I’m still getting used to the quirks of living in Wisconsin, but there’s one thing I’m very grateful for. My apartment complex is wired with Ethernet and I can get fast, high-speed internet access through a local ISP for $35/month. I’m supposed to get 35 Mbps service up and down, but realistically I’ve been maxing out at 10-15 Mbps down and 5-10 up.
Still, that’s a big improvement over the 6 Mpbs down / 768 Kbps up I had with AT&T DSL. Charter, the local cable company, offers speeds as high as 20 Mbps, but they don’t say what the upload speed is. Even AT&T’s new U-Verse service only offers speeds as high as 18 Mbit.
What’s the next step, technologically, for broadband internet? How long will it be before I see 100 Mbit or 1000 Mbit service to my house? Can existing cable lines be upgraded, or will we need to offer fiber to every house before that can happen? How fast can we go with existing infrastructure before we have to put in new fiber across every telephone pole?
>What’s the next step, technologically, for broadband internet? How long will it be before I see 100 Mbit or 1000 Mbit service to my house?
The problem here is that your line is only as good as your backhaul. Right now you are being sold 35mbps but only getting 10. To me, that says the service is so oversold that until there’s a big breakthrough and buildout you wont be getting much faster for years if not decades.
So a 1gig uplink to your house from the central office isnt going to help you much, you’ll still be stuck at 10.
>Charter, the local cable company, offers speeds as high as 20 Mbps
Charter is doing the same thing your ISP is doing. They claim to sell 20mbps but in reality its 10 or so. Im sure if youre not on a busy node then you might get 20 from time to time.
That said, the home connection really is coming close to the max speed of many backhauls and links to data centers. A DOCSIS3.0 cable modem than can do 50mbps really wont be of much help when the link between you and the server you are trying to talk to is 10mbps.
Pretty sure FIoS and UVerse have theoretical maximums of 1GB/s or more, if you include the wavelengths for television programming. Wikipedia seems to agree, fwiw: cite
Heck, I’d be satisfied if the next step in broadband is simply making something other than satellite available to every doorstep in the country. I’m still on dial-up, which sucks for a lot of reasons, but currently what tops the suck list is that I have a dandy new PS3 that doesn’t get to take advantage of hooking it to the intertubes.
What’s (kind of) weird is that, while I live in a rural location, it’s not that rural. US Highway 59 is 100 feet from my front door, and I’m only about a mile and a half outside of a town with plenty of broadband.
The problem is that there’s no cable TV offered, and even something as (relatively) slow as DSL doesn’t stretch this far. It’s actually rather maddening, because the neighbors 2 doors down can get it, but my house seems to be about 500 feet past the appropriate distance from the phone company’s…whatever you call it (central office? Something like that.)
I think there’s actually fiber cable at the end of my driveway…I remember them laying it…but I have no idea who owns it or what it’s for. Sigh
I recall a story I heard on the radio, NPR or PRI probably, that was talking about the television digital conversion that just happened. The huge question was what was going to happen to all those frequencies that had reserved for broadcast TV? One option had to do with massively improving internet service. I forget the details.
Unless competiton comes, we have an cartel so to speak. We need to get cable companies to open there lines like Bell was forced to do with their phone lines.
The biggest issue is conflicts of interest. We can have fast lines, but what’s the incentive? Comcast offers movies on demand, they don’t want you to get movies on demand from Netflix. Solution cap your bandwidth. For instance one cable company is setting a cap of 250g a month. Now that seems HUGE, unless you’re download High Definition.
Advertisers absolutely HATE any TV show that’s watched over the Internet, even though the ability to measure it is much more exact. Why? Because you can simply do other things while the ads are running. And despite any DRM there’s always an analog hole.
A lot of people have no access to broadband at all. In order to get better improvements in the Internet, we don’t need regulation, we need competition, REAL competition.
If Obama wants to help consumers here’s his chance to do something real, deliver real competiton, make sure companies who choose tiers advertise realistically or deliever refunds on unrealized bandwidth, and bring broadband to unserved area, much like the way the REA in the depression (Rural Electrification Act) brought electricity to area no one wanted to serve
We in Australia have been promised optical fibre to the home. Say this is rolled out in 2012; what kind of speed would we be expecting? The fastest generally available here right now is ADSL2+ with the M annex (I think) which is something like 24mb; or for those who get physical cable I believe around 30mb.
That would be something called “Fiber-to-the-curb”. It may or may not be publically owned, so you can probably ask city hall who owns it, and ask them to extend it (on your dime, of course!!) to FTTH, or Fiber-to-the-home.
Then you can enjoy Fiber optic speeds instead of relying on “plain old telephone service” (POTS) or cable.
I believe this is the case as the government can’t exactly lay fiber to connect up each person’s home, since it is private property.
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In Canada, Bell still owns the majority (if not all) of the phone lines, which is not so good for competition.
Last I heard, in Canada, Bell Canada is trying to do two things to make internet better:
[ol]
[li]Enable 16 Mbps access to select customers*[/li][li]Enable broadband (768kbps+) to rural areas instead of dial-up[/li][/ol]
“select customers” would mean “Bell customers”, of course. Bell hasn’t shown any kind of compassion towards their competition ever since the 3MBit days!
That link says nothing concrete about the timeline except that the first rollouts will occur in Tasmania within weeks of that article, so possibly by now. Nor was it ever intended that all Australians get it ever.
I’ll slightly modify my question then: assuming I get FttH in 2012, what kind of speed can I expect to see, given the standards and protocols expected to be available by then?
In less densely populated areas, I’m guessing it might be a while before everybody can get access to fiber to the home, but overall that seems the most viable means to get any significant increase in internet speed.
Fiber tends to just be way more reliable than any xDSL or other copper wire based connection. An example: my old connection was VDSL, advertised as being 24 mbps, but it only delivered 8mbps.
My current deal is fiber cable all the way to my apartment, at a theoretical speed of 100mbps, in reality I get about 80 mbps downstream, a way better advertisement speed to real speed ratio.
There has been some advertisements for 150 mbps wireless internet here also, but that is presumable only possible if you happen to be standing with your laptop right underneath the antenna/transmitter thingy.