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Originally Posted by phuzion  To answer your question on who has the fastest internet? It's a 75 year old woman in Sweden. Her internet connection could pretty much max out the pipes of most mid-sized datacenters. She gets 40gbps to her home.
You live in the US and have cable internet? Your connection is probably about .003-.015gbps. FiOS? .005-.025gbps. University connection with no limits? Assuming you have just a standard consumer NIC, not much higher than 1gbps.
Yeah. Give up, she won. Residential connections won't come close to this for about 5-10 years minimum. That's in Sweden. 20 years for the US at least, unless Verizon and other companies start rolling out a TON of fiber really fast. |
You forget that Verizon's fiber is passive. Active fiber can do speeds in gigabits per a second, in fact, I hear whispers of Terabit Ethernet over Fiber. (Clarification: 1tb/s Ethernet would move the entire contents of a 1TB hard disk in 8 seconds if it weren't for Ethernet frames. In practice it would take closer to 9 seconds. Assuming of course that you have a disk drive capable of maintaining a read rate of 125 gigabytes per second.)
Verizon's passively routed fiber however, can only reach about 300mb/s. Despite what they may try to claim. And, even then, we have a fios box at my job. the ethernet port on the bottom of it spits out 100mb/s. That's as fast as that net connection is going to go. Period.
Keep in mind, the smaller a country is in Europe and the more spread out it is, the more likely it is to have fast internet connections. In the USA we tend to live in larger groups and spread our actual POPs across larger areas of land than in other countries. A lot of that having to do with other countries having better infrastructures for data than many parts of the united states. Like here in New Jersey and New York there's fiber everywhere. It was once said "Welcome to New York, where the streets are paved with gold... and lined with fiber optic cable." This area had some of the first commercial broadband connections. I know a guy who has been on the same DSL contract for 24 years. He only gets 256kb/s both ways... but he only pays 12 bucks a month for it. A large number of people in this country still have an ISDN connection as their option for "broadband" internet. ISDN stands for "It Still Does Nothing" and the reason for this is longer runs for data in the United States tend to be run as Copper (or, depending on the contractor, Copper Substitute). Giving lower aggregate bandwidth for a large area of people, especially when spread out. Large areas of this country still do not receive Cable TV and don't understand what a DSL connection is because there's a length limit imposed on those and the phone company simply isn't local enough to make it happen. I guarantee you that if you look hard enough, you can find a local Dialup or ISDN operator that runs their services off of 1 or 2 T3 connections bonded together. While these people do provide higher bandwidth at low cost to rural areas, its not quite the same situation as it is in Europe. Europe gets fiber runs everywhere. If there was no existing data infrastructure (like there is in the United States, we have fucking copper telephone lines EVERYWHERE) then they run fiber. Fiber carries everything and rejects nobody. It also provides a convenient way to put 10gbps of pipe into a small mountain town in say, Sweden. As a result, because the Fiber pays for its self now a days, the local operators get to fight over who can provide the most bandwidth at the lowest cost. compare that to New Jersey, we have a law here called "keep it local" but what it really means is "Make mini monopolies." The law basically states that service providers (any service) can bid on parts of New Jersey (say, my town of Madison) to provide a particular service to that area. Cablevision owns Madison NJ's
Cable Television service rights. However, I could get FiOS because it comes in over a different medium. More or less the same thing is done with the rest of the things that come in to your house over a wire. The only thing it isn't universally done with as far as I can tell is traditional copper telephones. You can still choose between Verizon and At&T, and Cellular service, which is just universal. These laws stiffarm innovation and competitiveness. Why should Cablevision charge say, 30 dollars a month instead of 50 for its Optimum Online service when they have no competitor? Verizon charges 100 dollars a month and requires you to sign up for their TV service which requires a full rewiring of your house. It makes the package seem very unattractive to most people (However, I have been making money off of people who want their FiOS wiring done by someone who isn't a high school dropout, like most of the Telephone installers around here) Consumers in this area choose Cablevision, and Cablevision gets to charge whatever they want. Welcome to Networking. It works the exact same way with big pipes in many cases.