Faster than FIOS

Shrykull · Post by **Shrykull** » 2007-09-08 10:04am

http://www.naradnetworks.com/pr_062106.html

Isn't offered anywhere that I know of, whereas I see ads for verizon fios all the time.

Hawkwings · Post by **Hawkwings** » 2007-09-08 01:09pm

so... could I conceivably use that much bandwidth in a 3 computer household? Where could I get download speeds like that?

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-09-08 02:11pm

The cable companies aren't even spending the money to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.0; it's unlikely they'll start rolling out FTTC on an entirely new switched architecture anytime soon. When Verizon moves to a GPON configuration they should be able to offer similar speeds as well.

Shrykull · Post by **Shrykull** » 2007-09-08 05:08pm

I"m greedy for bandwidth though, my family has cable here in the house, FIOS isn't available yet, but when it is I want the ONT just for my computer/computers.

And, I wonder if with faster cable it will be the same deal, you share the bandwidth with your neighborhood node, and then, in my case I share again with people in my house on the wireless network, does it get divided up each time it's shared, divided first between my neighborhood, then I even less when sharing it with people in my house?

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-08 06:24pm

Wait a minute, how much do these packages cost? I just checked Verizon's site and I see 30 Mbps for $179.95 a month, or £60 a month.

WTF? I'm on 8 Mbps cable for about $36 a month and the only reason I'm not on a faster speed is because I've always had good service with my Tiscali account.

Is broadband that damn expensive in America? BT's 25+ Mbps service is still only about $50/month and that includes phone service, a Wi-Fi hub for the home, an on-line back-up storage service and on-demand TV. If this Narad, Inc. service got delivered, how much would that cost? I hear Paris already has such speeds via a modernised optical network they've just spent serious cash renovating and I don't recall such outlandish prices for anything other than corporate connections.

Shrykull · Post by **Shrykull** » 2007-09-08 06:32pm

Is broadband that damn expensive in America?

Yes, I think we pay more than anyone else does. Though, I remember Jonathan Boyd saying that local calls in Ireland weren't free, and he would have paid a lot just for dial-up.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2007-09-08 06:56pm

Over here $50 a month gets you 8 mbps with Comcast, or 15 with Verizon FiOS.

100 mbps is AWESOME, although I no longer care about download speeds as I find my computer usually is not the weak point in the speed chain. I would like to see connections have faster upload speeds; 8 mbps is actually very satisfactory for me, but my upload speed is TERRIBLE.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-08 07:07pm

That's just it. At uni, I had a 10 Mbps connection for free every year. I still had sites load like ass at times, because unless the whole web is rewired with super optic-fibre goodness and cutting edge servers, you're just going to run into a brick wall that no amount of your cash will solve. Upload speeds could be improved, but I don't see 100 Mbps downloads being all that remarkable in the near future.

That's actually the other reason I didn't switch to BT's or Virgin's faster ADSL or wait for cable, because I really don't see much of an improvement unlike with dial-up, just as HDTV's less than stellar improvements do not justify the cost.

I do look forward to the day when we can get all our TV, phone, Internet and whatever other streams from a single, compact cable that is interference free, very high fidelity and can be cheaply installed anywhere and allows you to download a HD movie in seconds and upload that same file at the same speed to someone else.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-09-08 07:36pm

Admiral Valdemar wrote:I do look forward to the day when we can get all our TV, phone, Internet and whatever other streams from a single, compact cable that is interference free, very high fidelity and can be cheaply installed anywhere and allows you to download a HD movie in seconds and upload that same file at the same speed to someone else.

The idea behind Verizon's fibre deployment is that you can pretty much throw POTS, Internet and video access (IPTV in the future) on a single wire.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-08 08:30pm

That's really what everyone's going for now, isn't it? Just about every telecoms company or media provider is going form just phone or TV to Internet combined with phone and TV. BT have gone from just phones to broadband and now on-demand TV, and Virgin, Tiscali and Tesco are following suit.

