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100Mbps Internet Access For $1000 Per Month 207

Posted by Hemos from the that's-a-lotta-file-sharing dept.
A reader writes "Cogent, a startup ISP that has just recently completed their fiber optic network across the US, is now offering 100Mbps internet access for $1000 a month in some major metropolitan areas." A few caveats of course - I'm not sure how close to actually connecting people they are - but it does sound like a nice deal.
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100Mbps Internet Access For $1000 Per Month More

100Mbps Internet Access For $1000 Per Month

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  • The upload limits of cable are there not because it's fun, but because of the limited frequency slices available for upload.

    The Broadcom CMTS chip usually comes in a 8:1 flavour (8 upload channels for 1 download channels).

    With existing cable infrastructure, it can be a challenge to find all the available upload bandwidth within 8 frequency slices, while the download channel is usually much higher up in the list, and it not a problem at all. Hence the single channel allowed to it for up to 27Mbps.

    --
    Let's not all suck at the same time please

  • Re:Sweet. (Score:5)

    by stx23 ( 14942 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @04:42AM (#581472) Homepage Journal
    What couldn't you stream over this SOB?
    The Olympics?
  • If they say they're all Cisco, then they get their equipment for about half off. :-)
  • I wonder what the CIR actually is though. I assume that they don't have enough peering to make sure people actually get that much bandwidth while talking to a bunch of distant machines. WOuld be nice to sign up at two different locations within their network and make a VPN though, because i bet they _are_ that fast to themselves...
  • Call me at 917.679.5297 and I can tell you about our presence in Boston. Evan Gillman

  • Bah! I connect at 150MB/s, and I only pay $40 per month. Ok,ok, so it's a cable modem, but I really do see that much bandwidth as a rule, so who cares?

  • Uhg...too early...must have caffeine. Upon a second read I realize that a) that bits is with a lower-case b and b) I connect at 1.5Mb/s, not 100Mb/s. :-(

  • And how many of your friends who aren't geeks (oh wait, bad question) still turn their computers off all the time. Where oh where is the email to go when your computer is off? Not a very reliable way to do it. Dedicated servers will be around for a long time.
  • Hmm, i would, but it's not like i'm anyone special... i don't own a business and i'm not some bigwig landlord... I think it would make more sense to post the info here :)
  • I contacted these guys about 3 weeks ago and asked if they had any connectivity in my location. They said they didn't have anything to offer me currently in Louisiana (my present location), so I asked about getting connectivity in Los Angeles instead (I have some servers there too). They took down my information and never called me back, when sales doesn't call you back, that is not a good sign. Could have been a fluke, but just thought I'd share my experience.

    My mom says there's a lot of Penguins in Antarctica. The Linux Pimp [thelinuxpimp.com]

  • I'm told by my father that @Home is puting fiber optic lines in Omaha as a test market.

    I've not seen the docmentation myself, but I do notice that when I visit the connection is significantly faster than what I get in Berkeley.

    Also, unlike in Berkeley, he does not seem to be affected by the time of day. In the SFBA most of the people I know with @Home find a significant lag increase during prime time 5pm and 11pm.

  • Teeny little correction there, "dark fiber" is *not* bandwidth. It's just what you'd think, a peice of cable in the ground, with no light (and hence, no packets). To get bandwith, you have to "light" the fiber, and that's the expensive part. So, sure, dark fiber is cheap. It's also usless because you have to light it to use it, and the ends are expensive. (although, that is a one-time cost)

    --Maarken
  • Why stop at 100Mb when you can pump full blown
    1000base ethernet down that fibre......
    www.worldwidepackets.com

  • If there are girls at the lan party either you've been slipped some acid or one of your friends has had an operation. :)

    -Zane
  • right, and then everyone could then get root on your machine without possessing any skill whatsoever. scp works well for me, but ftp is easier to deal with. Try using Proftpd instead. You dont see root hacks posted for it twice a week, unlike the WU garbage.
    --
  • If you think about it, $1000 for 100Mbps makes starting an isp of your own somewhat viable. Assume 100 customers per line, each with 1Mbps (125kB/s), each paying $40 per month and you've got $4000 for your $1000 investment. Of course, this doesn't factor in last mile installation or staff wages, but I don't know enough about that to make an estimate. Still, with a price like this, I could hook up my neighborhood and get that new porche I've had my eye on.
  • Site swamped by Linux surfer nerds? Switch to Cogent, and kiss your /. troubles goodbye!
  • yeah, I've got 10Mbps but I don't get that speed most of the time. In fact I've never gotten up to full speed. The most I ever got was something like 420KBps (34%) but usually I'm around 50KBps (4%).

  • Ha...that's funny. *sigh*...I miss my college days (ended this past May)...100 Mbps ethernet was truly eggsellent. I remember transferring files between a computer lab and the computer in my dorm room via ftp I actually saw the data rate get up to 60 Mbps...the highest I ever saw.

    Those were the days. Of course, my connection at work isn't so bad, so I can't complain.

    "It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."
  • so...
    my cable is .4MB/sec then
    because i frequently d/l 50MB in just a few seconds

    not bad for $AU75/month

    T1: 190KB/s
    56kbps: ~6KB/s
    therefore T1 is only 30 times faster than dial-up??

