Rocket Fiber Launches 100GB/s Internet Service in Downtown Detroit

http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/rocket-fiber-launches-100gbs-internet-service-in-downtown-detroit/

by prostoalex • 11 years ago

157 110 11 years ago

tired_man3• 11 years ago

Not cheap? Where does the writer live that USD$70 for 1Gbps seems expensive to him? I want to move there!

tinco2• 11 years ago

$70 for an internet connection is not cheap. The author just means that it's not a no-brainer for individuals currently on one of the big providers who are on a budget.

bluedino3• 11 years ago

It is for the area.

Comcast charges $65.95/mo. to $78.95/mo for 70mb/s in the Detroit metro area. $70/month for 1gbs service and not having to deal with Comcast is a no-brainer

iagooar2• 11 years ago

In Switzerland, 1Gbs down/up optic fiber costs 150 CHF, roughly $150 USD. It comes with TV (no separate Internet only option). It's a lot of money, but given the median income still very affordable.

merpnderp• 11 years ago

CableOne is $55 for 100Mb/5Mb, $105 for /200Mb/10Mb, but mostly serves small rural areas in the US.

buzzdenver2• 11 years ago

I'm paying that for 70Mbps in Denver...

PeCaN• 11 years ago

What provider?

I'm at like $40/month for 12Mbps in Lakewood (on CenturyLink).

adventured2• 11 years ago

Romania is about the only place I'm familiar with where 1gbps (consumer) is really cheap, but it's only cheap based on higher level Western incomes.

~$20 for 1gbps in Bucharest. That's the equivalent of around $80-$100 adjusted to US incomes.

mlangenberg• 11 years ago

In The Netherlands it's €40,- ($43) per month for a 1 Gbit/s consumer fiber connection.

omgtehlion2• 11 years ago

in Moscow, Russia, I pay currently $12/mo for 1Gbps, plus additional $2 for static ipv4 (average income is about $1k I suppose)

edit: added income reference

distantsounds• 11 years ago

yeah, but how is your peering once you get outside the country's border? people talk of super-cheap fast residential internet but usually it suffers once when you start accessing content that's remote.

nostalgiac• 11 years ago

Count me in.. all these other posts about anything fiber optic is insane.

Try Australia. $80/month for 8mbit/1mbit if you're lucky.

For reference, our business connection (50/50) costs ~$1200/month.

notyourwork• 11 years ago

Agreed - even in Seattle 1Gbps is $80/month.

profmonocle• 11 years ago

You can get 1G in Minneapolis for $65. But it's only in a few neighborhoods so far - sadly not mine. :(

jdhawk• 11 years ago

I pay $70 for AT&T's UVerse GigaPower fiber (300/300 right now) in Austin. The only reason we have that option though is due to Google Fiber making everyone up their game. Even Time Warner offers reasonably priced 300/20

habith• 11 years ago

I pay $70 for AT&T's UVerse GigaPower fiber (300/300 right now) in Austin

Does that include the opt-out from tracking fee?

I don't live in Austin and don't have GigaPower, but I remember there was a kerfuffle around AT&T offering the service at two price points, cheaper if you allow them to track your web activities and something like $30 more if you opt-out.

Or, hopefully that whole thing just went away.

Edit: Link[0] to HN discussion

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743447

tkriger• 11 years ago

The fastest affordable option in South Africa is still ADSL. Line rental from Telkom (they have the telecom monopoly) costs me ~ZAR500 p/m and then I pay another ZAR130 for an unshaped, 60gb cappped account. This is a 4meg line, so max 400-odd kbps. So yeah, $70 seems pretty reasonable to me...

pmjordan2• 11 years ago

Doesn't South Africa have a backhaul problem though? Overpriced internet in North America tends to be artificial scarcity at the last mile. I'm not sure that's the case in SA?

I've visited quite a few times and yeah, your internet connections truly are painful to use even when I'm on holiday and not really using the net that much. Much worse than rural areas of Europe which typically only get 1-3Mbit/s ADSL. Some of it is the latency to faraway CDNs and EU/US-centric servers and saturated intercontinental cables, but even South African sites seem to be awfully slow, with high latency, which to me suggests overloading on the core infrastructure. Is that the case? (I know you see microwave comms towers all over the place - if those are being used as the main cross-country internet links then that could be it.)

craigds2• 11 years ago

Agreed, I think the OP is dreaming.

