1 Gbps Fiber Comes Home. A new development on the shores of Lake Ontario will offer Internet connections 500 times faster than most homes, offering speeds of up to 10 gigabits a second for businesses or 100 megabits for residential use. It’s modeled on similar undertakings in Seoul, Tokyo, Stockholm, London and Paris. The Toronto broadband project is expected to be a crucial draw for the residential and commercial space east of downtown Toronto. Acccording to Dan Armstrong, chief executive of Beanfield Metroconnect, the telecommunications company that won the Internet tender, “Having this sort of capacity available to residents will allow for a whole new world of applications we haven’t even conceived of yet.”
Each home and business in the 2,000 acre zone will be hooked up to a C$30 million fiber optic network that is guaranteed to be one of the seven best in the world for ten years after the last building is finished. GigOm compiled a list of places that offer 1 Gbps residential connections: Japan's KDDI to Offer 1G Bps Internet Connections to Homes. Japanese telecommunications carrier KDDI will start offering from October 1G bps (bits per second) fiber-optic Internet hook-ups for less than the current price of a connection one tenth the speed, it said this week. The Hikari One Home Gigabit service will cost 5,460 (US$51.40) per month and provide an upstream and downstream connection at 1G bps. Internet-based telephone service and cable TV service can be added to the connection for an additional fee.
It will be available to single-dwelling homes and apartment buildings up to three floors high in the Tokyo area and Hokkaido island in north Japan. KDDI's current fiber-optic service for such buildings tops out at 100M bps and costs 6,615 while the broadly available 10M bps DSL (digital subscriber line) service costs around 4,599. Japanese Internet users already enjoy some of the fastest and cheapest Internet connections in the world. Interview NiQ Lai and Ivan Tam of City Telecom. City Telecom is now the second biggest operator in Hong Kong, offering speeds and prices that no incumbent can dream of. It’s pushing fibre to the home, but even the existing ethernet wiring delivers a gigabit to customers NiQ Lai, CFO of City Telecom: Why aren’t other companies following City Telecom? It took seven years to hit positive free cash flow. It’s a very, very long cycle Hong Kong’s City Telecom is on track on its mission to commoditise bandwidth in the Chinese region.
The company, which claims to be the number two operator in Hong Kong, and the fastest growing broadband provider, is now offering one gigabit connections — that is symmetric, one gig each way — for just HK$199 a month, equivalent to about US $25. “Three years ago we were the smallest operator in town. The company is second to the incumbent, PCCW, “but we’re chasing them down”, says Lai. The company “thinks differently”, he adds. The right cable “The network is our major asset,” says Tam. Equipment can be upgraded. 3. HKBN Surpasses 10,000 Symmetric 1Gbps Subscribers. KDDI to launch 1Gbps fiber-optic service in Oct. Technology ( ) KDDI Corp will launch a fiber-optic communications service with upload and download speeds each of up to one gigabit per second on Oct 1.
The new service will target people living in single-family homes and low-rise apartment buildings. The traffic speeds will be the fastest in eastern Japan, up drastically from the current 100 megabits per second. With the service, KDDI aims to catch up with Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, which has a share of over 70% in the market for fiber-optic broadband services for single-family houses. KDDI will charge 5,985 yen in basic monthly fees for Internet and telephone services, down 1,155 yen from the current price, if a user subscribes for two consecutive years. KDDI will start offering its fiber-optic services, which are now available only in six prefectures in the Kanto region and nearby Yamanashi Prefecture, in four cities in the northern prefecture of Hokkaido.
So Where Else in the World Can You Get 1 Gbps to the Home? Updated: Google yesterday announced Google Fiber, an experimental network that would connect between 50,000 and 500,000 people, or as many as 200,000 homes, to the Internet at speeds reaching 1 gigabits per second — a truly jaw-dropping and envy-inspiring rate. Being big fans of broadband, we’ve been following the race to 1 Gbps and have come up with a list of places around the world where you can get 1 Gbps connections to your home. * Hong Kong: The Hong Kong broadband network currently offers a FTTH/FTTB 1 Gbps service for $215 a month and is available to nearly 800,000 households. * South Korea: The Korean government has a plan to spend $25 billion that over the next five years to bring fiber-based 1 Gbps connections to each home in South Korea. * Cologne, Germany: Netcologne, a German city carrier, is looking to launch a service that will allow consumers to buy 1 Gbps connections in the city of Cologne sometime this year.
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