    Can someone point me in the right direction where i can read something that explaines what i have got wrong here?
    Thanks
    -Chris
    cjconlan@optushome.com.au

  • Yeah, here in Austin I have connectivity through Time-Warner (same network as @Home? not sure). Reading their terms of service ("no servers, you naughty little linux hacker") and looking at their bandwidth profile (15Kbps up, capped) leaves one with the distinct impression that they really aren't interested in being a 2-way IP(internet protocol)-carrier but rather a 1-way content provider.

    I expect that this is common to other ISPs operated by cable companies, becuase their entire business mindset (up until recently) has been focused on being the sole source of information to passively absorbing masses of people (TV). Not too suprising that they'd approach the new medium of the Internet (new to them) with the same thought patterns of the old.

    On an Austin-TW side-minirant, the main reason they give against home serving and for the bandwidth cap is that "they don't have enough bandwidth". Oh, I see, you have enough bandwidth for 60+ digital cable channels but not enough to let people upload files to work at more than a snail's pace? :-/ The other rational they give is that people only want to use servers for piracy (mp3, warez). How like a content company to assume all their customers are IP (int. prop.) criminals... :-(

    (Side note: I'm not trying to be condescending by defining IP twice, I just didn't want their to be confusion about which expansion of IP I was refering to. :-))

    --

  • Not true. Verizon offers in their Tier 3 ADSL package 680kb up, 7.1mb down. I've gotten 500KB transfers fairly regularly from certain high bandwidth sites , and I can regularly get 3 150KB+ connections going at once.

  • Re:Too bad the Internet is not that fast (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Think "multiple connections" instead of one fast connection point-to-point. This isn't for home use for you to download the latest game demo from gamespot, it's backbone for people running ISPs and ecommerce. These kinds of uses need to be able to handle a decently fast connection from MANY different sources at the same time.

  • therefore T1 is only 30 times faster than dial-up.

    Yes, about. Though 56k downloads are restricted to 53k, at least in the US, and that is only for downloads, uploads are still at 33.6. A T1 is up and down ~190k. Cable is even faster than that, but again, the upload is usually severly limited.

  • I have found that most users problems relating to poor bandwidth on DSL lines is due to the TCP Recieve Window and MTU setting being to small for broadband access. http://www.dslreports.com has some good info on how to fix that.
  • That's nice, but what's the point?

    Two words: Counter. Strike.

    -
  • To everybody remarking about how expensive this is for Internet Access:

    $1000/month for 100 Mbps is good. Can you find anywhere that offers 67 T1 connections for the same price?

    Just to further clarify, this service is decidedly aimed at business applications. Again, businesses; not individual residential subscribers. If you, your friend, your housemates, or anyone else you know is even remotely considering purchasing one of these for home use, there is a Big Blue Room that they should really consider visiting once and a while.

    $ man reality

  • Cogent Software is an ISP, not a software company (dispite the name) and that would but them in direct competition with each other.

    Anm
  • This company was reported on Slashdot on October 15th. The title was Fiber optic lines Can Offer Much More. [slashdot.org]

    I swear this repetition is becoming more common on /. Is it simply the number of articles being submitted that precludes doing verification of the uniqueness of a topic? Is real news hard to come by? Do the people in control not read the site?

    I'm baffled since a simple search for "cogent" turned up the old article for me...

  • How about hooking that firehose to a whole street full of outside taps?

    That would be almost like having lots of browsers open, wouldn't it?

    Each one getting full external bandwidth concurrently, side by side down the ISP's fat pipe to your machine.

  • Where are you? I have linkline DSL, with the line provided by verizon. I pay $49/mo for static ip with 768k down / 128k up. Depending on the site, I always hit the 768k cap, no matter what time of day it is.

    My suggestion is to NEVER go with the telco for your internet service... they usually screw it up pretty well. There are a ton of other providers out there who want your business, and are willing to give you static IP's and such.
  • well we do have a major presence in boston...if you could put me in touch with someone who handles the technology for your company, it would be much appreciated.
  • Anyone can deliver 100Mbit MANs for $1000 when they obviously don't build on redundant technology...at least they're not multihomed and their primary pipe is down.
  • Just who exactly does your campus connect to at 4Gbit/sec (assuming the second OC-48 is actually used actively and isn't just a hot spare)?

    I'm not even sure that you can get OC-48 internet access without serious money and very special arrangements with a provider and I'm pretty sure it would be worse than having a half-dozen OC-3s to multiple providers.
  • Cognet is buying all their dark fiber from
    Metromedia Fiber Networks, and then charging you
    for just a piece of that bandwidth. However,
    you can lease a strand from MFNX, have them light
    it and off you go at an extremely low price.

    Of course, this is *not* for the individual.
    You can check them out here [mmfn.com] ,look under their corporate products -
    managed SONET, MetroGig-E and WaveChannel Optical Nets
  • My boss (at New York Connect [nyct.net]) just had a lengthy discussion with Cogent folks. Since I was performing an emergency system repair at our colocation facility (Telehouse NYC baby!) we invited them along since they were interested.

