathers are also useful.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    my only other options are horrible DSL that has a 25GB cap I don't think this is true. If you can get a loop to your house, you can get some sort of business DSL plan, which definitely won't have a cap. I use Speakeasy for this. Expensive, but worth it because I have an unlimited pipe that I can use for whatever I want, and they have actual people (who are native speakers of English) that I can call when something goes wrong. Anyway, you aren't looking hard enough, or you aren't willing to pay for more than 40G a month.
    - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
      I live in an apartment. I have no other options...
  - shiranaihito 18y ago
    When you can upgrade 10 homes in Japan with the same space of 1 home in the US, and there are no sprawling suburbs to lay long runs of cable, it's easy to grasp that per-person price gap. Actually, I've seen a sprawling suburb of Tokyo, and the one resident I visited there was able to get a 100M connection. With the first six months free or something.
- cookiecaper 18y ago
  The $800-whatever prices quoted in the article are the prices for Verizon's FiOS service. The $20/home is to upgrade Japanese equipment to DOCSIS 3 over existing cable lines. It's different! The article then continues to state that it'd take at the most $100/home to upgrade to DOCSIS 3 in the United States. The section on competition refers to the slothfulness to roll this technology out in the United States at affordable prices.
mdasen 18y ago
Unfortunately, the article completely ignores the geographic realities or the United States and Japan. First, Japan's population density is orders of magnitude greater than that of the United States. It's going to cost less to deliver high-speed internet when people live closer together. Likewise, Japan is a smaller country. That 160Mbps is not the speed you're going to get traveling over underseas cables to North America. That's the speed you'll get for servers located within Japan. Backbone connections are going to cost more to create in the United States simply because Americans are as likely to access a server across the continent as they are within 100 miles of them. Where you can essentially create a backbone in Japan with a under 1,000mi of fiber, in the US you'd need 20x that amount or more. Those are stark differences. I mean, it wouldn't be too hard for an ISP to provide faster connectivity from Boston to Philly where populations are dense for sites hosted in that area, but that wouldn't be helpful to users - since most of the time I'm not connecting to servers hosted within eastern Mass, RI, CT, the NYC metro area or Jersey. In fact, I'd say that most of the time I'm connecting to Texas or California. Can we stop comparing Apples and Oranges? The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy. Maybe those things could offer marginal improvements (seeing our service go from 6Mbps to 10-15Mbps), but we simply won't have service like Japan will since we don't locate ourselves close to the servers we want to access or to each other.
- endtime 18y ago
  The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy. I accept that geography is a factor, but do you mean to say that lack of competition isn't? It seems to me that it's simply not in the interest of US cable companies to improve bandwidth (which, as the article says, might lead people to stop paying for TV) or lower costs (which would lower their profits).
  - mdasen 18y ago
    In a country like Japan, it's decently easy for a company to run its own backbone and provide connectivity to, say, 80% of where a customer is going to be connecting to with minimal investment. In the United States, you don't really have that option. Bandwidth is going to be expensive here. If you up people to 160Mbps service, you're going to need a ton more backend capacity and because you can't just create that capacity yourself, it's prohibitively expensive. Sure, lack of competition is a problem, but that's just an easy scapegoat. I mean, bandwidth at 10 cents per GB is really cheap bandwidth - cheaper than you'd get with most dedicated hosts. Part of what makes that expensive is that fiber has to go a long way to provide that bandwidth - if I'm downloading from NY to San Fran, that's a huge expanse to cover. In Japan, it would be a lot easier for companies providing bandwidth to consumers to also run their own backbone. Sure, competition is a problem in the US, but we're talking about having to do 20x as much cap-ex to cover the US. Anytime you have 20x greater costs, you need to expect that the product will reflect that. Saying that it's just competition is an easy way to be anti-corporate without addressing the issue - it costs a lot more to create and run the internet in the US; it doesn't cost a little bit more or 50% more, but orders of magnitude more because we're more spread out. We don't need to overcome a cost premium of 20%, but probably in excess of 1000% - and it's somewhat incredible that we aren't doing worse.
