The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune reports
"The fastest Internet in the world is going to be here in Minneapolis starting this afternoon," said Joe Caldwell, co-CEO of US Internet. "We're talking about a game-changing speed."[1]
The service will cost $400 per month, Caldwell said. The company already offers 1-gigabit-per-second service for $65 per month to the same 30,000 households west of Interstate 35W, and plans to expand its network east of 35W, mostly to neighborhoods south of Lake Street.
[...]By moving eastward with its fiber network's high speeds and lower prices, the upstart US Internet hopes to take business away from Comcast.
[1] 10-gigabits-per-pecond.
Related Stories
El Reg reports
Singapore's dominant telco, Singtel, has announced a pilot deployment of 10Gbps broadband to a select group next quarter and says that it expects the blistering fast Internet service to be generally available by the later part of this year.
The high speed connectivity is only possible due to the completion of Singapore's Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network (Next Gen NBN) initiative--a master plan to wire up every corner of the city-state with fibre optics.
[...] 10Gbps services are rare anywhere: telcos in Hong Kong and Korea are experimenting with broadband at these speeds while US Internet offers such a service in Minneapolis. Singtel stepping up and promising commercial services by year's end is therefore globally noteworthy.
Related: US Internet Customers in Minneapolis Get World's Fastest Residential Internet for $400/Month
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @06:20AM
What the summary left out. Would you buy it?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Friday December 26 2014, @06:26AM
If it meant that my dollar was competing with Comcast, I just might. I just might.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Marand on Friday December 26 2014, @07:25AM
The $400/mo one is a bit rich for my tastes, but I'd definitely take the $65/mo one. 1gbps and it's not Comcast, what's not to love? Hell, I'd take half that speed and still be happy.
The highest residential speed I've had before is when I had FiOS. Paid for a 75mbit/sec connection, but I never saw it go under 80mbps, it often cleared 100mbps, and a few times I even got up to 120mbps. For most stuff that was already ridiculously fast; for example, most of the games I have on Steam could be downloaded and installed in about the time it took to go to the kitchen, make a drink, and get back. Even at just a fraction of this ISP's 1gbps offering, it was still great. So, yeah, half or even ¼ the 1gbps offering for not-Comcast would be a great deal.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @08:53AM
And most of the time the other end would be too slow. I'd say 1Gbps should be enough for most residences till the rest of the popular sites catch up.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @09:28AM
I'd say gigabit would be sufficient for most homes for decades. With 10 gbps you could be launching your own personal AI to scour the Web. Meanwhile, H.265 has sliced many video file sizes in half. On video Wikipedia says you need 20-30 mbps to stream H.265 4K. Other estimates have put it at 15-20 mbps. Quadruple that for 8K video, multiply the streams, and gigabit could handle it. If you don't like H.265/HEVC, Google has said it will release successors to VP9 more rapidly.
Speeds above 1 gbps might enable some crazy future of VR where Oculus Rift meets Second Life meets mainstream gaming (and it all runs on your phone).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 26 2014, @11:45AM
Still need to be measuring with H264 right now as most hardware and software don't yet support H265. It will probably be on the close order of five years before H265 is the proper codec to benchmark against. Otherwise you're correct.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @07:12PM
Well I'm using 2010-11 laptop hardware and I was able to get 720p to run on VLC. I actually didn't expect it to work. 1080p I'm less sure of.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by cmn32480 on Friday December 26 2014, @05:52PM
What is the cost of equipment that will handle 10 gig connections? It is certainly NOT consumer grade stuff.
I would think that 1 gig connections to the house for residential internet would be more realistic in terms of actual use.
But zoinks, that is FAST!
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @09:29AM
That caught my eye.
There was a plot line in Dilbert last month, but I didn't think it was a real thing.
Pay rate [dilbert.com]
Tiebreaker [dilbert.com]
Split the duties [dilbert.com]
Bad news [dilbert.com]
Subcontracting [dilbert.com]
Golden parachute [dilbert.com]
Reboot [dilbert.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 4, Funny) by Dunbal on Friday December 26 2014, @01:06PM
Only no one mentioned they cap your data at 20GB/month... at those speeds you should arrive there in what oh, 30 seconds or so?
(Score: 1) by mgcarley on Saturday December 27 2014, @04:19PM
They said this *isn't* Comcast.
I think you'll find municipal (and muni-style) ISPs like this one tend not to have data caps.
Judging by information at peeringdb, they seem to have a lot more bandwidth (per subscriber) than a company like Comcast does.
Founder & COO, Hayai. We're in India (hayai.in) & the USA (hayaibroadband.com) // Twitter: @mgcarley
(Score: 3, Informative) by egcagrac0 on Friday December 26 2014, @01:44PM
1. speeds up to 10Gb/s
2. It's actually $399/mo, not $400.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 27 2014, @02:50PM
So Mr. Inkhorn, what are you gonna do with your buck?
Usually if you have a great point (your #1), it only diminishes the impact if you bundle it with something insignificant (your #2).
(Score: 2) by egcagrac0 on Saturday December 27 2014, @05:26PM
The savings of $399 vs $400 is .25%. This is significant when compared to interest paid on a typical savings account.