    They mentioned something about building their own fibre network along with new technology that allows you to cram multiple waves over a single fibre. I really have no idea what this means, and they were sales guys, but their offer seemed worth listening to.

    We're interested in their connection because it would allow us multiple internet uplinks (ie, redundancy) since Verizon has proven itself less than friendly/competent.

    There was a catch though, and one that my boss was upset about. I haven't been given all of the details since I'm not in that office anymore.

  • That's nice, but what's the point? Unless you are exchanging data with someone else on that backbone
    well doesn't it make sense to add more backbones and try to get people connected to them?
  • There is a "funkoid router interface" involved. A router or an optical switch brings fiber into the building. The router interface is, typically, a Fast Ethernet interface. Customers have a sub-interface (at least in a Cisco router) going to fiber to a Fast Ethernet switch port, then to an RJ45 wall jack. Each customer has a seperate sub-interface.

    There is a post further down (with a reply by someone who works for one of these providers) which briefly discusses the business side of this.

  • Well, the T1 where I goto collage is 10kb sec !!!
    Thats when everything is bogged down at 1:00pm.
    At night it goes up to 140kbps when its not being used
    by anyone else. Its great to run a q3 server off of one
    of their machines, and then go home, and admin it. :-)

    Just a note. Bellsouth blows. period.

  • Din't NT 4 have that problem? It was only capable of 90Mbits.

  • bahaha, that may be true in your town, Silicon Valley kid.. but I'm sitting in my cornfield in middle Indiana on cable modem and can pump full t1 speed.. Sometimes even faster! (T1=192KB, that's nothing.. I've pulled 300KB+ off of fileplanet or any other site..)

    hehe, who needs big cities?

    -since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?

  • That's nice (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But who are they peering with? Sure, you probably get 100mbs through their network but what about through their peering points? They better have OC-192 if they're going to do this.

  • Re:OK, folks (Score:3)

    by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @06:39AM (#581515)
    f you, your friend, your housemates, or anyone else you know is even remotely considering purchasing one of these for home use, there is a Big Blue Room that they should really consider visiting once and a while.

    You've obviously never been part of a condo association or even thought beyond your immediate roommates.

    I looked into getting cogent for my condo association. With 20 lofts in the building the cost would have translated to $50/month for shared 100Mbit -- a worse case scenerio of 10Mbit, or 10 times the DSL bandwidth I get now for that price. However, with so few people I would be getting close to 100Mbit for that price, or 100 times the bandwidth for what I'm paying.

    Unfortunately, cogent is not available in my building and is not in any way targeting residential customers, and they need 7+ subscribers (@ $1000/each) for each set of equipment to be profitable, so I need to find six other building willing to subscribe who are close enough to use the same Pop -- not impossible, but not trivial either.

    For business its great -- we're getting lit up in January. However, for those of us lusting after such things at home we'll have to wait a couple of years, not for the price to drop (although that is always nice), but simply for the service to be available at all, at any price.
  • Because CLECs sell channel services instead of bandwidth. It's like buying a POTS phone line... the telco is "required" to have the switch capacity to handle every line. (That only means you get dialtone from the switch everytime you pick up the phone. Interswitch capacity can and does cause failures -- "all circuits in use".)

    This isn't necessarily true. Case in point, our local university used to have quite a dialup system running off a miniswitch on campus tied to the CO downtown. One day the Prez of the university picked up his phone and had to wait 10 seconds for dial tone.

    Needless to say, that problem was promptly resolved by moving most of the dialup system to the CO itself, then to a CLEC.

    Which then brings us to your second point, interswitch capacity. The CLEC had only turned up one DS3 to the local ILEC tandem, and when all the students came back to school from summer break suddenly no one could call the dialup, and business customers of the CLEC couldn't call anywhere other than inside the switch. Guess that's what happens when you've got capacity on one side for about 2000 dialup users, and the 40,000 users on the other, and only 670 or so channels inbetween.

  • It just struck me that email servers (in the client/server scenario that we see today) will be made very much redundant in the future if we all have dedicated 100 meg pipes coming into our homes and PCs with a static IP. There will be no more need for store-and-forward messaging.

    Universal broadband will totally change the face of what we do online, when, where and with whom.
  • I dont like PPPoe and I'll be the first to switch to static IP..... But Verizon...much to my dismay has been a good ISP. Getting it installed during the strike was a nightmare...but once is was running it has worked like a charm.. I get 540 kbps on a 640 line...pretty damn good... Tech support....I had unbelievable. I had Network engineers and tier three techs calling me to get me up and running... I know the horror stories...but I've only had a good experience with verizon...nevertheless PPPoe sucks.... Stephen.Power@NO_SPAMMY.verizon
  • I don't think there was any suggestion that 100Mpbs was for surfing.

    This is actually potentially a really great deal for people who are paying through the nose for a T1 (typically $2000/month, or 12 times more expensive) or a DS-3 (even more exorbitant, $5000/mo not unheard of). If you're in a metro area, you're hosting your own web servers, and especially if you're stuck with a static market defined mainly by one Baby Bell, you're gonna love this.
    ----

  • It is aimed at buildings/shared access (Score:4)

    by Matt_Bennett ( 79107 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @04:55AM (#581520) Homepage Journal
    If you take the time to look at their website:

    Cogent has many distinct market advantages to enhance your real estate investment... from
    this page. [cogentco.com]

    This is being marketed as something to install in the apartment building you own, not really as a personal connection to the internet.