In urban NZ we pay almost this much for 100% shitty ADSL with data caps. Speeds vary wildly but it'd be rare to get more than 50 down / 10 up. 1Gbps is not available to consumers anywhere in the country no matter how much you pay AFAIK.

jayonsoftware• 11 years ago

I live in Troy, MI (A suburb outside of Detroit) and pay $75 for a 300 Meg Down / 20 Meg Up connection from http://www.wowway.com/. I have lived in silicon valley, but now work in Detroit, the high tech scene in Detroit is one of the best.

dheera3• 11 years ago

... and I live smack in the middle of downtown Boston and can't get more than 150 down because nobody wants to give us fiber.

imjk2• 11 years ago

I live in Boston as well. What service provider do you use to get that speed?

medmunds• 11 years ago

That rate is at least partly because Troy has genuine competition between two cable internet providers (Comcast and WowWay).

JumpCrisscross• 11 years ago

I live in New York and pay $70 for 300 Mbps down / 25+ up from Time Warner.

jseliger• 11 years ago

I live in New York and pay $70 for 300 Mbps down / 25+ up from Time Warner.

NYC also has competition between Time Warner, RCN (who I use) and Verizon FiOS.

crisopolis• 11 years ago

I live in St. Pete, FL and pay $104 for 150 Meg Down / 10 Meg Up connection from BrightHouse Networks. Even though VZ FiOS services the surrounding area BrightHouse locked my community in.

toomuchtodo3• 11 years ago

Off topic: Any area in St Pete you'd recommend a early 30s tech worker to rent in for a few months?

markeroon• 11 years ago

Are there any interesting startups in Detroit now? Visited recently and I love the city, I'm curious if there's a decent tech scene.

xorblurb• 11 years ago

I live in France and I pay 50€ for 3GB of 4G per month (then bw limited) _and_ 200Mb/s down 50Mb/s up fixed Internet (official speeds but I speedtest them at something like 270 / 70 Mb/s)

There are other operators which are even less expensive (but 4G coverage and upstream fixed network peering changes a bit).

mmanfrin• 11 years ago

These are wireless prices, correct? Do you not have a wired option?

dpw• 11 years ago

The linked article states 100 Gb/s, i.e. gigabits per second. But the post title says "100GB/s" which suggests gigabytes per second. Worth correcting, because getting 100GB/s between two machines in the same rack would be quite an achievement today.

barkingcat• 11 years ago

And also, this being a tech oriented start up targeted discussion site, it would be important to get the basic units of internet service correct in the titles.

benjarrell• 11 years ago

I used to resist the KiB/MiB/GiB nomenclature. But after seeing this problem everywhere, I've changed my mind.

zaphoyd• 11 years ago

I think in this case the issue isn't binary prefixes vs decimal which in this case would amount to a ~7% error, but rather bits vs bytes which is an error of ~800%

imaginenore• 11 years ago

How does that solve anything? I still don't know if you meant KiB = kilobit or kilobyte.

wyldfire• 11 years ago

As others have pointed out it's the difference between bits and bytes. But "among bytes" units, I prefer the base-2 SI units (KiB/MiB/GiB) because as written, they're unambiguous.

privacy101• 11 years ago

it is a big mistake but either way it is very fast...

lsc• 11 years ago

You're not wrong...

but the convention that network connections are rated in bits per second is very strong, and largely solves this sort of confusion

_mulder_• 11 years ago

This is not new. Existing Carriers have been offering 100GbE services for some time although the type of customer who requires this type of service is few and far between.

As for 10GbE for residential, if this is literally 10G to the home then that is something new (as a product offering, technology is not new). Interesting to know how they do the hand-off as 10GbE interfaces are simply not useful for home use.

vidarh2• 11 years ago

It's new and pointless at this point for individuals.

Very few places will be able to stream anything to them at 10GbE. Most regular harddrives have a bandwidth substantially below that - it takes an expensive RAID or high end SSD to feed a single user at that speed....

For an apartment complex, though, it might be useful to take 10GbE link...

Even on the business side - I run racks of servers handling dozens of clients running booking services for several hundred restaurants, and we're using tens of Mbps including really excessive amounts of regular disaster recovery syncs and backups between our two data centres.. Some companies will benefit, but most won't get anywhere near...

I think this is more of the case that it doesn't cost them that more to offer to set things up for 10GbE, since these users will mostly be limited by upstream servers that won't send them traffic enough so their bandwidth usage won't go up nearly as much as it theoretically could, so it's part a long term view, part a competitive move to make 1Gbps or less from competitors seem too little or too expensive for what you get.

CyberDildonics2• 11 years ago

I see comments like this on every announcement of fast internet and it is very narrow minded.

Working remotely, high res video conferencing, screen casting, and even booting a computer remotely over the internet are all big applications for things like this.

