Japan Going to 10 Gigabit/s symmetrical internet access starting 2010

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/06/ultra-broadband-worldwide-and-gdp-boost.html

by heed • 17 years ago

14 26 17 years ago

nextbigfuture.com

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

Meantime, we suck...

Thanks to BigTelcos

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

Well let's not just blame them for this.

Also blame them for the disgusting state of our cell phones!

sachinag• 17 years ago

Again, that's the government's fault for not setting communication protocol standards. Free markets != absence of regulation w/r/t public airwaves.

Of course, it could be worse. We (the U.S.) could be Canada.

dkasper2• 17 years ago

To be fair, also blame the fact that the area of the US is 25x that of Japan (10x if you count just the lower 48).

xenophanes• 17 years ago

According to your figures, alaska + hawaii is 15x the size of japan, and thus 1.5x the size of the lower 48 states. that's wrong.

just_the_tip• 17 years ago

I think it has to do more with policy than it does with the telcos. Japan, Korea, and Sweden are outliers which have had massive funding (direct and indirect) from the governments to build up their broadband infrastructures. The hands-off, let the market decide, strategy of the previous Republican administration has led to the largest commercial fiber deployment in the world (FiOS), but it isn't as far-reaching or speedy as the government-assisted rollouts. When you look at penetration rates and bandwidth capacities of different nations, the US is in the middle of the pack.

billswift2• 17 years ago

Don't forget that local area monopolies on cable haven't helped any either.

strider24• 17 years ago

We = ?

coderdude• 17 years ago

The United States, naturally.

wmf4• 17 years ago

How do people in Japan use their current 1 Gbps connections today? Are the ISPs making money or are they in some kind of government-subsidized fiber bubble?

1 Gbps is faster than a hard disk and 10 Gbps is faster than an SSD; this could change app design.

DenisM3• 17 years ago

And it will. I signed up for the speedier FIOS (20/20) just so that future comes to my house a little quicker than others. This should give me a better shot at inventing the next bandwidth hog like YouTube.

Right now I'm thinking if it's worth it to buy a home server or just put everything into S3/JungleDisk. We're not quite there yet, but it's getting awfully close.

EDIT: read here on the emerging application paradigm http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2009/05/quick-history-...

s3graham• 17 years ago

Thanks for that link. Nothing really new, but really well crystalized and named.

I can't get more than 25/2 here. :(

stratomorph• 17 years ago

To be fair, network latency is both much higher and much more variable than hard disk latency, even if the bandwidth is higher. Design can change, but it's hard to get away from needing enough local smarts and storage to make an interface feel snappy.

Edit - To back up my otherwise unsupported assertion:

  --- ycombinator.com ping statistics ---
  5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4105ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 80.985/112.433/163.591/29.114 ms

So a little over 100ms with significant variance for the open internet, results fairly typical. (Edited to add: I can't reproduce these results; later attempts give closer to 450ms, so this is biased in the network's favor.) Hard drives (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE..., for lack of a better source) have latency around 5 ms.

You can solve bandwidth problems by buying more lines, but latency, once introduced by a slow network hop, can never be recouped by any amount of hardware.

evgen2• 17 years ago

The size of the pipe going out of your house does not matter if the upstream routers do not have #users x max_bandwidth available as well. Seeing as how state of the art equipment does not have enough bandwidth on the backplane to support even a small neighborhood with connection speeds like this it seems that a better description of this endeavor would "waste of effort."

DenisM3• 17 years ago

... or "crazy fast neighborhood network", for some interesting definition of "neighborhood".

wmf4• 17 years ago

Fast but bursty Internet connections are still worth having since a lot of Internet usage is bursty.

evgen2• 17 years ago

Please define an actual use-case for 10G burst to the home. The reality is that the most important parts of the network are not the last mile, but all of the interconnects upstream and at the peering points.

This sounds nice, but provides no real benefit to the end-user over a 100M connection that was actually backed by infrastructure that could maintain some reasonable fraction of this amount of bandwidth. If the amount of cash that the telco dumped into this 10G marketing ploy were actually used to upgrade the backhaul all of the users would benefit more.

dflock• 17 years ago

Are there any HN'ers (patio?) who live in Japan and could shed some light on what you actually use all this bandwidth for, if you do? Is the current situation really as it's painted?

I'm in the UK and I current have a (fairly flakey) 24Mbps ADSL2+ connection and I can see running everything like TV, radio, music, voice, etc via this connection. I would do this more if it was more reliable - and I already download a lot of video and stream music via last.fm, use skype, etc... I can see myself using maybe 5-10x my current bandwidth quite happily but not really knowing what to do with anything on top of that.

Obviously while it was novel you'd just gleefully 'download the whole internet' because you could, but what then? Apart from bigger, better, faster, HD/HiFi versions of current applications, what do you (or would you) use a really fast connection for, in the long term?

vicaya• 17 years ago

The "symmetrical" is the killer part. It makes peer to peer backup of large files (HD videos) bearable.

Japan Going to 10 Gigabit/s symmetrical internet access starting 2010

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