    On the other hand, considering building managment, do you really want the building super to also be your sysadmin?
  • Maybe if we can get some other companies doing this, we can finally get the nationwide fiber-optic internet access we were all promised to have by now.

  • As I said in another post, this is meant solely for business use. There are two reasons that spring to mind that a business would get this installed:

    • 1) they have branch offices in the connected cities and they want to save on leased-line costs
    • 2) they are a "serving" company (.com, ISP, co-lo provider, et al.) and need cheap bandwidth by the bucketfull, but not all to one big source (instead to a lot of little (modem) to medium (xdsl, cable,isdn) sources).
    (or maybe some combination of the two).

    The network as described fits both of those needs very well. Now if for some reason you were the sole utilizer of the line and you wanted to just act like a surfer (wishing to get 100Mbps to, say, some pr0n site), yeah, you'd be screwed.


    --

  • Notice that Cogent states on their website: ". This congfiguration enables Cogent to offer each customer a fully dedicated, non-oversubscribed 100 Mbps connection that is not shared with anyone else. "

    They do not guarentee this bandwidth anywhere I can see. I am running into a problem with my current ISP related to this: bandwidth sucks, and they keep telling me there's nothing they can do...nothing was contractually guarenteed. So needless to say, I'm searching for a new ISP...

  • Yawn (Score:2)

    by rodgerd ( 402 )

    You've been able to get 100 Mbps [citylink.co.nz] in Wellington, New Zealand for years now. Costs around NZ$600/month, IIRC (about US$250).

    Glad to see the US is catching up with New Zealand...

  • what "big blue room"
  • and so i stand corrected .... it's not silicon valley, though. shores of eastern florida, but at least we can vote! sun must be bleaching my brain, though
  • I live in the concord pacific buildings in Yaletown ( in downtown ). My rent is $1000/month for a one bedroom + den. ( ~720 sq. feet ).
  • Ok, So I Called a colo place I have a server for because they have a very open door policy that if you can find them better deals for bandwidth they are willing to go for it. SO i saw this aritcal and said "Hey this would rock. It will beat the hell out of the 3 T1's they have now at a very reduced cost." So I called my guy and he talked to them. Here is the deal. "I spoke to a guy named Todd Kuehn a Cogent. He was real informative, but kind of arrogant (I could tell that we are not "big enough" of a customer). I didn't ask for his phone number, but his e-mail is tkuehn@cogentco.com . Here's the scoop on Cogent: It's available in a few big markets in the North East like Boston. Will be available here in 3rd quarter of 2001 . . . but not for everyone. Their target client is multi tenant buildings - big buildings. The reason? It costs the company $80,000 to hook up their network to a building. So he said . . . there is a minimum committment of 1GB/sec for $10,000/mo per building (so they break even by the 8th month and profit in month 9 and so forth). So they need a minimum committment of 10 customers in a single building to go in and install the fiber. Committ to a Gigabit/sec = 1,000 mbs/sec for $10,000 per month." Now, I don't know about you but the joe average user or even the small to mid size company cant aford that kind of bill. But it is still a good deal I guess.
  • I get 100Mbps at my apartment which is included in total rent and all we pay is $700 a month so $1000 seems a little expensive if you don't get a place to live along with it = )
  • thanks. i actually found that our IT manager had already contacted you at a trade show way b4 it came up on /...
  • AirSwitch [airswitch.com] is better. . . . . if they actually provided service to anyone besides no-name towns like Springville.
  • Where is your company located? Have you signed? Can I be of any assistance to you? Evan Gillman Cogent Communications egillman@cogentco.com 917.679.5297
  • Heh, like i said, i'm nobody special. I go to a major University, (Syracuse University [syr.edu] They could probably use their services though... Our OC-3 connection is probably costing us a pretty penny.

    I'm just inquiring about your services because i'll be moving back to boston soon, and i know there would be a LOT of residents that would be interested in your services. The only other options for broadband are Media One Cable and DSL (provided by Verizon). From what i hear, both those services are piss poor. So if you guys start wiring up apartment complexes, i sure as hell would like to know about it.

  • Oh, I see, you have enough bandwidth for 60+ digital cable channels but not enough to let people upload files to work at more than a snail's pace?

    Well, there's a world of difference between what they choose to send down pipes that they own and what they are going to send up the pipes that they lease. Typical pricing arrangements for ISP bandwidth involve some calculation of peak bandwidth and total data sent. So it probably costs them money when you're running a server on their network. Therefore they do what they can to discourage this behavior, namely they make your server really slow.

