Putting The Spurs To Internet Access

[Bschneider]

Putting The Spurs To Internet Access

By RICHARD MULLINS The Tampa Tribune
Published: Aug 8, 2006

http://www.tbo.com/news/scitech/MGBS9OTLLQE.html

If you think your cable or DSL Internet service at home is pretty fast, get ready to feel pretty slow.

By early next year, Verizon Communications Inc. is preparing to launch a home Internet service in the Tampa Bay area that is four to eight times faster than what's now available to residential customers in the region.

The new service could be as fast as 100 megabits per second - much faster than many big companies have for employees at work. The move would up the ante in Verizon's battle with Bright House Networks for Bay area Internet subscribers.

In theory, Verizon's new service could allow customers to download a song from Apple iTunes in half a second, 100 digital pictures in about four seconds, or an entire digital movie in less than two minutes. Downloading the same movie on dialup service could take two days.

The service initially will be geared to so-called

ESTIMATED DOWNLOAD TIMES

Top-selling song on iTunes, "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley, 2.5 minutes
Dialup: about 12 minutes
5Mbps Broadband: 8 seconds
New service: ½ second

Music Video: Paris Hilton, "Stars Are Blind"
Dialup: about 45 minutes
5Mbps Broadband: 30 seconds
New Service: 2 seconds

100 digital pictures, at 5 megapixel resolution
Dialup: about 2 hours
5Mbps Broadband: 1.5 minutes
New service: 4 seconds

Full-length, 1½ hour digital movie
Dialup: about 2 days
5Mbps Broadband: 32 minutes
New Service: 1.6 minutes

3 gigabytes of images for magazine layout project
Dialup: 5 days
5Mbps Broadband: 1.3 hours
New Service: 4 minutes

Source: Verizon Communications Inc.

[Harry]

That all sounds cool but I do have some reservations that were expressed by the BHN spokesman they asked for comments on in the paper. If the servers and the backbone links are not fast enough and empty enough, it does not matter how fast your local link is. I think that I am pretty well, limited by outside stuff even at the 15mb speed. I am not sure what 100mb would buy me as a single or even a dual user in the home. Works better for a business with multi users and multi servers.

Harry

[jazzcat]

Or theres the other possibility which is to find an internet cafe and access your stuff from there. Our local Leclerc charges about 1€ an hour.

[Kendo]

I was talking to a tech over 6 months ago and he said FiOS could easily do 100mbps but they didn’t see a market, so it wasn’t offered. I guess now that BHN introduced 40mbps lightning they “feel the need, the need for speed” (even though Vz offers 50mbps).

I have FiOS but regardless of whom you go with, we are pushing the boundaries of what the actual internet and servers you connect to can provide. What good is a 6 foot pipe sucking from a 1 inch pipe?

Looking at it from another point of view; it will benefit households such as mine that have multiple users sucking from different sources at the same time. I think the service is going to be tailored to households with multiple users – I’ve got one kid playing on line games on Playstation 3, another watching youtube, my wife researching something and me doing some work at home via a VPN using RDP to my work computer… and everyone is screaming fast!

Talking to people lately I find it interesting that Vz is pushing symmetrical service hard lately - 20/20, 35/35 or 50/50…etc. They are pushing everyone to having the same up/down speeds for some reason at very good pricing.

[Jason]

Raw speed for a single task is nice, but even at my current 20Mbit connection with Bright House, I rarely find sites that can max that out.

One would think that they would be reluctant to offer (and push so aggressively) the symmetrical speeds with such large upstream bandwidth. It seems that, although they are trying to discourage peer-to-peer, torrents, etc., they are making it easier for more home users to do.

Or perhaps this is a sort of gateway drug, where they get us hooked on high speeds, only to see extra charges for excess data transfer later? I know Comcast started the trend, but I really doubt they'll be the last.