
Hong Kong gets 1 Gbps broadband service for $26 a month - acangiano
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/hong-kong-gets-1-gbps-broadband-service-for-26-a-month-20100420/
======
muhfuhkuh
I'm resigned to the US never having speeds close to that. Never. I've heard
everything from "it's market forces" to "it's the
government's/FCC's/President/your mayor's fault" to "we're too far apart" to
"the people don't want it so they don't ask for it". Which is it? Or is it a
combination of all factors creating some "perfect storm" of awful service and
slow speed?

I don't even bother streaming HD on Netflix or youtube because of the burps
and buffering.

I wonder how things can get done so seemingly fluidly in terms of technology
and broadband adoption in other countries, where it's either super-socialist
or statist (like Nordic countries) or mythical in its backroom, nepotistic
corruption (like apparently Asia, including HK). How does anything get done in
other countries if its so galactically hard to do so in the US, even in places
with aboslute population density like NY and LA?

Is it really the federal government? Or is it local government? I'd hate to
think it is. I mean that HK 1Gbps line _has_ to be somewhat funded or
subsidized by their government, either by funding the laying of fibre or some
other thing.

What's more, our wireless speeds are bad, too. I mean, my brother was recently
in Vietnam and he said their 3G connection consistency and speed blew the US
equivalent out of the water. Of course, 3G adoption is likely not as high as
here in the US, but the point stands.

~~~
adestefan
It's the NIMBYs. No one wants their property torn up to install the stuff.
Same for the wireless providers. People get pissed when a large cell phone
tower is placed anywhere near their home.

I pay $45 for 25/5 FIOS and never have a problem streaming Netflix in HD to my
TiVo. That's over 802.11G wireless too.

~~~
ericd
FIOS is the happy exception to the rampant crappiness in the US broadband ISP
field. Unfortunately, it never seems to be available. My parents in rural MD
have had it for years, but it hasn't been available in my past three
apartments in NYC, two in the Bay Area, or one in the LA area. Instead, I've
been stuck with inconsistent on-and-off service from cable providers who are
all basically the same except in name.

~~~
adestefan
We seemed to have lucked out with FIOS in MD. Just about the entire central
part of the state is covered. The exception seems to be Baltimore city.

FIOS has also helped to push competition with Comcast here too.

------
Swizec
Just chirping in:

In Slovenia I'm paying 20 euro a month for 20/20 unshaped, uncensored and
uncapped FTTH. There are Gbps lines, but that costs something like 200 euro a
month, which is completely unacceptable.

~~~
catch23
Hah, a 1gb line here in mountain view, a few blocks from google still costs
around $3000 a month from at&t.

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kenkam
I'm from Hong Kong and I think it's unfair to compare the US with us. Hong
Kong's just a city in China. If anything, compare with New York, say...

... or compare US with China. I know which one I prefer :D

~~~
muhfuhkuh
"compare with New York, say..."

Last I checked, NYC has nothing even resembling 1GBps speeds, not unless
you're willing to pay for an OC12 line, which I think is in the
US$100,000-200,000 per month.

~~~
masklinn
> Last I checked, NYC has nothing even resembling 1GBps speeds

I think that was his point: NYC has the same population density as HK (higher,
actually, by close to 10%) but you'd be hard pressed finding an ISP offering
1Gbps for $30.

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harisenbon
Whenever I hear about foreign currency translated into USD, I get nervous...

Is that $26 a month merely a direct translation at the going financial rate
(about 200 HKD), or is that taking in to account the general wages of Hong
Kong in general?

For example, when you're paid $3000/month, $26 is nothing, but if you're only
paid $800 a month (like many in Hong Kong), then that 200HKD is no longer
comparable to $26. It's more like $98 a month.

Living in Japan, I get a lot of comments about how expensive video games are
here (6000yen or 71USD). The fact is 6000 yen is more like 60USD, as long as
you're living and working in Japan. Just because the USD is in the crapper,
doesn't mean that all of our products suddenly got more expensive.

</rant>

By the way, we have 1Gbps here in Japan as well... I believe it's only
70-100USD a month?

~~~
towelrod
I live in Hong Kong, and the people I know get paid roughly what they would
get paid in the US. Most goods and services cost roughly the same as they do
in the US as well. Some things are cheaper (taxis) and others are more
expensive (imported beer).

There are a lot of people working for way less than what they would get in the
US though -- domestic helpers are a prime example.

------
albahk
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492984>

I posted this on HN a while back when I was looking at a new internet
provider. I didn't choose the 1Gbps but got a 100mbps instead with a bundled
package. Using speedtest.net to a HK-based server I get 60-70mbps download and
30mbsp upload fairly consistently. Love it. HK-hosted sites load like they are
on a local server.

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mrcharles
Canada can never have anything like this, since the CRTC has proven that they
will defend Bell's write to keep a stranglehold on last mile connections to
consumer homes. Even if a startup did want to provide the ridiculously high
speeds, the 'cost' of convincing Bell to let you compete on their copper will
be prohibitive.