    In addition, you have to remember who most of their customers are. Most people buy internet access so that they can buy beanie babies on e-bay. Most people who use the internet aren't /. readers. Most of them don't want and wouldn't know how to run servers from their home. As long as they can buy and sell beanie babies on e-bay they're happy. Asymetric cable internet service makes this possible and speedy.
    _____________

  • But it's not a physical property of the cable (or whatever) that makes upload necessarily slower than download, it's because these freakin devices were designed for companies that want upload speed limited and that think of the internet in terms of television broadcasting. They understand that there must be two way communication, but they don't like it. I agree with the original poster, I don't want my internet access to be (effectively) one way, I already have a television!

  • They're not the only ones (Score:3)

    by tgeller ( 10260 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @06:51AM (#581545) Homepage
    Telseon [telseon.com] and Yipes [yipes.com] are in exactly the same field, selling exactly the same service, and are at about the same stage of development.

    --Tom

  • Several companies are doing the same thing (Yipes, Universal Access, Davnet, Quartet Services, etc.) for the same price. The solution, typically called "in-building Ethernet," is aimed at multi-tenant buildings. Routers or optical switches connect buildings in a metropolitan-area network. Buildings are wired with fiber up and down building risers, with switches at various points; copper runs from the switches to a jack in each office. Once a client is signed up, the switch port is activated. Very simple stuff. Customers not signing up for 100Mbps are rate-limited in the router to DS-1, DS-3, 10Mbps, or whatever they signed up for. Typically a provider has a DS-3 (T-3) or an OC-3 (STM-1) for peering. Providers with lots of customers on a large MAN are using OC-12 (STM-4) for peering. Is the customer thus getting true 100Mbps Internet access? No. Is the customer getting more bandwidth at a better price than is possible otherwise? Yes.
  • Woah there, hoss. I sell Verizon DSL -- or rather, am the Internet backend for the service -- and :

    1. - I don't use PPPoE
    2. - It's fast as crap, I use it at home
    3. - the last time the service was down, it was on a Qwest T1 line. I moved the whole service over to a T1 of frame from Genuity. It hasn't been down since.

    All ISPs are not created equal, pal. Personally, I work my ass off.

    -Omarius

  • The chances of this story being redundant are really high. Think about it..

    The first /. article couldn't be a repeat. There was only one. The second had a 1 in 2 chance. Either it was the same as before or it wasn't. The next one though, that had a 2 in 3 chance. It would be either the same as the first, or the same as the second, or a new one. And so it goes for all the other stories. If there are a million stories already then the chances of the story being a repeat are 1000000 in 1000001. How could you reasonably expect there not to be a few repeats now and then? Come on. Be reasonable.

  • Re:competative? (I'm waiting for hookup) (Score:3)

    by Kashmir ( 140655 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @05:05AM (#581551)
    Hello again- As it stands, Cogent has not lit up any client sites yet. I am a "customer" of Cogent's, I have signed up four buildings for my network. Their backbone lighting party here in Chicago was late November; they are roughly a month behind schedule.
    The way they are costing out there service isn't too hard to follow. They buy dark fiber in pre-wired buildings, in cities that they already have drops to their fiber ring. Everyone here is missing something about Cogent - They are NOT reselling to home users. In fact, they don't allow colocation either! If you do not have a POP in a building they are lighting, you are out.
    Someone a little farther on caught on to the main point of using the Cogent service - creating an incredibly fast VPN nationwide (US). Chicago is to have one of the first buildings lit, then NY, and last I heard building 3 is in San Fran. Nothing as of yet.

  • Ha! My new technology will rule the world! (Score:3)

    by tewwetruggur ( 253319 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @05:05AM (#581552) Homepage
    With my plans of running plasma fiber lines to transmit super-light-speed particles, I'll run this company into the ground. Just imagine getting data before you actually request it. It boggles the mind. Our only hurdle is to actually observe the super-light-speed particles. If anyone is really good at seeing really fast stuff, please, by all means, let me know.

  • I think you're missing (part of) the point. Cogent is wiring 20 metropolitan areas right now. Odds are, if you're a large company with branch offices, your other offices are in one of those areas. And so are your suppliers, distributors, customers, etc. If not, I think they'll get around to smaller urban areas pretty soon.

    What Cogent seems to be doing (or, at least, what I would be doing in their case) isn't simply about providing a link to the Internet. It's about creating a "new" Internet. Well, a new network, anyway. That network will then have a link (well, links, hopefully) to the Internet to use occasionally. But if things work out for them, I think a lot of the traffic will stay on their network. Think of it as sort of a big LAN connected via a slow-ass WAN link to another network (the Internet).

    After all, the company I work for doesn't need a 100Mbps for us employees to read /. But, it would be nice to use it for our branch offices in San Fran and Atlanta (domain replication, video conferencing, file sharing, transparent WAN links...)

  • A company in Utah has been deploying a fiber network for the past several years. Airswitch who just changed their name to Switchpoint is offering 100mb/s to residential customers for less than $50 per month.

    Their web site ( www.airswitch.com [airswitch.com]) is in transition, and doesn't have very much info on it right now. I remember in the past seeing that they are currently deployed in Springville and American Fork with Pleasant Grove and Orem coming online soon.

    I also noticed that they just inked a deal with a company in Denver Colorado to offer service there.

    People are chomping at the bit for this service. I wonder why more parts of the country aren't working faster on this.