raheemm 18y ago
"The industry is worried that by offering 100 Mbps, they are opening Pandora’s box, he said. Everyone will be able to get video on the Internet" - WTF? This really pisses me off!
- DarkShikari 18y ago
  This is because cable companies are worried that streaming video will put their VOD services out of business. Hence many companies trying to add caps to their bandwidth. When they tell you it's because of 1% of users using the most bandwidth, they're lying; it's because they want users paying for VOD content. This is understandable, as VOD is by far their most profitable business segment on a %-basis (I work for an IPTV company). Thus, they are scared to death by the concept of decent internet service--it'll reduce their profit margins.
  - sketerpot 18y ago
    Really? We haven't slipped through a hole in the space-time continuum and been magically transported back to 2003? There will be decent internet service. Anybody whose business model depends on internet access sucking forever needs to find a new source of income, fast.
    - netcan 18y ago
      Whenever this comes up on HN, my response is that just because it is hopeless having a business model that depends on copyright (crappy internet), doesn't mean they don't benefit from prolonging the process. The days of mature consumer technologies depending on Broadband speeds you get in S. Korea are a ways away. How many people are still not connected to the internet at all? How many people have no broadband at all? If they can add 1 or 2 or 5 or 10 years to the point where youtube is what people connect to their big TV, they make a lot of money. It's sort of like saying a business model that requires U2 to stay popular is not sustainable. Of course not. But it doesn't mean you should give up.
- jrockway 18y ago
  I don't buy this argument. I can easily stream HD video with "only" a 6M DSL connection. (Note that it's re-compressed h264, not mpeg2... but who cares, the quality is great.)
iamelgringo 18y ago
Why is it that in Silicon Valley, the fastest consumer connection that I can get is 12Mpbs? And that costs me $60 a month. Sharpen the pitchforks and light the torches.
- Mazy 18y ago
  Comcast recently rolled out (last month) 50 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up, they call it Extreme 50, it's $140/mo.
  - barredo 18y ago
    That's a joke in Japan, South Korea and Escandinavian Nations
    - modoc 18y ago
      Having just spent a week in Iceland, they may have fast local connections, but for actually using US based sites and services, I'd rather have 1.5 MBit DSL in the States (actually I have the Comcast 50/10 service at home). It was painful.
      - Mazy 18y ago
        how is the Comcast 50? I am considering getting it, but I'm worried because they advertise it as "up to" 50. What speeds are you getting from it?
        modoc 18y ago
        I love it! It's $$ but it's a business expense. I get the full 50/10 they advertise: http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/general/comcast-5010-service.html http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/general/comcast-50... The only issue is you're still limited by the 250 GB/month transfer cap. My first month with 50/10 I did over 750 GB, and got a phone call about it:>
    - umjames 18y ago
dkasper 18y ago
I would gladly pay the $100 to get my home upgraded. Doesn't it seem like individuals or even communities should be able to round up the money to pay for the upgrade themselves? It's basically like we are at the mercy of the cable/telcos until they decide it's cost effective for them to upgrade people. It's not like a hard drive where you can pay extra money to get something better, you have no options.
- wmf 18y ago
  The $100 is probably an amortized number, assuming that your whole neighborhood gets upgraded. e.g. It costs $50,000 to upgrade your cable node which serves 500 customers. If only 50 people round up the money to pay for the upgrade they'll need $1,000 each, which isn't as palatable.
  - kd5bjo 18y ago
    Amortize that $1000 over two years, though, and the upgrade costs less than $50/mo, which starts to sound reasonable again. If all 500 customers paid, it only takes a price increase of $5/month to pay off the upgrade in two years.
    - wmf 18y ago
      Yeah, I'm a believer in the concept of customer-owned broadband, but the ISPs are stuck in a model where they think they have to accept all the risk of upgrades.