~~~
Maciek416
Counter-datapoint:

I'm in Canada (Toronto) and have fiber to the home, and have had it since
about 2002. If you see more of this sort of thing in Canada, I suspect it will
likely be brand new neighborhoods in metro areas, large scale condo projects,
etc.

[EDIT: speed test: <http://www.speedtest.net/result/1145884475.png> ]

~~~
mrcharles
Do you pay $13 a month for it? I'm going to assume no.

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f1gm3nt
<https://epbfi.com/>

Chattanooga, TN USA currently has residential speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps. As
far as I can tell it is still the only place in the USA where you can get some
of the fastest internet speeds. HOWEVER it's 349.99 for that speed [see
<https://epbfi.com/you-pick/#/> ]

Has anyone else heard of any other place in the US that offers speeds close to
any of this?

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noibl
Since this is almost a year old, some previous discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277000>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1492984>

(I still think the title should be tweaked -- 'gets'?)

------
romaniv
I don't _need_ 1GBps connection or even 100Mbps connection, but I do want to
be able to get at least 3Mbps for a reasonable price. Last time I checked, it
was $35/month + $240 installation fee. The way I see it, this area has no real
competition. It's mostly AT&T plus some cable company (usually Comcast).

~~~
englishVoodoo
When you have it you'll find good use for it. With that bandwidth you can
start using cloudservices for backup and storage for starters. Currently I'm
dumping photos on amazon once in a while as my sole backup, but once I've
routed some cables from my new 100Mb line I plan on taking more advantage of
the cloud and in the process throw away a few annoying external harddrives.

------
qua
Prague, Czech Republic: 30/30 Mbps $30, 50/50 Mbps $45, 100/100 Mbps $55. I
was on the middle deal for 18 months, it's uncapped and unshaped even on the
uplink.

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mtisdale
I just can't seem to figure out why we supposedly live in the richest (if not
that atleast in the top 10) and can't even compete on internet speed?

God help us.

------
veidr
I think the way they did it in Japan was really good. Obviously, any industry
that leverages legally enforced right-of-way or geographical exclusivity is
_already_ regulated, so it makes sense to try to do a good job regulating.

They've done that here, although it is hard for me to imagine the government
in the US doing nearly as good a job. Pipes are essentially scarce, whether
fiber or DSL or cable, and so pipe owners are required to make them accessible
to different providers.

I just recently switched from SoftBank YahooBB fiber-to-the-buiding service
(synchronous 100Mbps, I'd get 10MB/sec downloads) to NTT fiber-to-your-router
service (200Mbps down, 100Mbps up, now getting slightly over 20MB/sec
downloads). This is about $50 per month, and I had my choice of something like
40 different providers to choose from when they installed the new fiber
terminal in my room. (1Gbps "business" service was also available, but that
cost $400 per month and my future wife vetoed the idea.)

It was a similar deal in 2005 when I had fiber installed here at a different
Tokyo location, though. That time the fiber was owned by the electric power
utility, and I got various competitive offers for IP service.

For work I have also set up connectivity at a few US locations, all DSL or
cable since fiber isn't widely available. The problems with Internet service
in the US are mainly political, not technical. Regulations create artificial
oligopolies where you usually must choose a.) the local telephone monopoly,
b.) the local cable monopoly, or c.) an esoteric solution like a leased line
or some kind of wireless service. There are often reliability issues or huge
costs associated with that last one, so in many/most US locations it is a
choice between two monopolists whose respective pipes are protected by
government regulation, but which are not under the sorts of regulatory
obligations that they are here, which create real competition in the market.

Without real competition, there is little incentive to make major
infrastructure investments and so you end up with the US being a pathetic
backwater banana republic in terms of Internet connectivity. (For that reason,
I hate trying to work in the US almost as much as in mainland China.)

------
tungwaiyip
I have HKBN at one time. It is a lot less exciting than it sounds. I picked
cheapest package at only 100M. It is a large pipe but the problem is I'm only
getting trickles from it. The actually speed don't even match my unglamorous
ADSL in US. It seems the Transpacific network has only very limited bandwidth.
So if you are watching video served by a CDN in Hong Kong you will be fairly
happy. But 95% of internet connection I'm making, such as to my company's VPN,
is to the US. And the bandwidth is pathetic. Forget about 1Gbps. If I can get
a guaranteed 3Mbps I'll be fairly happy.

------
drdaeman
I wonder what are the real speeds, because true unmetered gigabit link
certainly costs more than $26 (and even more than $260).

I believe it's that you would get a peak speed of about 1 Gbps, but I'm
certainly sure it's impossible to have a constant 1 Gpbs speed over long time.
In one possible case, you'll divide the ISPs' uplink with other users, so if
ISP has a total uplink connectivity of 100Gbps - which is extremly rare case -
and there are 1000 users, they'll all get less than 100Mbps. In another case,
if you'll hit some sort of a bandwidth cap, your connection will be shaped
down.

------
oz
Here in Jamaica, the equivalent of USD $38 gets you 20 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up.
You can get 50 Mbps down for USD $105, and 100 Mbps down / 5Mbps up for USD
$129. It's not bad at all, all things considered.