  • A T1 is 1.544 megabit raw data. To get bytes, divide by 8. 1,544,000 / 8 = 193000. Not all can be used for data, as packets must be created. This does not rule out compression, which can get you more data, once uncompressed. But the actual flow is around 190k.

    To get a 50 meg file in two minutes, if uncompressed, would require 25 meg a minute, or .4 meg a second.

  • My only guess why they would skip Austin is the lack of large buildings. The per tenant basis would do poorly in an area where maybe only a few businesses coexist in the same building as compared to Dallas and Houston.

  • Re:Yawn (Score:2)

    by jbrw ( 520 )
    Isn't that for a 100Mbps connection to an ISP? The ISP will then want to charge you for hauling your packets about, methinks...

    ...j
  • Good god, that's a lot of bandwidth. For once, I don't think the linked site will be slashdotted to its knees.
  • My collage has pictures from cigarette ads, and
    Cyndi Lauper. Unfortunately, I can't run a q3
    server off of my collage, and when I tried, I got
    glue all up in my NIC.

    how much do your parents pay?

  • unreal (Score:3)

    by madcactus ( 221067 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @07:22AM (#581581)
    In disclosure, I work for a Cogent competitor, but for that reason, I've studied the model closely.

    Cogent uses (or, more precisely, plans to use) deep wave division multiplexing which does indeed lend credibility to their claims of 100 Mbps on the MAN. However, their claims of "non oversubcribed bandwidth" are patently silly. Even on a 2 gbps peering point they could only serve 20 customers and the number of gigabit peers (or Internet backbones) is still pretty small. Also, the wholesale price of bandwidth for non tier-1 ISPs (they aren't a tier 1) is between $200 and $500 per meg depending on volume. They are not sending you $20,000 - $50,000 in bandwidth for $1000 a month. Sorry. World doesn't work like that.

    Also, they are an in-buidling provider of the same type as Allied Riser (ticker: ARCC) and Cypress Communications (ticker: CYCO). Both of those companies have had 10 mbps Ethernet (10bFX, 10bT, or 10b2 believe it or not -- and you thought coax was dead...) offerings for over a year now and, if you look at the charts, can't make ends meet even with oversubscription. Cogent's proposal is even more silly.

    The Cogent plan is great if your offices are all on the same MAN and most of your traffic is bound for those offices. Otherwise, you can send 100 megabits out to some peering point where it will be dropped in the congestion.

    Also, I invite anyone to call Cogent and ask for a customer list. The last write up I saw of them or Yipes! had one guy with a T1 saying he'd like to buy a line from them when the service is available. It isn't.

    Sorry. Didn't mean to rant, but people with claims like this discredit providers with real services (and business plans) and do a lot to confuse the public.

  • Re:competative? (Score:3)

    by jarv ( 22298 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @12:16PM (#581584)
    Technical Contact:
    Network Operationc Center (NO2032-ORG) noc@COGENTCO.COM
    Cogent Communications
    1015 31st Street, NW Suite 330
    Washington , DC 20007
    US
    +1 877 7COGENT Fax- +1 202 295 4217

    ....

    GATEKEEPER.COGENTCO.COM 206.64.112.115
    MONET.TITANIA.NET 209.207.60.17

    .....

    cogentco.com name server hydrogen.cogentco.com
    cogentco.com name server gatekeeper.cogentco.com
    cogentco.com name server monet.titania.net
    cogentco.com name server sesamestreet.cogentco.com

    sesamestreet.cogentco.com has address 10.0.6.1
    lithium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.170
    carbon.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.173
    helium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.169

    hydrogen.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.168
    sodium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.178
    almandine.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.9
    allemontite.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.8
    beryllium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.171
    oracle.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.193
    aluminite.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.11
    nitrogen.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.174
    gatekeeper.cogentco.com has address 206.64.112.115
    vjklein.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.129
    oxygen.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.175

    .......

    Hooray for the Network Operationc Center!
    Hooray for Highly skilled network chemists!
    Hooray for non-routable RFC 1918 address space!

    Top notch operation. I'm investing, and retiring at 25.

  • Cable Infrastructure (Score:3)

    by Raetsel ( 34442 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @07:26AM (#581585)
    When I lived in Connecticut I had @Home using a LanCity device -- 10 Mbit symmetric. It was unrestricted . When I ordered the service, @Home told me I would be getting "...about 1 Mbit/second upload and between 3 and 5 Mbit/second download..." Within the system, this was generally true. I could FTP files back and forth with another fellow on the cablemodem at 400 KiloBYTES a second. Incredible for $40/month.

    However, the problem came when we tried to access any resource outside @Home's wires. In Connecticut, they hadn't installed enough connectivity to serve the number of users that they'd signed up. Another fellow started the CT@Home Users' Group, and we squeaked until the grease came in the form of another T3.

    The upload cap isn't to preserve capacity. It's to make it unusable for commercial purposes. @Home techs told me many times that people were using the service to host their little website business or ISP. So, instead of kicking them off and losing their revenue, they just put a cap in place. The people who weren't "abusing" it weren't supposed to notice. (Too bad if they did.)

