
Rocket Fiber Launches 100GB/s Internet Service in Downtown Detroit - prostoalex
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/rocket-fiber-launches-100gbs-internet-service-in-downtown-detroit/
======
dpw
The linked article states 100 Gb/s, i.e. gigabits per second. But the post
title says "100GB/s" which suggests gigabytes per second. Worth correcting,
because getting 100GB/s between two machines in the same rack would be quite
an achievement today.

~~~
benjarrell
I used to resist the KiB/MiB/GiB nomenclature. But after seeing this problem
everywhere, I've changed my mind.

~~~
zaphoyd
I think in this case the issue isn't binary prefixes vs decimal which in this
case would amount to a ~7% error, but rather bits vs bytes which is an error
of ~800%

~~~
grubles
Yes, I'm not sure the parent realizes KiB (kibibyte) is different than Kb
(kilobit):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte)

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jayonsoftware
I live in Troy, MI (A suburb outside of Detroit) and pay $75 for a 300 Meg
Down / 20 Meg Up connection from
[http://www.wowway.com/](http://www.wowway.com/). I have lived in silicon
valley, but now work in Detroit, the high tech scene in Detroit is one of the
best.

~~~
xorblurb
I live in France and I pay 50€ for 3GB of 4G per month (then bw limited) _and_
200Mb/s down 50Mb/s up fixed Internet (official speeds but I speedtest them at
something like 270 / 70 Mb/s)

There are other operators which are even less expensive (but 4G coverage and
upstream fixed network peering changes a bit).

~~~
mmanfrin
These are wireless prices, correct? Do you not have a wired option?

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icebraining
I believe the prices are for a plan that includes _both_.

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tired_man
Not cheap? Where does the writer live that USD$70 for 1Gbps seems expensive to
him? I want to move there!

~~~
tinco
$70 for an internet connection is not cheap. The author just means that it's
not a no-brainer for individuals currently on one of the big providers who are
on a budget.

~~~
bluedino
It is for the area.

Comcast charges $65.95/mo. to $78.95/mo for 70mb/s in the Detroit metro area.
$70/month for 1gbs service and not having to deal with Comcast _is_ a no-
brainer

~~~
tinco
Oh wow that is expensive. In The Netherlands the big ADSL/Cable providers are
20/30 euro p/m + whatever you pay for TV and phone. The fiber operators charge
40-50 euro. I didn't expect it to be that much more expensive in the US.

~~~
adventured
Cable is certainly cheaper in the Netherlands, but not fiber.

In Utrecht, Online.nl is ~$54 for 50mbps fiber.

Fiber.nl is ~$44 euro for 50mbps fiber.

Per [https://www.internetten.nl](https://www.internetten.nl) and online.nl

$70 for 1gbps rather beats that by a drastic margin. Many cities in the US are
seeing gigabit consumer fiber deployments at that price range.

~~~
mseebach
> $70 for 1gbps rather beats that by a drastic margin.

You need to factor in the marginal utility of added bandwidth. Few people can
meaningfully utilise 20-50mbps (a full HD stream is <10mbps), much less 1gbps,
so you're looking at paying $20-30 for, essentially, nothing.

For the record, I count myself in the group of people who can't utilise such a
connection, although I'm squarely in the group of people who'd pay for the
faster connection in a heartbeat regardless.

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bsg75
Is it interesting this is in downtown Detroit?

Of late there have been some interesting photosets of the decay of formerly
"high end" real estate (residential and commercial), and I seem to recall
theories that Detroit could see a resurgence as tech businesses look to take
advantage of the power infrastructure formerly needed by manufacturing
companies.

~~~
moonchrome
One thing that seems strange to me as an outsider is how all your tech
startups and companies are clustering in areas with very high cost of living.
I don't know much about the US since I'm European but I do keep track of stuff
around here on HN.

I can understand it from employee point of view - large city - big job market
and naturally those places are also more desirable. But if you're going down
the startup route you're already going to sacrifice things for a potentially
big payout down the road (assuming you have stocks - right ?) which is why I
would have no problem relocating to a cheaper/less desirable area in order to
lower the operational costs and increase the chance of success.

Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong but unless you are doing B2B or direct sales
location shouldn't matter more than having funds to stay operational/becoming
profitable ?

One explanation I can come up with is that if you are looking for investors
instead of profitability it makes sense to be closer to them - but at the same
time that kind of feels like perverting incentives.

I was under the impression that the costs differences can be huge (2x) between
regions - maybe that's not the case ?

~~~
shostack
Access to employees and access to investors is a big part of it for sure.