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dev_Gabriel
In Brazil I pay 90 bucks for a 5Mbps(and this is a GOOD one) connection ):

~~~
BoppreH
You forgot to mention the upload is 10 slower than the download. Literally.

~~~
arethuza
My upload is about 10 times slower that download - that's the A in ADSL.

As it's about 2.5Mbps up and 25Mbps down I'm not hugely bothered - we have
100Mbps symmetric fiber connection at work and it's generally only noticeably
faster when you do multiple gigabyte downloads.

------
schpet
Canada gets 7.5 Mbps for $47 a month

<https://store.shaw.ca/pages/main.jsp?top_active=inet>

~~~
martythemaniak
with a whopping 60GB cap! Think of all the midi files you could listen with
that kind of bandwidth!

------
georgecmu
Hong Kong and Singapore have a huge advantage over the States in that the
population there is extremely concentrated. A thousand households there is a
single (albeit large) apartment building, while here it's a small
neighborhood. I don't know how much cheaper it is to wire a single building
than 20 blocks of single houses, but I imagine it's several orders of
magnitude.

------
teyc
In reality these are beauty contests. We should pay attention only when Hong
Kong creates startups that makes use of the 1Gps.

On the other hand, I enjoy the meta discussion about monopolies and barriers
to entries that exist in America. If anything, it is a pointer to a more
general malady that befalls every aspect of doing business in the U.S.

------
krackpot
Lived in HK for a while in 2009, they had this same 1Gbps package, but more
expensive. I talked with a few people working for the firms offering these
packages and they all mentioned to me that this 1Gbps speed is guaranteed only
within the Hong Kong area. If you made connections to say US, they would not
guarantee that speed.

------
tszming
Hong Kong is also the world's most expensive place to buy a home, welcome to
Hong Kong. ([http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-28/hong-kong-is-
world-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-28/hong-kong-is-world-s-most-
expensive-place-to-buy-home-on-property-shortage.html))

------
jister
I envy you guys. In the Philippines we have 2 mpbs for $47.

------
pnathan
What about the issues with entrenched infrastructure and the technical cost of
switch over? Are there any studies on that?

------
suyash
Singapore is kicking everybody's ass too!! With 4G all over and fiber cable
speed internet throught

~~~
mdink
How much in US dollars do they pay for that?

~~~
antrix
One provider's traditional Cable as well as Fibre broadband plans:
<http://www.starhub.com/broadband/athome.html#tabcontrol-1>

1USD ~ 1.3SGD

------
patrickk
Ireland has 24Mbps for €24 per month (approx. $32.40) if you are a business.

------
david2777
Here in Hawaii I pay $50 a month for 5/1 mbps....

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bigwally
Not only is 1Gps $26 a month, it gets connected the same or next day.

------
vacri
_sigh_

One day we'll stop comparing city-states to continental countries.

How about an apples-to-apples comparison. Hong Kong is part of China. How's
the internet compare between the US and China? Average speed? Broadband
penetration? Choice of ISPs? Freedom of access?

I come from a different continental-sized country also full of internet-speed
whiners, and boy do they love pointing at tiny countries and outliers and
making it sound like these are the norm. Huh, fancy that - South Korea is an
order of magnitude ahead of everyone else in the world. Clearly we /must
suck/, because we don't match that hypertech'd outlier!

~~~
vacri
So _that's_ how you do italics here. How baroque!

------
mrshoe
There are some things that a 426 square mile country can do that a 3,717,813
square mile country really can't.
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_total_area))

I suppose we can hope for better coverage in the highest population density
areas, but even there the US population is just much more spread out than most
of the civilized world.

~~~
masklinn
This claim is bullcrap:

* There are places in the US with even higher densities than HK (NYC), they don't get the service

* There are a number of states with densities in the ballpark of european countries, or South Korea, or Japan, they don't get the service either

* Service in the sticks in the US is crap _right now_ , it's not like cities get awful service because everybody gets the same thing, DSL speeds in rural areas are _advertised_ the same speed they were a decade ago in France, and for twice the price. And the US still have a significant population of dialup users (>10%, I believe)

~~~
jarek
To be fair, unlike NYC, a lot of Hong Kong's area is actually uninhabited, so
the effective population density is higher.

That's not to say this excuses the North American internet service.

------
jpmc
This sounds cool but will have an impact on the Internet. We all want more and
more bandwidth but it comes at a hidden cost. Today’s computer is so much more
powerful than just a few years ago. These computers in the hands of novices
coupled with extreme amounts of bandwidth create the perfect environment for
hackers…not hackers like us but the botnet credit card thieving type. The
average home user doesn’t know how to secure his/her machine. In years past a
sluggish computer might have been a good sign you had a virus/Trojan/malware.
Today these machines can send millions of emails, portscan servers or
participate in DDOS attacks and the user has very little if any noticeable
performance hit.

In short more!=better.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
Isn't that the equivalent of saying "because people can't drive, no one is
allowed to have a sports car"?

~~~
jpmc
No, no its not. I am not saying people shouldn't have 1g connections. My point
is the majority of these users will have no idea how to handle it..like giving
the keys to your Ferrari to a 16 year old. If everybody had this type of
access and they continue poor security practices there will be an impact.

