Swedish firm to offer 100Mbit/s broadband for £70/month

dahamsta

Heh, I love posting these stories.

Swedish firm to offer 100Mbit/s broadband for £70/month

Blightyland, listen up!

By INQUIRER staff: Friday 19 December 2003, 09:38

A SWEDISH SUPPLIER will introduce an amazing 100Mbit/sec broadband connection for 895 kroner in April next year.
That's about £70 a month, and that speed is in both directions.

Bredbandsbolaget will cap downloads to 300GB as part of the service it's offering.

Right now, Bredbandsbolaget is offering bi-directional 10MB connections for 330 kroner a month without limits on the download. That's round about the average price for 512/256 ADSL here in Blightyland.

According to the UK ADSL Guide, your £70 will get you 2MB/256K ADSL from a few suppliers.

Sheesh! Us Brits are kebabbed! µ

Capt'n Midnight

Taking into account the 48:1 contention ratio used by Eircom et al. what is the minimum number of 100Mb connections needed to supply ALL Resedential ADSL customers.

Bonus marks if you can find a cheaper gigabit card than
this - €26.20 inc VAT http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?action=info&sku=122643&p=&t=1794&l=3&AvdID=1&CatID=19&GrpID=20&cks=PRL
the relevance - I'm not saying Eircom could hang 96,000 512KB customers off it, or that your monthly 4GB cap could be delivered in about one minute at gigabit speeds (in practice would be a bit slower) but rather that the price of this technology is dropping all the time

So €70 gets you 75 times as much last mile bandwidth as Eircom are advertising as being enough to change your life and both companies have fixed costs to cover.

And the funny bit is people are going to stick to 10Mb 'cos it's uncapped - will dig up the link - but someone has posted usages of over 500GB per month. (that's over a decade's worth if you are on eircom cap.)

iwb

I have been curious for some time about the possibility of running Cat 5 cable to each house along a block for example, under the eaves, like where they usually put the coax for cable tv. A 24 port 10/100 switch is a fairly inexpensive item these days. With a 100Mbit network between all the houses, the potential is there for when the bandwidth does arrive. Is there any legal or permit reason why this couldn't be done? The max distance of the run is 100M so if the switch was placed in the middle
of the row, you could reach say 160M in total with some spare for inside the last house on each end. If many of these were wired together, now you have far fewer connections to hook up to a WAN link, each requiring higher bandwidth than separate houses together. With some creative fibre placement or 802.16 radios, you could interconnect all these clusters.

Capt'n Midnight

it's 100m per section - 5/4/3 rule etc. so you could have one central switch and connect other switches to it so you get a radius of 200m before you have to start playing with bridges / routers.. or get some old hubs with BNC coax - to get a 180m run

In fact using several switches would save on cable costs !

Main worry is the cabling - how to protect it from the weather (Trade pack 20mm black PVC from B&Q ? and a pipe spring and some hot water to get it around bends)

The real problem is how to get it across roads / driveways - RF of course but then you are into routers and 54g would have to be very close to work..

Main thing is to make sure everyone has a firewall.

In fact you would not need to be an ISP - main fun would be to do with DHCP - who assigns IP's or would they be based on house number ??

Make sure it's cat 5E and pay attention to the termination - you might go to gigabit sooner than you think...

BigEejit

802.11g would be fine for this .... router in the middle connected to G access points all over the place ...

But getting back to the original story, 10Mb up/down with no cap ...thats incredible, it'll be a long long time before we would be able to get that down our telephone wires without paying >€5000 pm for it
As for 100Mbit .... wasnt too long ago at all that that was the standard for LAN's let alone broadband

yankinlk

Originally posted by iwb
Is there any legal or permit reason why this couldn't be done?

I believe you would actually need a license as that would be considered broadcasting or something.

Good idea though.

(capn, u used the word main way too many times in yer post)

Capt'n Midnight

The legal area is a little grey. If you don't offer intenet or telephony access to the public you should be ok. If it's only for a club you should be ok (cf. travel clubs on private buses a while back) You might be ok if you offered internet access but not charge for it.

Then again some ISP are allegedly breaking the law so.. and people have been elected on deflector schemes.

There are licence costs associated with offering certain services to the public ~ €2,500 for telephony / isp / community TV etc. - these are buried on www.comreg.ie
If the same laws apply to rich and poor then you could argue that Eircom's refusal to comply with comreg.. or you could argue about EU law on internet sharing ...