With a 10gb connection you could have a computer at home that would boot remotely and be part of a company's network as if you were in the office.

noxryan• 11 years ago

It's not entirely new, US Internet offers 10GbE residential in Minneapolis.

http://fiber.usinternet.com/

bluedino3• 11 years ago

This is only for 19 buildings, and it sounds like they are all owned by Dan Gilbert who also is the investor behind the project.

atonparker• 11 years ago

I live in the Detroit Metro area, and despite the way the article was titled, the 100Gb and 10Gb service doesn't seem like the main announcement to me. I would love to get 1Gb/s for $70 a month, especially from someone other than Comcast.

tyndierock• 11 years ago

We just got this at work and I have to say it's insanely fast. Makes downloading things like Xcode a joke. We are getting around 250Mb/s down over AC wifi and a blazing 800mb down over ethernet. Great stuff so far!

edude03• 11 years ago

I wonder how they terminate it into the premises? AFAIK (I don't work with fiber though) there aren't SFPs that go above 10G per fiber. On the other hand, there are connectors like MTP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber_connector#/media...) that allow you to multiplex multiple fibers into one cable then separate them back out into multiple cables so maybe that?

amazon_not5• 11 years ago

100G transceivers from Fiberstore, the Amazon of fiber optics http://www.fs.com/c/100g-transceivers_1159

100G connectivity comes in different flavours. Some use MTP and multiple fibers to transport 100G others use normal LC connectors and transport 100G over multiple wavelenghts on a single fiber pair.

X-Istence4• 11 years ago

Good ol' 100 Gbit transceivers. The ones I've used are JNP-QSFP-100G-SR4.

Takes a pair of fibers... and now you have some very high data rate switching ;-)

blisterpeanuts• 11 years ago

So, it looks like it's 10 gigabit for $70 for residential service, which is 10x the Google Fiber speed ("1000 megabits" for $70).

Does this service come with any restrictions such as how many devices can share it, can you host with a fixed IP, effectively run an ISP service out of a home? A lot of residential providers limit such activities.

Anyway it's a good sign that entrepreneurs are jumping into this market to challenge the dinosaurs like Comcast, Cox, Verizon, etc.

zokier• 11 years ago

So, it looks like it's 10 gigabit for $70 for residential service, which is 10x the Google Fiber speed ("1000 megabits" for $70).

The difference between 10Gbps and 1Gbps last-mile is almost completely meaningless compared to how well the rest of the network is connected. And somehow I imagine that Google might have slight edge on that side...

pyvpx• 11 years ago

Google Fiber != Google as far as networks/autonomous systems go.

vlan05• 11 years ago

Dear god, they chose the two cheapest upstream providers on the market [1]. It's a shame they didn't pick up a higher quality carrier to handle the majority of their traffic.

[1] http://bgp.he.net/AS394141#_asinfo

organsnyder• 11 years ago

That's easy enough to change later if their upstreams struggle to meet demand. Once they have the last mile finished, the rest is much easier by comparison.

vlan05• 11 years ago

That it is. Now to convince management of that...oy vey

ju-st• 11 years ago

Why would you need premium providers for an eyeball network these days?

amazon_not5• 11 years ago

Because even eyeballs need to be reachable and it gets old real fast if only Netflix and Youtube work.

nullrouted• 11 years ago

What high quality carrier would you recommend for Detroit? They can go to Cogent, HE, Level3 or one of their competing Telcos. There is nothing wrong with using Cogent/HE for their eyeball network, it gives them cheap connectivity and allows Cogent/HE to balance their traffic ratios Win/Win.

Also to note Google Fiber uses a lot of nLayer/GTT for their eyeball traffic.

vlan05• 11 years ago

I can't really speak for that area. But if I chose out of three you listed, it would be L3.

A close friend of mine spent years managing the network of a smaller ISP in the northeast using both Cogent/HE for their eyeball network, and he was constantly telling me about packet loss issues with Cogent. On the other hand, I haven't seen as many issues with HE as a whole, more localized.

Either way using the cheaper options is a good choice if you want to keep costs low during expansion. Hell, it's probably still better than what I see through TWC.

X-Istence4• 11 years ago

I haven't heard anything bad about HE... what's wrong with them?

vlan05• 11 years ago

I actually haven't heard a great deal of negative for HE as a whole, but mainly some localized spots. In hindsight, it might have been a bit too much of a generalization.

mschuster912• 11 years ago

100 gigabits per second for $300? Holy cow. You can run a whole datacenter off a single such link (and another one for redundancy of course). How is traffic priced?