    There is so much bandwidth available in a modern cable plant it's not funny. My current provider (Comcast in South Carolina) would absolutely love to make paying use of all their capacity, but there's these damn people that insist on not signing up for this wonderful digital-cable thing. The cretins. That means they have to double up on a lot of TV channels, when each channel is actually capable of over 60 MBit/second.

    Yes, cheap cablemodems will likely have issues. A good device (like a Cisco) will handle it just fine, you get what you pay for. I just want @Home to actually deliver the service they teased us with -- @Home Pro:

    • Host your own domain!
    • Servers are okay!
    • REALLY! It's not vapor! (Yeah, right.)
    The original point of all this was to say "Peer with Cogent, plug into their fiber, and solve the capacity issues." There's enough capacity there to make a 1 MBit cap feasible. Heck, I'd spring for a Cogent connection myself -- and damn the cablemodem!
  • As for PPoE, use the Linksys DSL/Cable router. It is PPoE capable and does the log-in for you, automatically, on-demand. Then use it for DHCP, plug in your machine, and you're ready to go. This is excellent for notebooks. I always insist on setting up DHCP wherever I go with my notebook so I don't have to do anything for configuration. The last thing I want to do is to set up PPoE to use a network that I only use on occassion. With the Linksys box, it's really easy to do. Also, you get the benefit of a firewall, which is a must-have these days.

  • Re:That's nice (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    56k dialup into AOL.

  • 100Mbps... wow! Can you even look at pr0n that fast?
  • if they fall to the slashdot effect, then we'll pretty much know what kind of bandwidth they have up their sleeve.
  • That's nice, but what's the point? Unless you are exchanging data with someone else on that backbone, you're never going to get even close to using that bandwidth. The Internet is just too slow. It's like hooking up your standard outdoor tap to a firehose.
  • Not here, thats for sure

    Bastard moderators jealous of my karma! MOD THIS DOWN THEN YOU FLABBY GEEK!!!!

  • Re:It is aimed at buildings/shared access (Score:3)

    by gleam ( 19528 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @05:25AM (#581624) Homepage
    It's not being marketed for apartment buildings, it's being marketed for office buildings.

    It would be pretty damn good for my office building. We currently have a partial T1 here, even though we have over 100 users in house. I work in the bloomingdale's building in chicago, and there are ~30 floors of offices. Spreading 100mbit/s over all the companies would work wonderfully. Besides, your landlord wouldn't be your sysadmin. Basically, everyone in the building would plug into a jack in their wall and be hooked directly up to either the company lan (more likely) or the building lan (less likely).

    My impression is also that they are very picky about who they sell to, since they don't oversubscribe.

    They'll only sell 24 of these for each 2.4Gbit/s OC48 MAN. That's not much money, and I'm worried that they won't be able to make money if they're only making 24k/month but splitting up OC48s.

    I dunno, maybe they have a better business model in hiding.

  • Re:Make sure that it isn't PPPoE. (Score:3)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @06:03AM (#581629)
    "I've also read that there's some third party freeware Windows drivers that work a heck of a lot better as well"

    Like RASPPPOE? It's free. It's small. It integrates nicely with Windows.

    Roaring Penguin is the best PPPoE client I've used, and it's a UNIX (Linux, *BSD, etc) client. The author subscribes to the same ISP as me ;) It's not a kernel solution, but it can easily act as a router for a 1mbs connection on a 486.

    Personally, I bought myself a Netgear RT314 router. I don't worry about PPPoE anymore.
  • Even if it's not aimed at 'residental businesses', if I had an apartment building with 24 units, I'd be willing to get this, wire up some cat5 from the basement to at least 2 ports in each unit, and then make sure to advertize these apartments as "net-ready with an average 4Mbps connection", only adding $50 above the normal rent tag. Of course, one would have to work out AUP issues with the provider to benefit the renter, but if you're paying $1000/mnth, the provider better be willing to make some concessions on AUPs.

    I suspect that in the next 2 years, "net-ready" apartments are going to be in high demand, just as adding cat5 wiring to a new house, even if you don't plan to use it, is a huge added benefit.

  • Feeling strangely familar.... (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @04:31AM (#581635)
    This was posted before by timmy. Article here. [slashdot.org]
  • Get @Home to plug into this, and then they can lift that @#^$ upload cap!!

    Okay, I know there are better uses for bandwidth like this, but there are times when @Home really gets on my nerves -- like last night!



    With all the incredible potential of the internet, using @Home is like trying to have a conversation with duct tape over your mouth... the only thing they want you to do is listen. God forbid you might actually have something to say.

    (For the curious, @Home's webspace runs off Apache, and what feels like a 33.6 modem! That's what has me ticked.)

  • College? (Score:5)

    by IAmATuringMachine! ( 62994 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @04:32AM (#581644)
    I always thought that college was a place that sold 100Mbps internet access for $1000 a month... And it came with free live-motion chicks viewable through the window panel on my wall. I don't know if they were real though; never went outside my room. Of course I am of that select population that would, when given the option of a date and a LAN party, pick the latter. And if there are girls at the LAN party, it counts as a date, right?
  • I will get 10Mbps for about $20/month (SEK 200/month) sometime in the first half of next year. I have friends who already do. The ISP:s idea is not to make money from the Internet connection, but from peripheral services, such as video on demand, home security and other things.
    Besides, a fiber connection doesn't cost much in itself. The nnn Mbps figure is probably only the bandwidth to the ISP:s own network. What connection(s) that network has to the rest of the Internet is an unknown (and keeping those connections scaled to give adequate performance for all customers at once is the expensive part).