65 points by hko 18y ago

Did I miss it, or did that article not explain how it somehow cost $600 more per American home to upgrade here than in Japan? They touched on competition, but it seemed like that was only for the final service, not necessarily for the supplies. I thought maybe homes were more compacted so it was easier to upgrade multiple homes.

nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
I would assume that the combination of denser residentials and fewer suburbs in Japan has everything to do with the cost difference. When you can upgrade 10 homes in Japan with the same space of 1 home in the US, and there are no sprawling suburbs to lay long runs of cable, it's easy to grasp that per-person price gap. That's still no excuse for the floundering broadband speeds in this country. I live in Rochester, NY, where Time Warner announced that on top of the "10Mbps" that I never get as it is, they'll be introducing capped plans, with a maximum cap of only 40GB! And I can't just take my money elsewhere, because the city granted them a monopoly; my only other options are horrible DSL that has a 25GB cap, ClearWire broadband at 1/10 the speed I have now, or dial-up. There's absolutely no competition! It's no wonder Time Warner chose my town for second-round "evaluations"; nobody can leave Time Warner because of this policy, so of course they'll "find" that people are "happy" with the caps. It disgusts me!
- anamax 18y ago
  > And I can't just take my money elsewhere, because the city granted them a monopoly Did the city grant the monopoly to help you or because they got paid off? Someone mentioned torches and pitchforks. Tar and feathers are also useful.
- jrockway 18y ago
  my only other options are horrible DSL that has a 25GB cap I don't think this is true. If you can get a loop to your house, you can get some sort of business DSL plan, which definitely won't have a cap. I use Speakeasy for this. Expensive, but worth it because I have an unlimited pipe that I can use for whatever I want, and they have actual people (who are native speakers of English) that I can call when something goes wrong. Anyway, you aren't looking hard enough, or you aren't willing to pay for more than 40G a month.
  - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
    I live in an apartment. I have no other options...
- shiranaihito 18y ago
  When you can upgrade 10 homes in Japan with the same space of 1 home in the US, and there are no sprawling suburbs to lay long runs of cable, it's easy to grasp that per-person price gap. Actually, I've seen a sprawling suburb of Tokyo, and the one resident I visited there was able to get a 100M connection. With the first six months free or something.
cookiecaper 18y ago
The $800-whatever prices quoted in the article are the prices for Verizon's FiOS service. The $20/home is to upgrade Japanese equipment to DOCSIS 3 over existing cable lines. It's different! The article then continues to state that it'd take at the most $100/home to upgrade to DOCSIS 3 in the United States. The section on competition refers to the slothfulness to roll this technology out in the United States at affordable prices.

mdasen 18y ago

Unfortunately, the article completely ignores the geographic realities or the United States and Japan. First, Japan's population density is orders of magnitude greater than that of the United States. It's going to cost less to deliver high-speed internet when people live closer together. Likewise, Japan is a smaller country. That 160Mbps is not the speed you're going to get traveling over underseas cables to North America. That's the speed you'll get for servers located within Japan. Backbone connections are going to cost more to create in the United States simply because Americans are as likely to access a server across the continent as they are within 100 miles of them. Where you can essentially create a backbone in Japan with a under 1,000mi of fiber, in the US you'd need 20x that amount or more. Those are stark differences. I mean, it wouldn't be too hard for an ISP to provide faster connectivity from Boston to Philly where populations are dense for sites hosted in that area, but that wouldn't be helpful to users - since most of the time I'm not connecting to servers hosted within eastern Mass, RI, CT, the NYC metro area or Jersey. In fact, I'd say that most of the time I'm connecting to Texas or California. Can we stop comparing Apples and Oranges? The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy. Maybe those things could offer marginal improvements (seeing our service go from 6Mbps to 10-15Mbps), but we simply won't have service like Japan will since we don't locate ourselves close to the servers we want to access or to each other.

endtime 18y ago
The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy. I accept that geography is a factor, but do you mean to say that lack of competition isn't? It seems to me that it's simply not in the interest of US cable companies to improve bandwidth (which, as the article says, might lead people to stop paying for TV) or lower costs (which would lower their profits).
- mdasen 18y ago
  In a country like Japan, it's decently easy for a company to run its own backbone and provide connectivity to, say, 80% of where a customer is going to be connecting to with minimal investment. In the United States, you don't really have that option. Bandwidth is going to be expensive here. If you up people to 160Mbps service, you're going to need a ton more backend capacity and because you can't just create that capacity yourself, it's prohibitively expensive. Sure, lack of competition is a problem, but that's just an easy scapegoat. I mean, bandwidth at 10 cents per GB is really cheap bandwidth - cheaper than you'd get with most dedicated hosts. Part of what makes that expensive is that fiber has to go a long way to provide that bandwidth - if I'm downloading from NY to San Fran, that's a huge expanse to cover. In Japan, it would be a lot easier for companies providing bandwidth to consumers to also run their own backbone. Sure, competition is a problem in the US, but we're talking about having to do 20x as much cap-ex to cover the US. Anytime you have 20x greater costs, you need to expect that the product will reflect that. Saying that it's just competition is an easy way to be anti-corporate without addressing the issue - it costs a lot more to create and run the internet in the US; it doesn't cost a little bit more or 50% more, but orders of magnitude more because we're more spread out. We don't need to overcome a cost premium of 20%, but probably in excess of 1000% - and it's somewhat incredible that we aren't doing worse.