Creamy Goodness

two of my clan mates told me about this and they'll be upgrading to this when it's out.

they are already on 10mbit

here's me stuck on stupid ISDN and the state that ireland is the future doesn't look bright at all

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Cr3m0
two of my clan mates told me about this and they'll be upgrading to this when it's out.

they are already on 10mbit

here's me stuck on stupid ISDN and the state that ireland is the future doesn't look bright at all

Originally posted by Cr3m0
they are already on 10mbit

here's me stuck on stupid ISDN and the state that ireland is the future doesn't look bright at all

Yes. This talk of 100mbit/s in Sweden is irrelevant when we are struggling with getting basic broadband available especially outside the main urban areas.

The service in Sweden makes a fibre connection into buildings buildings and then distributes the connection around the building using ethernet. It works well in Sweden for two main reasons:

1) Much higher density of population than Ireland in urban areas. In Sweden a much higher proportion of the population lives in apartment blocks. Ireland's urban areas are sprawling low density affairs, and a higher proportion lives outside urban areas than in Sweden or indeed other European countries.

2) Publically owned fibre rings have been in place for some time.

Incidentally, the cable company NTL is the main shareholder in Bredbandsbolaget having, it is believed, invested $200M in 2000 (six months before halting the upgrade of the Irish cable network). They are unlikely to pay for fibre to building services in Ireland when they have only upgraded a few of Dublin housing estates in the last 3 years with modest 600 kbit/s services.

So lets get realistic about what can be achieved in Ireland given Ireland's circumstances. We have different priorities.

iwb

A few points.
1. A license doesn't cost anything anymore. There is still a process to follow but there is a very nominal fee of a few euro I think and that's it.
2. We will have live fibre rings any time now and hopefully an MSE to manage them shortly. The rings will come fairly close to a lot of housing. If we could aggregate the houses over a network like the one above, it would make it far more attractive for a potential ISP to connect to it.
3. Although we are far behind the likes of Sweden, we need to start thinking radically to catch up so I do think these discussions have merit. We might just stumble upon a way to make this all happen a lot more quickly.

Capt'n Midnight

IWB - any link to the licence cost reduction ?

iwb

I have never read about it. Comreg told me about it and I have heard from others also.
I just had a look and here is a relevant link.
http://www.comreg.ie/sector/default.asp?S=4&NavID=195&M=

Cabaal

Originally posted by dahamsta
Heh, I love posting these stories.

You like making us all cry a little inside everyday, don't you?
I feel betrayed

LFCFan

Sweden is a country blighted by horrible weather conditions every year for a good portion of the year and still they manage to roll out these technologies yet if there's a wee bit of rain in Ireland €ircon will use that as an excuse for not being able to roll stuff out properly. €ircon make me sick.

muffen

Sweden is a country blighted by horrible weather conditions every year for a good portion of the year

It's not that bad. It gets a little cold in the winter, but I wouldn't call the weather horrible.
Although, I do agree that it's kinda difficult to dig up the road in -25degrees C, that's why they only dig up the road during summer (unless absolutely necessary).

EDIT: Just after writing this post I read that 80 000 people are without electricity today due to the snowstorms... ah well, maybe we do have horrible weather in the winter sometimes

BTW, that connection isn't 70euros, it's 90 (might be a litle more even). Also, last I heard they were gonna start offering it first of Jan.

Much higher density of population than Ireland in urban areas.

You must be joking. Stockholm must easily be three or four times the size of Dublin (including surrounding towns) with the same populations (about 1 million).
The drive between the two largest cities, Stockholm -> Gothenburg, is like 6hours.
Malmö has fast internet too, and that's like an 8hour drive from stockholm, if not more. Furthermore, you can get decent internet in the most northern parts of Sweden (Umeå, Luleå etc), and that a good 14hour non-stop drive from Stockholm. Trust me, Sweden is everything but densily populated.

iwb

muffen,
Maybe what he meant is that there are dense clusters of population. Is apartment living very popular? Are there lots of houses clustered close together, or is it more like Dublin in the cities, with lots of semi and detached houses?

muffen

Is apartment living very popular? Are there lots of houses clustered close together, or is it more like Dublin in the cities, with lots of semi and detached houses?

Semi-detached houses don't really exist. Either you live in a house (garage, garden, completly detached) or you live in an apartment.
I guess you are right in that regard, a lot of people live in apartments. This whole sharing house with roommates like you do here doesn't exist over there. Housing is so much cheaper in Sweden that most people choose to live by themselves in apartments.

But yeah, you are right, apartment blocks are fairly popular, and one such area houses thousands of people.

However, this fact only helps for the "last mile". Looking at the backbone infrastructure, I think you are worse off in Sweden than Ireland. Cables are being dragged all over the country. You have backbone cables going between the topmost point in Sweden to the souther end. As the distances are really big, it's difficult to get the backbone infrastructure in place.