Depending on the nature of the business, it might also be access to
prospective customers, particularly for b2b tech plays.

~~~
moonchrome
Do startups commonly have traditional employees in US ? As in people working
for a paycheck and no shares ? I feel like if I was going to work in a startup
I would have no problem moving for a couple of years and taking less money in
exchange for shares in the company (ofc. if I thought the company was going
somewhere)

From what I can see* locally it's usually founders with shares in company and
there's also a growing number of investors/incubators in Eastern Europe (where
the cost of doing business/living is considerably lower than Western Europe).
Perhaps it's because Europe is more separated legally and governments also
play a big role (trying to imitate US model) so investors are "forced" to go
to multiple places instead of bringing everyone to them.

*I'm very superficially familiar with startup scene, I'm considering getting in so I'm trying to figure things out :)

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tyndierock
We just got this at work and I have to say it's insanely fast. Makes
downloading things like Xcode a joke. We are getting around 250Mb/s down over
AC wifi and a blazing 800mb down over ethernet. Great stuff so far!

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PaybackTony
Wanted to touch on this post. I think having that kind of bandwidth, given
proper and reasonable connectivity outside the "last mile" is a big draw. I'm
a co-founder of a telecommunications start-up (cloud call center stuff) and
the thought of running our own DC on the cheap is a serious draw with a proper
connection. But that's a separate discussion (only 19 buildings right now, etc
etc etc).

Here in Portland, at my house I currently pay around 200/mo for 50/20, but
only really get 25/10 most of the time, on top of their second from lowest end
cable TV package. Google Fiber is moving in, but there is another player that
is really ramping up here, CenturyLink. As far as the west coast goes, they
are the kinds of fiber (from the long chain of acquisitions). Level3, Integra,
etc all lease much of their network from CL. But now CL is offering Business
1g lines as well as residential for the same price (around $115-$145/mo
depending on contract). I got TV (Prism) and 1Gbit for $145/mo. The kicker? No
caps. No throttling and no data caps at all on neither their residential
service nor their business. They also don't care if you use your residential
line to host servers on. Their entire network is fiber, and they've been
building it out since the late 80s.

I wonder why Comcast is so much more expensive here than what others are
reporting? I suppose as far as Cable Providers go, until this year your choice
in PDX has been Comcast or Satellite (Dish / DirecTV).

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_mulder_
This is not new. Existing Carriers have been offering 100GbE services for some
time although the type of customer who requires this type of service is few
and far between.

As for 10GbE for residential, if this is literally 10G to the home then that
is something new (as a product offering, technology is not new). Interesting
to know how they do the hand-off as 10GbE interfaces are simply not useful for
home use.

~~~
vidarh
It's new and _pointless_ at this point for individuals.

Very few places will be able to stream anything to them at 10GbE. Most regular
harddrives have a bandwidth substantially below that - it takes an expensive
RAID or high end SSD to feed a single user at that speed....

For an apartment complex, though, it might be useful to take 10GbE link...

Even on the business side - I run racks of servers handling dozens of clients
running booking services for several hundred restaurants, and we're using tens
of Mbps including really excessive amounts of regular disaster recovery syncs
and backups between our two data centres.. Some companies will benefit, but
most won't get anywhere near...

I think this is more of the case that it doesn't cost them that more to offer
to set things up for 10GbE, since these users will mostly be limited by
upstream servers that won't send them traffic enough so their bandwidth
_usage_ won't go up nearly as much as it theoretically could, so it's part a
long term view, part a competitive move to make 1Gbps or less from competitors
seem too little or too expensive for what you get.

~~~
CyberDildonics
I see comments like this on every announcement of fast internet and it is very
narrow minded.

Working remotely, high res video conferencing, screen casting, and even
booting a computer remotely over the internet are all big applications for
things like this.

With a 10gb connection you could have a computer at home that would boot
remotely and be part of a company's network as if you were in the office.

~~~
vidarh
Most people could do that with 1Gbps without any caching. If you want to run
off fast remote SSDs, then yes, you may be able to exceed a 1Gbps connection.
But if you're willing to pay for a suitable switch and network card for your
computer, you'd be better off buying a high end SSD for your home machine.

Most office networks I've dealt with have fileservers attached that couldn't
max out a 1Gbps connection at the best of days.

Of the rack fulls of servers I manage, we have a total of 2 unused 10GbE
connections - this is fairly typical. Most peoples servers don't yet have more
than a couple of 1Gbps connections. So trying to max out a 10GbE connection is
an exercise in frustration.

Yes, there are the rare exceptional circumstance where someone could manage to
make use of it, but they are just that: rare and exceptional.

Yes, there will be a time we can max it out with ease, but it's not there yet,
and at the rate of adoption of 10GbE even for servers it won't be anytime
soon.

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moreentropy
If you have fiber and the right transceivers, you can run 100Gbit/s over it.
If you need that sort of bandwidth, you'll probably do your own peering
because just paying for traffic will be obscenely expensive.

Chaos Computer Club's 30c3 conference had a 100G fiber link to downtown
Hamburg for a couple of days, still 12k users w/ Gigabit ports and a makeshift
datacenter with 10g ports couldn't manage to saturate the link:

[https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5609_-_en_-
_saal_6_-_201312301...](https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5609_-_en_-
_saal_6_-_201312301430_-_infrastructure_review_-_kay_-_peter_stuge_-_florolf_-
_sebastian_-_m#video&t=98)

~~~
amazon_not
Just because you have a 100G network does not mean that anybody will peer with
you. You pay for transit like everybody else.

Even the usual suspects (Netflix, Google, etc.) have their own criteria before
they will peer with you.