raheemm 18y ago

"The industry is worried that by offering 100 Mbps, they are opening Pandora’s box, he said. Everyone will be able to get video on the Internet" - WTF? This really pisses me off!

DarkShikari 18y ago
This is because cable companies are worried that streaming video will put their VOD services out of business. Hence many companies trying to add caps to their bandwidth. When they tell you it's because of 1% of users using the most bandwidth, they're lying; it's because they want users paying for VOD content. This is understandable, as VOD is by far their most profitable business segment on a %-basis (I work for an IPTV company). Thus, they are scared to death by the concept of decent internet service--it'll reduce their profit margins.
- sketerpot 18y ago
  Really? We haven't slipped through a hole in the space-time continuum and been magically transported back to 2003? There will be decent internet service. Anybody whose business model depends on internet access sucking forever needs to find a new source of income, fast.
  - netcan 18y ago
    Whenever this comes up on HN, my response is that just because it is hopeless having a business model that depends on copyright (crappy internet), doesn't mean they don't benefit from prolonging the process. The days of mature consumer technologies depending on Broadband speeds you get in S. Korea are a ways away. How many people are still not connected to the internet at all? How many people have no broadband at all? If they can add 1 or 2 or 5 or 10 years to the point where youtube is what people connect to their big TV, they make a lot of money. It's sort of like saying a business model that requires U2 to stay popular is not sustainable. Of course not. But it doesn't mean you should give up.
jrockway 18y ago
I don't buy this argument. I can easily stream HD video with "only" a 6M DSL connection. (Note that it's re-compressed h264, not mpeg2... but who cares, the quality is great.)

iamelgringo 18y ago

Why is it that in Silicon Valley, the fastest consumer connection that I can get is 12Mpbs? And that costs me $60 a month. Sharpen the pitchforks and light the torches.

Mazy 18y ago
Comcast recently rolled out (last month) 50 Mbps down / 5 Mbps up, they call it Extreme 50, it's $140/mo.
- barredo 18y ago
  That's a joke in Japan, South Korea and Escandinavian Nations
  - modoc 18y ago
    Having just spent a week in Iceland, they may have fast local connections, but for actually using US based sites and services, I'd rather have 1.5 MBit DSL in the States (actually I have the Comcast 50/10 service at home). It was painful.
    - Mazy 18y ago
      how is the Comcast 50? I am considering getting it, but I'm worried because they advertise it as "up to" 50. What speeds are you getting from it?
      - modoc 18y ago
        I love it! It's $$ but it's a business expense. I get the full 50/10 they advertise: http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/general/comcast-5010-service.html http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/general/comcast-50... The only issue is you're still limited by the 250 GB/month transfer cap. My first month with 50/10 I did over 750 GB, and got a phone call about it:>
  - umjames 18y ago

dkasper 18y ago

I would gladly pay the $100 to get my home upgraded. Doesn't it seem like individuals or even communities should be able to round up the money to pay for the upgrade themselves? It's basically like we are at the mercy of the cable/telcos until they decide it's cost effective for them to upgrade people. It's not like a hard drive where you can pay extra money to get something better, you have no options.

wmf 18y ago
The $100 is probably an amortized number, assuming that your whole neighborhood gets upgraded. e.g. It costs $50,000 to upgrade your cable node which serves 500 customers. If only 50 people round up the money to pay for the upgrade they'll need $1,000 each, which isn't as palatable.
- kd5bjo 18y ago
  Amortize that $1000 over two years, though, and the upgrade costs less than $50/mo, which starts to sound reasonable again. If all 500 customers paid, it only takes a price increase of $5/month to pay off the upgrade in two years.
  - wmf 18y ago
    Yeah, I'm a believer in the concept of customer-owned broadband, but the ISPs are stuck in a model where they think they have to accept all the risk of upgrades.