CyberDildonics2• 11 years ago

10gb for $300, 100gb was a business connection and a custom quote.

mschuster912• 11 years ago

Ah, I misread. Still, for a small DC a 10GBit link is enough...

moreentropy2• 11 years ago

If you have fiber and the right transceivers, you can run 100Gbit/s over it. If you need that sort of bandwidth, you'll probably do your own peering because just paying for traffic will be obscenely expensive.

Chaos Computer Club's 30c3 conference had a 100G fiber link to downtown Hamburg for a couple of days, still 12k users w/ Gigabit ports and a makeshift datacenter with 10g ports couldn't manage to saturate the link:

https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5609_-_en_-_saal_6_-_201312301...

amazon_not5• 11 years ago

Just because you have a 100G network does not mean that anybody will peer with you. You pay for transit like everybody else.

Even the usual suspects (Netflix, Google, etc.) have their own criteria before they will peer with you.

moreentropy2• 11 years ago

Right. But I doubt that anyone shifting that much traffic just buys 100G internet service to a certain location. If you push out that much you might make use of CDNs, if you consume that much Netflix/Google I guess you meet their criteria and the CDNs talk to you (and place their edge servers in your network).

bsg75• 11 years ago

Is it interesting this is in downtown Detroit?

Of late there have been some interesting photosets of the decay of formerly "high end" real estate (residential and commercial), and I seem to recall theories that Detroit could see a resurgence as tech businesses look to take advantage of the power infrastructure formerly needed by manufacturing companies.

moonchrome2• 11 years ago

One thing that seems strange to me as an outsider is how all your tech startups and companies are clustering in areas with very high cost of living. I don't know much about the US since I'm European but I do keep track of stuff around here on HN.

I can understand it from employee point of view - large city - big job market and naturally those places are also more desirable. But if you're going down the startup route you're already going to sacrifice things for a potentially big payout down the road (assuming you have stocks - right ?) which is why I would have no problem relocating to a cheaper/less desirable area in order to lower the operational costs and increase the chance of success.

Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong but unless you are doing B2B or direct sales location shouldn't matter more than having funds to stay operational/becoming profitable ?

One explanation I can come up with is that if you are looking for investors instead of profitability it makes sense to be closer to them - but at the same time that kind of feels like perverting incentives.

I was under the impression that the costs differences can be huge (2x) between regions - maybe that's not the case ?

shostack• 11 years ago

Access to employees and access to investors is a big part of it for sure.

Depending on the nature of the business, it might also be access to prospective customers, particularly for b2b tech plays.

ajmarsh• 11 years ago

My understanding is it is being installed under the new M-1 rail line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-1_Rail_Line

darkr• 11 years ago

Wonder if/what usage caps would get applied to this.

Given a 300GB cap like many providers have, it would take 26 seconds to reach it.

mrbill• 11 years ago

I'm in Houston and pay $150/month for Comcast 50/10 "business class" service with 5 static IPs (do all my hosting, email, etc from home).

Can't wait for a faster alternative; the next step up is around $199/month for 75/15...

pinkunicorn• 11 years ago

And I'm on cloud nine for having a 10Mbps connection. #IndianWoes

PebblesHD• 11 years ago

Meanwhile in relatively suburban australia I pay $79/month for 'unlimited' 600kb/s. I so desperately want to get in on the whole remote working thing but the network I'm on seems to be getting slower by the month rather than faster

PaybackTony• 11 years ago

Wanted to touch on this post. I think having that kind of bandwidth, given proper and reasonable connectivity outside the "last mile" is a big draw. I'm a co-founder of a telecommunications start-up (cloud call center stuff) and the thought of running our own DC on the cheap is a serious draw with a proper connection. But that's a separate discussion (only 19 buildings right now, etc etc etc).

Here in Portland, at my house I currently pay around 200/mo for 50/20, but only really get 25/10 most of the time, on top of their second from lowest end cable TV package. Google Fiber is moving in, but there is another player that is really ramping up here, CenturyLink. As far as the west coast goes, they are the kinds of fiber (from the long chain of acquisitions). Level3, Integra, etc all lease much of their network from CL. But now CL is offering Business 1g lines as well as residential for the same price (around $115-$145/mo depending on contract). I got TV (Prism) and 1Gbit for $145/mo. The kicker? No caps. No throttling and no data caps at all on neither their residential service nor their business. They also don't care if you use your residential line to host servers on. Their entire network is fiber, and they've been building it out since the late 80s.

I wonder why Comcast is so much more expensive here than what others are reporting? I suppose as far as Cable Providers go, until this year your choice in PDX has been Comcast or Satellite (Dish / DirecTV).

Rocket Fiber Launches 100GB/s Internet Service in Downtown Detroit

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