~~~
moreentropy
Right. But I doubt that anyone shifting that much traffic just buys 100G
internet service to a certain location. If you push out that much you might
make use of CDNs, if you consume that much Netflix/Google I guess you meet
their criteria and the CDNs talk to you (and place their edge servers in your
network).

~~~
amazon_not
True enough. The distinction really comes down to want and need 100G. If you
need 100G, you have options and peering is on the table. If you just want
100G, like Rocket Fiber with their 19 buildings, not so much.

As to buying transit on a 100G port, obscene is perhaps a bit harsh. Transit
cost goes down significantly with volume and there rarely is a need to commit
to a full 100G port. In any case price per Mbps is going to be in cents, not
dollars.

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ajmarsh
My understanding is it is being installed under the new M-1 rail line.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-1_Rail_Line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-1_Rail_Line)

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edude03
I wonder how they terminate it into the premises? AFAIK (I don't work with
fiber though) there aren't SFPs that go above 10G per fiber. On the other
hand, there are connectors like MTP
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber_connector#/media...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber_connector#/media/File:MPO_Stecker_HR.jpg))
that allow you to multiplex multiple fibers into one cable then separate them
back out into multiple cables so maybe that?

~~~
amazon_not
100G transceivers from Fiberstore, the Amazon of fiber optics
[http://www.fs.com/c/100g-transceivers_1159](http://www.fs.com/c/100g-transceivers_1159)

100G connectivity comes in different flavours. Some use MTP and multiple
fibers to transport 100G others use normal LC connectors and transport 100G
over multiple wavelenghts on a single fiber pair.

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blisterpeanuts
So, it looks like it's 10 gigabit for $70 for residential service, which is
10x the Google Fiber speed ("1000 megabits" for $70).

Does this service come with any restrictions such as how many devices can
share it, can you host with a fixed IP, effectively run an ISP service out of
a home? A lot of residential providers limit such activities.

Anyway it's a good sign that entrepreneurs are jumping into this market to
challenge the dinosaurs like Comcast, Cox, Verizon, etc.

~~~
zokier
> So, it looks like it's 10 gigabit for $70 for residential service, which is
> 10x the Google Fiber speed ("1000 megabits" for $70).

The difference between 10Gbps and 1Gbps last-mile is almost completely
meaningless compared to how well the rest of the network is connected. And
somehow I imagine that Google might have slight edge on that side...

~~~
pyvpx
Google Fiber != Google as far as networks/autonomous systems go.

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mschuster91
100 gigabits per second for $300? Holy cow. You can run a whole datacenter off
a single such link (and another one for redundancy of course). How is traffic
priced?

~~~
CyberDildonics
10gb for $300, 100gb was a business connection and a custom quote.

~~~
mschuster91
Ah, I misread. Still, for a small DC a 10GBit link is enough...

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vlan0
Dear god, they chose the two cheapest upstream providers on the market [1].
It's a shame they didn't pick up a higher quality carrier to handle the
majority of their traffic.

[1] [http://bgp.he.net/AS394141#_asinfo](http://bgp.he.net/AS394141#_asinfo)

~~~
nullrouted
What high quality carrier would you recommend for Detroit? They can go to
Cogent, HE, Level3 or one of their competing Telcos. There is nothing wrong
with using Cogent/HE for their eyeball network, it gives them cheap
connectivity and allows Cogent/HE to balance their traffic ratios Win/Win.

Also to note Google Fiber uses a lot of nLayer/GTT for their eyeball traffic.

~~~
vlan0
I can't really speak for that area. But if I chose out of three you listed, it
would be L3.

A close friend of mine spent years managing the network of a smaller ISP in
the northeast using both Cogent/HE for their eyeball network, and he was
constantly telling me about packet loss issues with Cogent. On the other hand,
I haven't seen as many issues with HE as a whole, more localized.

Either way using the cheaper options is a good choice if you want to keep
costs low during expansion. Hell, it's probably still better than what I see
through TWC.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Meh, I used to use Cogent in the mix of transit providers for hosting
services, and it was more than adequate when peering spats weren't going on
(in which case we'd dump traffic over to Hurricane Electric or Global
Crossing).

Want quality bandwidth? Pay for quality bandwidth. Most people just want their
packets delivered, a few extra 10s of milliseconds be damned.

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PebblesHD
Meanwhile in relatively suburban australia I pay $79/month for 'unlimited'
600kb/s. I so desperately want to get in on the whole remote working thing but
the network I'm on seems to be getting slower by the month rather than faster

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mrbill
I'm in Houston and pay $150/month for Comcast 50/10 "business class" service
with 5 static IPs (do all my hosting, email, etc from home).

Can't wait for a faster alternative; the next step up is around $199/month for
75/15...

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darkr
Wonder if/what usage caps would get applied to this.

Given a 300GB cap like many providers have, it would take 26 seconds to reach
it.

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pinkunicorn
And I'm on cloud nine for having a 10Mbps connection. #IndianWoes

