

1Gbps connection now costs $26 a month in Hong Kong - swombat
http://www.convergenceconversation.com/posts/benoit.felten/a-gbs-in-hong-kong-now-costs-26

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meroliph
Some notes:

1\. This pricing subject to a 24 month contract and an installation fee.

2\. They only guarantee this speed locally(read: within the network), so
they're not getting 1000mbps everywhere.

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swombat
My broadband is also subject to a contract (12 months) and has no guarantee
whatsoever... They say it's 24 Mbit, but in practice, even to London it's only
about 10 - and to other parts of the world it can be a lot lower.

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kierank
_They say it's 24 Mbit_

Are you talking about headline speed or actual sync speed? The latter is
beyond the control of the ISP (apart from laying FTTC or FTTH of course)

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swombat
I realise that Hong Kong is much smaller than the average country, but is
there really any excuse why major city centres in the western world can't
match this, other than generalised incompetence?

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potatolicious
Yes, government-granted monopolies. This going beyond things like spectrum
regulation, but also to exclusivity deals that municipalities sign with
various providers. In Asia this just doesn't happen.

When your customers _need_ to be online, and there's no one else but you that
offers service, you can sell them whatever the hell you want.

We have loud outcries about Goldman Sachs and other sorts of corporate
shenanigans, yet we make no noise when our city governments blatantly jump in
bed (publicly admitted as such!) with telecoms.

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anigbrowl
OK well obviously we'd prefer to avoid 10 different companies digging up the
street to put in their own cables (and I'm sure they'd rather not have to do
that either), so how does the competition manifest in practice?

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jacquesm
The usual way is by 'right of way' on a competitors infrastructure for a
minimum fee.

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_Lemon_
Subtle change in the headlines here: GB/s to Gb/s. Things get confusing
quickly but B is bytes, and b is bits. (Except when it says something like
MBits).

</pedantic>

~~~
anigbrowl
Even so...that's about 20x faster and 40x better value than what I have. I
knoq HK is tiny but so's San Francisco. /grumble

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mdasen
I hope someone has an answer to this. In a lot of places (like Hong Kong or
Japan), users are likely connecting to local servers a lot of the time for
reasons of language or geography. So, it's potentially easy for an ISP to
offer a high speed to those local servers just like it could be easy for an
ISP in Boston to offer high speed access to servers in Boston. However, most
Americans would be connecting to servers that are usually far away from them
geographically.

My question is, are those Hong Kong users getting 1Gbps access to the internet
or a small portion of the internet located within 5 miles of their position?
If I had a server in Japan, would they be able to connect at 1Gbps? If I had a
server in San Francisco?

I know that when I was in Israel a few months back, access to major sites like
Facebook was terribly slow even over a connection that was fast when tested
using Speedtest.net to a server within Israel (even accounting for latency).

If that's the case, would you want/accept an American ISP who offered you
100Mbps access to servers within your metro area and much slower speeds to the
greater internet? For example, in Boston we have the Northern Crossroads
(<http://www.nox.org/background/index.html>) and my ISP could probably easily
and cheaply give me very high speed access to servers within it, but that's a
tiny fraction of the servers that I'd want to use since, as an English
speaker, the servers I'd want to connect to are very spread out. If they moved
the bottleneck to 2 hops out, would that be helpful? Would you accept them
selling you 100Mbps or 1Gbps internet service that was actually 10Mbps to the
greater internet and only that fast to servers nearby? I'm really just musing
here and am really interested in people's thoughts on the matter.

Hopefully someone who knows about the situation (like where ISPs costs are,
whether it costs more for an ISP to get/build capacity to go across the
country for me, whether it's significantly cheaper for my ISP to deliver
higher speeds to a nearby server, etc.) can speak to this.

~~~
ww520
The ISP only guarantees the 1Gbps speed for outgoing and INCOMING traffic out
of your house to their network. It can't guarantee the same speed at any
destination servers in the world. If the destination server in US has a slow
ISP, you can't get 1Gbps to it. There are also a number of routers and
gateways in between your house and the rest of the world. It's worse when
going across Continents. They all impact the speed.

It's like the ISP forms a 1Gbps-island. When all the islands in the world have
gone to 1Gbps and the inter-links between them have beefed up, you will get
1Gbps to anywhere in the world. Keep dreaming.

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edj
This is so depressing. I pay $25 for 12mbps. And even that's a half-off
special only good for the first six months.

~~~
tvon
_That_ is depressing, I pay more for a lot less via Comcast in the US.

~~~
edj
Same here. Comcast in Portland, a city that allegedly has competition among
ISPs.

The most galling thing for me is that my parents get 100 Mbps fiber with phone
service at their house for around $60 or $70 month. And this is in a small
town (<10,000 people) in the midwest. The difference is they're lucky enough
to have a visionary small ISP that chooses to reinvest in its product rather
than sit back and milk a quasi-monopoly.

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sirrocco
Romania - 10euros for cable, phone and internet :
<http://www.speedtest.net/result/787608943.png> (on one server I'm getting
close to 45Mb.)

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sliderr
Wondering why it's such a big deal to set up fast internet in metro areas in
the u.s. I got 100 MBit VDSL FTTB for 35€ here in Cologne and I could get
about the same speed from 3 other ISPs.

~~~
spamizbad
US telcom companies have assured us we're receiving the best internet access
in the world. 100MBit VDSL may seem impressive to you, but can you claim that
each packet is lightly-dusted with American Exceptionalism before being hand-
delivered by the invisible hand of the market? I think not!

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chwahoo
OT (but related): I pay for a 20Mbps connection in the DC area through a cable
provider. On a number of speed-test sites, I only get around 6Mbps. I tried
calling tech-support, but my representative went down a script asking me about
clearing my cookies, etc. I was unable to convey to him that my speed wasn't
"slow", it was just less than the advertised rate.

Is it normal to get far less than the advertised speed for a residential cable
connection?

~~~
DaemonHN
What you have is a plan that provides _up_ to 20Mbps. Since you're most likely
a residential customer, there are no service level agreements that you can
hold your ISP to.

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faragon
3mbps (509kbps upload) 41.64 euro/month (~56 USD/month) Spain (Europe); ISP:
Jazztel

(in my opinion is too much expensive)

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notauser
Emigrating to Hong Kong should be pretty easy, their migration process is
points based and most people with a Masters degree probably qualify. It's a
great city so the WiFi wouldn't be the only attraction.

Has anyone had any experience doing that? How hard is it to find work if you
don't speak Cantonese or Mandarin?

~~~
yeti
You can get a regional job without Chinese language skills (what I did), or if
you're a specialist in a niche field here is another way to go. Or invest and
setup a new business here.

~~~
notauser
How did you find the job? Did you go through an agency of some sort?

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bond
Here in Portugal i pay $74 for Tv 116channels+unlimited phone
calls+internet50MB.

<http://www.speedtest.net/result/787781349.png> Wireless test. Cable goes to
30-35

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henriklied
Oslo, Norway. $65/month: <http://www.speedtest.net/result/787586116.png>

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acangiano
Toronto, $40 a month: <http://www.speedtest.net/result/787507214.png>

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martythemaniak
I fucking hate Bell and Rogers internet :(

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grosen
What use is 1Gbps when you are sitting behind the GFOC?

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yeti
It's Hong Kong, not China. No firewalling here.