I think that one thing that has helped the Internet boom in Sweden is the government. Broadband has been a main focus for a while now, and the government has implemented a lot of taxbenifits. They have also funded part of the expansion, most noticable is the university network (GigaSunet); 5Gigabits going between the various universities. They allow small rural areas to be connected to the GigaSunet network, if it seems unlikely they will get broadband any other way.
You won't find many places in the country where you cannot get atleast 2MBits.
Any larger city, 10Mbits is almost minimum. I don't even think they are even offering less than 2MBits in Stockholm.

iwb

Thanks for that. Ireland does of course also have apartment buildings. I would like to know if any of them are wired with at least Category 5E cabling in some sort of structured way. That way, one feed to the building can be inexpensively distributed around all the apartments.
As for backbone is Sweden, it is probably worse than you think. There is so much fibre in the ground here that there is no comparison to a land where there just is no infrastructure in the area whatsoever. It is even harder to understand how far behind we are when you look at it that way. It is maddening.

So, given that you have been able to get 10Mbps there for some time now, I would be interested in a few aspects of it;
1. Is the bandwidth contended?
2. Is it delivered by an ISP or are ISP services extra?
3. Are there any uses of it that are different to the usual, given the much higher bandwidth available?

muffen

1. Is the bandwidth contended?

Nope, not at all.

Is it delivered by an ISP or are ISP services extra?

The bandwidth is delivered by either an ISP directly, or the ISP delivers to the apartment complex, and then you have the "housing network". I'm not sure what type of services you are reffering to. I mean, all connections give you email, webhosting (normally 50megs) etc.

3. Are there any uses of it that are different to the usual, given the much higher bandwidth available?

Yes, streaming movies is fairly common. You can actually pay for movies online and download them. They work for 24 hours.
Videoconferencing is fairly common too...

There are lots of people running various types of servers etc aswell.

I think a lot of people put the bandwidth to good use. Swedish people have been good at online gaming since the Quake 1 days. I think we have the best CS players right now.
I think the bandwidth makes a huge difference here, as people are used to playing with <20 ping, so there's no major difference for them playing on the Internet or in a LAN.

Ofcourse, you can find tons and tons of pirated stuff in Sweden, as people can transfer whole DVD movies in less than an hour.

I have a friend back home in Sweden on 100MBit (100Mbits has been available for some time now in certain apartment complexes). I went to his apartment to watch a movie. When I got there, he asked me what I wanted to see. We looked at imdb.com, found a good movie, ordered pizza, and by the time the pizza arrived, the movie was downloaded and ready to be watched

dahamsta

<evil grin>

Japanese broadband prices make Sweden look dear

We're all being ripped off...

By INQUIRER staff: Monday 22 December 2003, 08:40

WHILE SWEDES might feel they are lucky getting 100Mbit/s broadband connections for SEK 895, that's ludicrously expensive compared to Japan.
See Swedish firm to offer 100Mbit/s broadband for £70 a month.

A colleague from a Japanese magazine says that NTT East has offered 100Mbps bi-directional service at ¥5880 (around £30) a month including VAT since April this year.

And NTT West has an even more impressive offering, selling a similar service for ¥5670.

Neither service has any cap for downloading and while customers have to contract for the service, that is only ¥500 a month.

Making the whole kit and caboodle so cheap it makes us gasp in envy and admiration.

Anyone get the feeling we're all being terribly ripped off? µ

casper-

Originally posted by muffen
It's not that bad. It gets a little cold in the winter, but I wouldn't call the weather horrible.
Although, I do agree that it's kinda difficult to dig up the road in -25degrees C, that's why they only dig up the road during summer (unless absolutely necessary).

EDIT: Just after writing this post I read that 80 000 people are without electricity today due to the snowstorms... ah well, maybe we do have horrible weather in the winter sometimes

Hmm....sounds just like Canada Funnily enough a good chunk of the Maritimes were without power for three days last week - that's anywhere between 1-2.5x the number of people affected depending on where it hit.

SkepticOne

Originally posted by muffen
Semi-detached houses don't really exist. Either you live in a house (garage, garden, completly detached) or you live in an apartment.
I guess you are right in that regard, a lot of people live in apartments. This whole sharing house with roommates like you do here doesn't exist over there. Housing is so much cheaper in Sweden that most people choose to live by themselves in apartments.

But yeah, you are right, apartment blocks are fairly popular, and one such area houses thousands of people.

However, this fact only helps for the "last mile". Looking at the backbone infrastructure, I think you are worse off in Sweden than Ireland. Cables are being dragged all over the country. You have backbone cables going between the topmost point in Sweden to the souther end. As the distances are really big, it's difficult to get the backbone infrastructure in place.

But the 'last mile' is the key. The problem has never been connecting one city to another with bandwidth. This is comparitively cheap when compared to connecting up large numbers of individual dwellings.

