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United Kingdom The Internet

UK's Gigaclear Launches 5 Gbps Fiber Broadband Service (networkworld.com) 91

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Broadband service provider Gigaclear announced it will offer 5 Gbps internet service beginning next year. Most homes would be hard-pressed to consume data at this rate today, but these speeds will become necessary when over-the-top television services like Netflix and HBO GO become commonplace, television pixel densities grow to 8K (7680p X 4320p) at 60 to 120 fps, and the IoT connects every other home device to the internet. “We’re offering customers the chance to access absolutely phenomenal broadband speeds,” Gigaclear CEO Matthew Hare said in an official announcement. “To be clear, this is a premium service that gives the fastest Internet speeds in the country to those of our customers who want the best connection that they can get.”
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UK's Gigaclear Launches 5 Gbps Fiber Broadband Service More

UK's Gigaclear Launches 5 Gbps Fiber Broadband Service

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  • A joke? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is this a joke listing consumer services that won't even fully utilise a 1Gbps service in the next 10 years let alone a 5Gbps service? or are they just trying to con stupid rich consumers out of money? Our 5,000 seat organisation has a 2Gbps pipe to the internet, on that we service 30 million external transactions a day as well as the unrestricted browsing habits of those 5 thousand staff.

    • Re:A joke? (Score:5, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday November 19, 2015 @06:18AM (#50960925) Homepage Journal

      It's actually 5Gb shared between a number of customers. If no-one else is using it then you get 5Gb/sec, otherwise it will be less. On a line that fast you can support many households and businesses simultaneously.

      I've had experience of similar offerings in Japan. You can either have a 1Gb/sec line shared between 3-4 households, or for a bit more you can have 1Gb/sec all to yourself. It works as advertised. Sure, you rarely use all that bandwidth, but you don't have to think about sending large files while someone else is trying to watch Netflix in 4k etc. It's like a proper hot water system - you turn on the tap without worrying if anyone else is taking a shower.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          But we're so close. Intel's x540 dual 10Gb chips on 45nm are about $500 and their new x710 dual 40Gb chips on 28nm are going for about $350 and consume 1/2 the power. 4x faster, 30% cheaper, 50% more efficient. Once Intel frees up some 22nm production for NICs, they'll be cheap, fast, and efficient. Soon(tm)

        • Until then, everyone will be capped at 1gig per device.

          That's not actually correct. Thanks to channel bonding I have a Synology Disk array which has 4 Gbps connection all using inexpensive consumer grade hardware. Channel bonding 1Gb is far cheaper than 10Gb ethernet although with the new 10Gbase-T format this too is now becoming more affordable.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bengie ( 1121981 )
            10 1Gb ports is more expensive than 1 10Gb port, but 5Gb ports are slightly cheaper than 1 10Gb port. The bigger issue is getting channel bonding that works at Layer 3/4 and not 2. Many implementation of bonding load balance on destination MAC addresses, and your gateway only has on address, so all WAN traffic uses the same link and does not get distributed.
          • After dealing with channel bonding where one link would spontaneously become 100% busy while the other three hung around 10% busy every time one VM wanted to copy files somewhere, I decided channel bonding is basically useless.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      I'd like to know who they peer with, at what speeds, and how many of these connections they plan to sell. I'm thinking their oversubscription rate will require exponents to express.

  • Shame Australia (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This puts Australia's (alleged) 2016 rollout of 100MB 'premium' service to shame....
    We're SO ready for japan's 2009 speeds at 8x the price.
    Forget about the future as we're sticking to our copper connections to the home.
    Makes me ashamed (amongst other things) to be an Australian

    • So your jealous of a home connection speed that is pointless for any home in the next decade at a minimum (probably a lot longer). The vast majority of homes and users don't even come close to utilising a 100Mbps connection. I have a 50Mbps connection for my relatively heavy usage house, we only consume around 1TB of traffic a month so we don't come close to stressing our connection. In Aus the average is under 100GB a month (last I saw it was around 30-40GB).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        look if you put a transfer cap then average will be way under said cap. then you can lower the cap. then you can lower it again. and again. and again. and always claim the average is below the cap so you can lower it.

        by the way fallout 4 is near 30 gigs.

        just downloading one game will put you on average use - and here we get to why you would want a fast connection, if you want to play said game on the same day.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        >> I have a 50Mbps connection

        What 50Mbps! In a good day I get 5Mbps in Canberra.