I imagine someday we'll have all our entertainment and communications piped to us from the one provider just as supermarkets seem to do everything now.

Alferd Packer · Post by **Alferd Packer** » 2007-09-08 09:34pm

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Wait a minute, how much do these packages cost? I just checked Verizon's site and I see 30 Mbps for $179.95 a month, or £60 a month.

Is broadband that damn expensive in America? BT's 25+ Mbps service is still only about $50/month and that includes phone service, a Wi-Fi hub for the home, an on-line back-up storage service and on-demand TV. If this Narad, Inc. service got delivered, how much would that cost? I hear Paris already has such speeds via a modernised optical network they've just spent serious cash renovating and I don't recall such outlandish prices for anything other than corporate connections.

Actually, that's more of a way to ream early adopters. Verizon's business model is to push FIOS in affluent neighborhoods with a higher percentage of private homes vs. apartment complexes. The reasons for this are manifold: private home owners, as a rule, probably have more money and would be more likely to spring for the absolute fastest broadband. Another reason is that a monopoly like Verizon hates dealing with other monopolies--namely, landlords. Apartment complex landlords can negotiate all sorts of bullshit right-of-way deals with service providers. Finally, the places where they're initially pushing FIOS are wealthy areas, so they're probably newer and thus easier to work on.

Rather insidiously, while Verizon is laying the fiber to your home, they rip out all the copper. My boss's friend almost got FIOS, but when she learned that they were going to pull out the copper, she fought tooth and nail to keep the copper for her home's alarm system, and Verizon eventually called off the installation because she refused to let them pull the copper. Apparently, the reason behind this is that if you ever want to drop FIOS, Verizon will charge you an outrageous amount of money to get run copper to your house. God Bless telcom monopolies.

Having said all that, I don't know why they're charging that much, unless that include TV and VoIP in that package. My Cable company offers 15 megabits as a standard downstream, with an option to run 30 megabits down/5 megabits up with a static IP address for $10 more monthly. You could literally get the same speed as FIOS for $55 monthly. Personally, 15 megabits is plenty fast for me, but it's nice to know that I can double my downstream and upstream with a phone call. Really, Verizon is so far behind the cable providers, it's not even funny.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-09-08 11:43pm

It depends on the area, though - Verizon is doing a very big and comprehensive push in the Tampa Bay area - and in quite a few areas that are not quite as affluent, either. A bunch of apartments are also getting wired up for it, too (for example, mine).

The pricing is competitive around here and VZ is pretty much curbstomping Bright House where they go. The whole "we're pulling copper" thing is really annoying - part of it is vendor lock-in and the other part is that VZ really would rather not have to deal with POTS copper anymore.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-09 07:31am

With the larger area they need to cover, I expected as much with respect to variable coverage of services. Today, the UK is pretty much 99% broadband enable, that's potential, mind. I think the actual number on broadband packages is around 60% or above currently.

The monopoly thing is a fact if life. BT is like that in many ways, because they own the damn phone network, so if you don't have cable, you're still relying on BT to deliver the goods for the line, though this may be changing. At least none of the cable providers hates copper wire here to that extent. They complement it with fibre-optic, not replace it.

Alferd Packer · Post by **Alferd Packer** » 2007-09-10 12:47pm

It appears that Cablevision is beta-testing the Narad-switched stuff.

50 megabits symmetrical. All I can say is, I'm fucking stoked that I use Cablevision.

If you live in the NYC metro area, I'd keep your eyes peeled. I might even make a call to Cablevision and see if I can volunteer to beta-test some of this stuff. Hell, it's worth a shot.

Xisiqomelir · Post by **Xisiqomelir** » 2007-09-10 01:16pm

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Is broadband that damn expensive in America?

It's a scandal.