Several years ago, Global Crossing connected Ireland to the US cutting transatlantic bandwidth to a fraction of the former cost. What difference did this make to what was available to the punter in Ireland? None. Even people in Dublin into which the bandwith was terminated did not see any results whatsoever. The reason was that the last mile was monopolised by Eircom and conseqently they had no incentive to pass on any savings to consumers.

This is why I was interested in the population density within cities. Fibre to buildings such as what Bredbandsbolaget is more feasible if there are large numbers living in apartment blocks. The cities in Ireland have relatively small numbers living in apartment blocks compared to Sweden as you point out.

Maybe when some of the 19 fibre rings are completed it may make sense to do a similar thing in Ireland for the relatively few people living in high density accomodation.

However, as I have already pointed out, the difference between Ireland and Sweden is that a higher percentage people in Ireland live outside urban areas and those in cities tend to live in spread out suburbs rather than apartment blocks in cities.

BTW, I'm not against some company doing this in Ireland, I just think it's less likely (though certainly possible) for the above reasons and relatively few people would benefit from it compared to other countries.

Should the goverment get involved here? Should the government start subsidising extreme high speed broadband for apartment buildings in, say, Dublin and Cork? I can only imagine the outrage on this board if they attempted it. I would certainly be writing to them urging them to cop on.

Urban Weigl

Originally posted by SkepticOne
This is why I was interested in the population density within cities. Fibre to buildings such as what Bredbandsbolaget is more feasible if there are large numbers living in apartment blocks. The cities in Ireland have relatively small numbers living in apartment blocks compared to Sweden as you point out.

He said Stockholm has a population of 1 million (less than Dublin), spread over an area 5 times bigger than Dublin. Furthermore, why should the Irish suffer simply because of the way we choose to live? Each country has different needs, and they can all be solved. The only problem I see in Ireland is not the way we live, but Eircom holding us back: helped, especially in the past and under Mary O'Rourke, by the government.

"But sure it's because we don't have as many apartment blocks as South Korea" has simply been an excuse by ComReg, trying to divert attention away from their complete failure to deliver.

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Urban Weigl
He said Stockholm has a population of 1 million (less than Dublin), spread over an area 5 times bigger than Dublin.

I was mainly interested in what he said about the numbers living in apartment blocks. Although they may not be all of the city, these are the high-density areas where you tend to see these 100mbit/sec + services.

Furthermore, why should the Irish suffer simply because of the way we choose to live? Each country has different needs, and they can all be solved.

Where did I say the Irish should suffer? In fact one of my points was precisely that because we live differently we have different problems that need to be solved. Our priorities are simply different to those of Sweden.

The only problem I see in Ireland is not the way we live, but Eircom holding us back: helped, especially in the past and under Mary O'Rourke, by the government.

Indeed. However when you start complaining about lack of 100mbit services in Ireland you need to look beyond the incumbent. Telia, after all, aren't providing 100mbit services to residents (although the do provide a superior DSL service - no doubt because of competition from the likes of Bredbandsbolaget.

"But sure it's because we don't have as many apartment blocks as South Korea" has simply been an excuse by ComReg, trying to divert attention away from their complete failure to deliver.

I would agree that this is largely bogus when it comes to basic DSL services. Simple monopolistic control of the last mile has been the problem here. However when we are talking about 100mbit/s services, then new companies are required and things like apartment living and population densities do become an issue regardless of whether or not ComReg have been using it as an excuse in the past.

I will repeat once again that I never said that Ireland should not have these services, just that our priorities lie in a different area right now.

melachi

"Right now, Bredbandsbolaget is offering bi-directional 10MB connections for 330 kroner a month without limits on the download."

I'm in Sweden on that connection right now and it sure is wonderland compared to that 512kb eircom dsl. So much bandwith its hard to use it all. It's fun even just going onto gaming site download game trailers in seconds.
I hope that 1mb/1mb irishbroadband gaming connection works out. Even a 10th of this bandwith and I'll be running with joy..
Here are my pingtimes:

C:\Documents and Settings\R S>ping www.sunet.se

Pinging www.sunet.se [192.36.125.18] with 32 bytes

Reply from 192.36.125.18: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=249
Reply from 192.36.125.18: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=249
Reply from 192.36.125.18: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=249
Reply from 192.36.125.18: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=249

Pinging clarity.jolt.co.uk [195.149.21.11] with 32

Reply from 195.149.21.11: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=56
Reply from 195.149.21.11: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=56
Reply from 195.149.21.11: bytes=32 time=29ms TTL=56
Reply from 195.149.21.11: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=56
(Same as with eircom dsl to UK but the pings are so much more solid ingame and can handle way more packets)


Come on irishbroadband! give us FREE FREEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!1

muffen

Med ett schysst järnrör kan man slå hela världen med häpnad!

I like that sig