

Japan Going to 10 Gigabit/s symmetrical internet access starting 2010 - heed
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/06/ultra-broadband-worldwide-and-gdp-boost.html

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dflock
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?

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

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wmf
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.

~~~
DenisM
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-...](http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2009/05/quick-history-of-
software-platforms-how.html)

~~~
s3graham
Thanks for that link. Nothing really new, but really well crystalized and
named.

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

~~~
DenisM
Michael's works are remarkable. Many things he writes about seem obvious in
retrospect, yet I find myself thinking _differently_ after reading his
wording.

It's also awkward talking to people who haven't read him as I end up coming
from different perspective and grasping for common references. Hence why I
plug him everywhere I can. :-)

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evgen
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."

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

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evgen
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.

~~~
Retric
This is a long way from nation wide adoption, but several places are rolling
out 1GB connections in the next few years.

Today when you give users 50MB+ connections they start using a tiny fraction
of their total bandwidth. The real advantage to 1+GB links is the ability to
grow the backbone as needed without caring about the last mile for a long
time. Going the other way limits the adoption of services that need such high
speed connections. And it's just fiber, they don't need to actually put 10GB
equipment at both ends of every home, just run a cable which could in theory
support those speeds.

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TweedHeads
Meantime, we suck...

Thanks to BigTelcos

~~~
just_the_tip
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.

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