  • Metropolitan Area Networks (Score:5)

    by John Murdoch ( 102085 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @06:10AM (#581655) Homepage Journal

    Hi!

    What Cogent is doing is part of a small but growing phenomenon--commonly called "metropolitan area networking." The basic idea is to wire a densely-populated area like a campus network--connecting to the larger Internet through a few gateways just like a university or corporate network would. The benefits of doing this are reasonably obvious: wiring an entire "campus" at once represents a single construction project, rather than becoming a years-long incremental installation of line after line after line. Typically the network service is provided with an Ethernet switch rather than a router--the host "Ethernet service provider" typically will also offer network management services for network participants.

    Another emerging provider of MANs is 3rd Wire [www.3rdwir...argetblank], which is presently in discussions to wire the downtown "Digital District" in Allentown, Pennsylvania. 3rd Wire is publicly indicating that they expect bandwidth costs to drop dramatically over the next 5 years--they expect to provide bandwidth within the Allentown Digital District at approximately $400/GB within a year, and their business model projects that price to drop to roughly $50/GB of bandwidth in five years.

    Mind blowing? What they're doing--and they are by no means the only people doing this--is seeing that there is critical mass in providing fiber in that "last mile" to the end user. And they're being helped, in part, by communities that recognize that "urban infrastructure" in the 21st century will require bandwidth just as much as it requires paved roads and traffic signals. Those communities are actively working to bring in providers to wire their communities--reasoning (entirely correctly) that high-tech firms are going to gravitate to cities with gigabit bandwidth for sub-K bucks.

    Incidentally, several posters have mentioned that this is meant "for business only"--not so. Certainly the Allentown Digital District very much wants to use the metropolitan area network to revitalize business in downtown Allentown--but we also want to encourage urban redevelopment in the surrounding neighborhoods with the offer of dramatic bandwidth for small dollars. If you can live and work a couple of blocks apart, and have gigibit Ethernet at home and at work, wouldn't that be attractive? We think it will be.

    Full disclosure: I'm heavily involved with the Lehigh Valley Partnership and the Allentown Digital District.

  • If you live inside the trial area for the Palo Alto, CA Fiber to the Home [cpau.com] trial, you can get 100Mbps for a max of $175/month including upstream connectivity.

    The program is managed by, you guessed it, Palo Alto's public utilities department. The same department installed a fiber ring throughout the city some years ago and licenses "dark fiber" (just the banwidth, ma'am) to anyone who wants to pay the drop charges plus $2,700/FMY (fiber-mile-year).

  • "Cogent Communications a national services provider that is currently constructing an OC192 nationwide backbone. We are in the process of connecting to the following exchanges: Mae-East ATM, Mae-West ATM, Mae-Central ATM (Dallas), AADS Nap Chicago, NYIIX, PAIX, PAIX-VA, PacBell NAP, and Sprint NAP. " Good enough for you? of course i haven't verifyied this yet...
  • For all the people asking if they REALLY can keep that level of bandwidth going, it looks like they can. From their faq page: [cogentco.com]

    The Cogent Communications Network is a facilities based, end-to-end optical system. We have metropolitan OC48 rings in 20 major cities tied together via a national backbone designed to operate at OC192 speeds implementing an IP over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) Cisco Powered Network.

    20 OC48's would keep up very nicely.

    Now, my question is what kind of money do they want for the install?

  • That's 100x (roughly) the bandwidth of a T-1 for 1/2 the price (again, roughly). Apparently you don't need some funkoid router interface either, according to the website it terminates in an rj45. To sweeten the deal, it looks like they'll even cover the cost of bringing it to your building.

    On the downside of course, is that it looks like this is Businesses Only. This really only makes sense, given the cost structure they have in place (where they cover pretty much all of the "last mile" installation costs (leaving you the building owner to cover the comparatively minor in-building ehternet instaaltion cost (minor unless you have an old building anyway)) and derive their all their income from the monthly payment). Looking at their "Property Owner..." section, it looks like the $1000/mo. is on a per tenant basis (still a good deal for the tenants compared to each getting a T-1), and by running one wire to a house you'd only get $1K/mo as opposed to (n tenants)*$1k/mo for one wire to an office complex.

    This would potentially be a very good deal for local ISPs in cities they offer service in. Anything that helps the "little guys" blossom is good, because I fear the day that AOL-TW and the Baby Bells are the only ISPs left.

    One last tangental point is that it seems their illustrator doesn't know Texas that well (Dallas is practically in Tyler's lap on the network map, :-) ). (Thinking of texas, why did they hit Houston and Dallas but miss Austin? Austin has a POP from pretty much every other big and medium size bandwidth provider, and given the large tech market here and whatnot I still doubt we've reached any saturation point in connectivity.)


    --

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