Eleas · Post by **Eleas** » 2007-09-10 02:30pm

A few years ago, when the Internet was still mostly dialup of different kinds, the quality of phone lines had a lot to do with it. I was living in Schleswig-Holstein at the time (the northern part of Germany, some distance removed from urban centers) and the speeds were laughable. The phone lines were unable to support 28K, IIRC. I imagine Jonathan suffered similar problems.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2007-09-11 12:35am

phongn wrote:It depends on the area, though - Verizon is doing a very big and comprehensive push in the Tampa Bay area - and in quite a few areas that are not quite as affluent, either. A bunch of apartments are also getting wired up for it, too (for example, mine).

Similarly, FIOS is available in my mom's neighborhood... which is in a sleepy little bedroom town of about 10,000, and full of lower-income residents. It's anecdotal, but it shows that Verizon isn't pushing FIOS exclusively to rich people.

Eleas wrote:A few years ago, when the Internet was still mostly dialup of different kinds, the quality of phone lines had a lot to do with it.

When it comes to DSL, the quality of phone lines still has a lot to do with it.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-09-11 12:59am

Alferd Packer wrote:It appears that Cablevision is beta-testing the Narad-switched stuff.

50 megabits symmetrical. All I can say is, I'm fucking stoked that I use Cablevision. If you live in the NYC metro area, I'd keep your eyes peeled. I might even make a call to Cablevision and see if I can volunteer to beta-test some of this stuff. Hell, it's worth a shot.

That makes sense - VZ is pushing FIOS hard in the tri-state area and offers higher speeds (50/5 for $90/mo) than what I can get here in Tampa Bay. I'm still a bit skeptical on if the cable networks can still serve that much data and if the companies are going to lock themselves into a proprietary backend.

Uraniun235 wrote:Similarly, FIOS is available in my mom's neighborhood... which is in a sleepy little bedroom town of about 10,000, and full of lower-income residents. It's anecdotal, but it shows that Verizon isn't pushing FIOS exclusively to rich people.

One thing they're doing is exclusively running fibre into new developments - no copper at all(!) Since you can still get PSTN access, I think VZ can get away with that.

When it comes to DSL, the quality of phone lines still has a lot to do with it.

AT&T's fibre-to-the-neighborhood initiative (Project Lightspeed) is effectively making a mini-CO in each neighborhood so people get can get ADSL2 speeds.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2007-09-11 02:09am

What's PSTN?

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2007-09-11 04:32am

Older name for POTS ie regular phone line.

On the subject of line quality mattering for DSL - mine got capped at 4mbit because my line sucks so they had to dial it down to get stability (in yet another thrilling story about the niceness of telecom monopolies, our dearest T-HT doesn't give a shit about copper line quality on their end - not house installations - as long as it can transfer voice at enough quality to be understandable). On the upside, the modulation I got gave me a 4:1 down:up ratio instead of the usual 8:1 or even 12:1 so my upload at 1mbit is actually decent and actually higher then any of the regular packages, excepting the very expensive "we give you as much as your line can take" one.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2007-09-11 10:55am

That's funny considering that out here, a line is considered "good" if it can handle a mere 3Mbps. There are people in the US who get capped down to 1.5 or even 768k.

Alferd Packer · Post by **Alferd Packer** » 2007-09-11 11:53am

My dad's DSL is a measly 512k. Of course, he does live in the boonies, so he's happy to have DSL at all. We couldn't get cable until 1993 or so.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-09-11 11:53am

Netko wrote:Older name for POTS ie regular phone line.

Well, the names are complementary:

PSTN: Public Switched Telephone Network
POTS: Plain Old Telephone Service

POTS gets you access into the PSTN, but there are also other ways (VoIP, fibre, T1, ISDN etc.)

On the subject of line quality mattering for DSL - mine got capped at 4mbit because my line sucks so they had to dial it down to get stability (in yet another thrilling story about the niceness of telecom monopolies, our dearest T-HT doesn't give a shit about copper line quality on their end - not house installations - as long as it can transfer voice at enough quality to be understandable).

Strictly speaking, that's all the FCC requires of the telecoms for POTS and since most telecoms these days bleed money with POTS, they just don't care.