        • I get 50 Mbps in Canberra. basically the only way I even manage to push my usage to 1TB is by finding a heap of torrents the last day or two of the month. 50Mbps is easily enough to bring down 3-5 TB a month without even noticeably stressing your bandwidth.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Public service announcement: Remember that Mbps means "megabit per second", not "megabyte per second" (and yes, that's "mega", 10^6, not "mebi", 2^20.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        100Mb is not enough unless you like ping spikes while someone is watching YouTube or Netflix. They like to microburst 1gb/s+. Using some tools, I can see this jitter for tens of milliseconds. Sometimes even into the 100ms time range. Of course your ISP may suck so much that they can't pass these bursts on to you because they have bottlenecks in other areas.

        I'm seeing about 75GiB per day and during Blizzcon, about 100GiB both days. Netflix alone is about 3.5GiB/hour, and that's mostly for background noise

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      2009? My ex had 100/100 symetric fibre back in 2004. The Australian system doesn't even seem to be symmetric, so it's over a decade out of date already. If it's any consolation, this offering is not widely available in the UK and most of us are stuck on much less than 100Mb down and 10Mb up.

  • hard to use (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "internet of things" is unmitigated bullshit pushed by electronics manufacturers desperate to find a market for useless products.

    4K television is already well into the zone of high priced screens chasing diminishing returns on human-visible image quality. It may eventually catch on, but it will be a very slow process, the cart pushed from behind by the horse of oversupply rather than pulled by damand.

    Individual conventional hard drives have a peak write speed barely over 1Gb/s. So anything over a gigabit

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dave420 ( 699308 )

      In precisely the same way "cars" are unmitigated bullshit pushed by car manufacturers? Obviously not. The "Internet of things" is just a name for putting devices ('things') on the internet, and having them all talk to each other to perform tasks. You not liking how a term is used, or that businesses are selling products to people under such a term, does not automatically make the term bullshit. You're going to have to actually put up an argument if you want to look less APK-y.

      • Putting my fridge, lights, or thermostat on the internet isn't going to take any appreciable amount of bandwidth. About the only IoT device that could use a decent amount of internet would be security cameras, and if you have somewhere on the order of gpbs transfer rates, even that won't make a dent in your usage.

  • Opposite to Australia (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Down Under we are the only developed country to be installing copper to ensure that by 2025 everyone has a 20mbps connection because our pollys are so smart they know how much of a fad this internet thing is.

  • Sounds more like:

    "Unheard of start-up announces that next year they may have a highly-contended 'up to' 5 Gbps fibre* broadband service available for the price of pretty serious leased line now which would probably give you better service overall anyway"

    The business one is £1500 a month. I can get quite a lot of leased line for that. And quite how many people could afford even the personal one, I'm not sure. I'm a geek and I couldn't.

    *They are British, spell it the British way.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The headline-grabbing press release misses out that this is only available to select rural villages, typically where the length of the local loop vastly exceeds the limits of ADSL and the cost of leased line installations is a joke.

      For perspective, with an install location in a town and across the road from a BT exchange, a 100Mbps leased line will set you back £1600/month with a £4000 install. 1Gbps costs £8600/month. 5Gbps for £1500 suddenly looks pretty good, especially if you res

  • As far as I have heard, most parts of the UK have the worst connections ever. Good to see some improvement there!

  • Most people cant get more than 25mbps. Even if Comcast is selling you more, you CANT GET more than that in most places.

    Honestly, the govt needs to force those assholes to spend money on their backbone.

    • Pretty much everyone in the Comcast, Time Warner Cable, or Charter footprints (about 2/3 of the US, combined) can get at least 100Mbps, if they want it. Charter doesn't even sell anything below 60Mbps anymore, and Comcast and TWC's standard package is now 50Mbps.

      The competitive issue is the much lower speeds that most telcos offer.

      Also, the backbone isn't the issue, it's the last mile.

  • Even if there's zero improvement in compression by the time 8K rolls around, it'll take around 30Mbps. So, unless you have 170 TVs in your home, 5Gbps is going to be overkill.

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