Pedantic accuracy used to be the norm around here.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 26 2014, @04:13PM
Cheap and relatively slow broadband would be much more useful for most people. 10G/sec is impressive in the same way a high end sports car is impressive. But 10M/sec for $20/month would get a lot more people online.
Would like to see smaller flash drives for cheap. When a new drive with double the previous high in capacity comes out, the bottom end does not get cheaper, it gets eliminated, and the lowest price stays about the same, just shifts to the next larger capacity.
As usual, businesses aren't interested unless it's high profit margin stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @07:34PM
They also have 50 mbps for $40, 25 mbps for $30.
As for flash, SSD prices have dropped to $0.50/GB at launch and will get cheaper as more V-NAND comes out, and USB flash drives can be found for under $10, 32 GB for about $12.
(Score: 1) by mgcarley on Saturday December 27 2014, @04:48PM
Not "typical American upsell" at all. All sorts of industries do this all the time, and arguably, it's a good thing: 1. People have different perceptions of "need". 1. I, for one, can see a need for this, even if it's not immediate for everybody. 2. Some bright-spark is bound to build something entirely new (eg not a Netflix clone) that will be able to take advantage of it, so the potential for growth and new industry/jobs/etc and 3. Existing services can introduce new functionality to take advantage of it (eg Netflix introduces 4K as a "mainstream" option or something).
Of course, it also shows the idiots at organizations like the NCTA (or other big supporters of the cable cos for that matter) that monopolies are not necessary to facilitate R&D and massive profits don't actually equate to better services or infrastructure upgrades. There is such a thing as delivering the best service possible for the sake of delivering the best service possible - even in America.
As far as the "cheaper, slower broadband" idea, what you don't seem to be taking in to account is that there is a fixed arbitrary cost (CAPEX/OPEX) which prevents price levels of $10-20/month (funky gimmicks and "special offers for the first few months" notwithstanding) for broadband in the US.
And I could go so far to suggest that the reason the cost is $400 instead of say just $150 or $199 is because the hardware required to support end-to-end 10gbit/s hasn't come down to commodity levels yet, but it's not far off yet, either. I'm aware that you can get "cheap" 10gbit/s GBICs and NICs now but they're still often an order of magnitude more than gigabit stuff, especially for "decent" stuff.
Overall though, this is a great development. The problem for customers on this service will no longer be the pipe, but the storage medium - the size and speed of even a top-end SSD means saturating the connection is (currently) difficult, so storing stuff locally becomes less of a necessity. Of course, there a healthy balance of local and cloud is necessary - keep your own private stuff (documents and such) local but movies and certain software can stay in the data-centre.
Then there are the opportunities for apartment buildings/complex owners: including service in the rent is a nice attraction, but it's still very easy to be paying $1,000-1,500 a month for 100mbit/s in many parts of the country, resulting in some pretty poor speeds in some places I've seen. Even if the cost stays the same, getting gigabit or better service would really improve things in some respects (of course, properly implementing qos and preventing a single user from saturating the line goes a long way as well).
Founder & COO, Hayai. We're in India (hayai.in) & the USA (hayaibroadband.com) // Twitter: @mgcarley
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday December 27 2014, @06:13PM
It's not plausible that, across the board in consumer electronics, everything has gotten way cheaper over the decades, but somehow networking services have not. In the early 1990s, a PC with a 486 cost about $2000, today much more powerful computers can be had for around $200. Like other hardware, networking equipment has also gotten far less expensive and more powerful. An expansion card for Ethernet was $100, and daisy chains with 10base2 Ethernet were more popular thanks to the typical $1000 price tag for a 10baseT Ethernet hub or switch. Now Ethernet ports are built into most motherboards, and low end switches are $10 and 10 times faster.
No, it's the monopoly power of ISPs that keeps prices high, and enables them to upsell the public. Would you like plan A for $149/month. or plan B for $99/month? A $20/month plan? There isn't one, sorry. Only reason phone service came down in price is because Ma Bell's switched network was so much less efficient than a packet network that even monopolistic ISPs could offer a better deal without even trying and still make huge profits.
Another example of the upsell is home security. A sensible way to do it is to have the equipment call you when it detects something unusual. That way, there's no need for a monitoring service. But home security businesses try very hard to ignore that, hoping the homeowner doesn't think of it either, so they can sell their monitoring services for a monthly fee.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @06:39PM
wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing [wikipedia.org]
and since google web search and image search give you only academia crap results, here:
is a real-for-life website that sells this stuff:
not affiliated in any ways, just saying google could give us some more real results then just
"theoretical" papers: http://www.transmode.com/en/technologies/wdm/dwdm [transmode.com]
so boys and girls, that device takes 10-20 10Gbits/sec links (as per port) and then all those
laser-lights get "shaken" into one strand of fiber optic cable.
so you have this PASSIVE, as in "need no electricity at all" device in same far of farmers town,
to which all the farm houses are connected via one fiber optic cable and out comes ONE strand
that goes alllllll the way to the ocean landing station and offf to chinaaaaa, to sell your potatoes and stuff.
so if your ISP is complaining that they can't give you a ACTIVE phiber optic (AON) connection (that is a connection you
don't have to share, unlike verizon which is Passive-optical-phiber (PON) beause it would require to have electrical power
in the remote far-off location .. then you can call bullshit!
you are welcome!