Bell Canada is apparently gearing up to provide the good people of Toronto with the World's Fastest Internet™.
http://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2015/06/25/bell-canada-to-give-toronto-worlds-fastest-internet.html
They needed to do this. Rogers is already offering higher speeds.
Nice try Bell.. So-Net did it two years ago, 2Gbps FTTH in Japan.
Article: http://bgr.com/2013/06/13/so-net-nuro-2gbps-fiber-service/
If you read Japanese: http://www.nuro.jp/hikari/
Eric
How does one fully utilize a gigabit link for home use? For a single person
it is overkill. Similar to the concept of price elasticity in economics,
going from 50mbps to 1gbps doesn't necessarily increase your average
transfer rate, at least I don't think it would for me. Anyone care to
comment? Just really curious, as to me it's more of a marketing push than
anything else, even though gigabit to the home sounds really cool.
But what about us in Northwestern Ontario who can only get dialup, if that, from Bell?
Its mostly marketing, a number of years ago I worked for a cable co, we
knew if we increased BW X we'd see a Y speed increase in usage. We also
has done the math on several future generations of upgrades, so we'd know
if "phone company" increases to A we'd move to B. I know the guy that did
the math for us then, he still sits in that job so I assume he still does
similar I suspect any cable so worth their salt does the same.
I have 250/50 megabit/s. I frequently use the 250 megabit/s download and upload speed when doing larger file transfers, and I actually get the speed advertised.
I can get 500/50 but I'd have to pay tens of USD per month more for that, and it's just not worth it.
So while my transfer rate when I actually do something increases, it doesn't make me use more data per month, it just means that when I actually have to download something bigger, it takes shorter time.
And yes, "fastest Internet in the world" is pure BS, gigabit ethernet access to peoples homes have been around for years in other places.
Parkinson's law of sorts? Use expanding to fill the bandwidth available
One kid with a torrent downloading random stuff, streaming hd and music off the internet etc and a family of four can make decent inroads into gigabit or so I would have thought
Don't even start counting say a gb here and several mb there in software, os etc upgrades across a variety of devices.
Exrtrapolating from current usage levels on comparatively lower speed broadband doesn't quite make sense to me
--srs
After you increase the download speed above a certain threshold, it's my experience that total data per month doesn't increase more than marginally with speed increase. As soon as access speed is high enough so youtube, netflix etc automatically goes to the highest resolution immediately, data transfered per month is the same even though the access speed goes up.
So when you go from 5 to 10 megabit/s towards the user, yes, data amount increases, but when you go from 100 to 250 megabit/s towards the user, not so much.
Like Peter Lothberg's mother's home 
--srs
Bell Canada is apparently gearing up to provide the good people of Toronto with the World's Fastest Internet™.
http://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2015/06/25/bell-canada-to-give-toronto-worlds-fastest-internet.html
Only 1Gbps?!
LOL, but US Internet offers 10Gbps!
http://fiber.usinternet.com/plans-and-prices/
Yes, residential; yes, 10000Mbps; yes, only 399,00 USD/mo, which
amounts to 39 bucks per gigabit.
Bell's 1Gbps is by no means the world's fastest internet.
Not even in Canada:
While homes in cities like Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto are toiling with maximum speeds only up to 100 megabits per second, in Olds Alberta – 90 kilometres north of Calgary – they have access to one Gigabit per second connections, and at the bargain basement rate of $57 per month, with no data caps.
Also, is Bell any different from AT&T and Verizon in that it doesn't
peer with like anyone? Will most Canadian traffic still go through
Chicago or New York?
C.
Why would you use average transfer rate as the metric for user experience quality?
Most users don't care about their long term bandwidth average, they care about getting that movie playing _right_now_, or HD video calls with all the grandchildren, all at once. Heck, they care more about web pages showing up on the screen nice and fast more than average download speed.
Personally I think it's pure marketing ... something I think we all know...
I seen a few years back a FTTH development get completed using GPON - everything in the area got "Full Gig Internet". Speedtest while I was onsite showed about 900Mb/s download so pretty darn close (before they fully deployed).
The interesting part was that the development consisted of 4400 active users the last time I heard but the bandwidth to upstream provider was still only a single GigE and was not hitting serious saturation levels most of the time.
Paul
I have worked on server room networking, and found that it takes quite a bit of tweaking of the interfaces and the TCP stack to get things up to 80 percent usage of a gigabit link. Both ends. So your side can go like the wind, but your data source may not be able to fill the pipe. So I agree that, for most people, this will be pure marketing hype.
As for the 4400 users, that's the classical oversubscription model.
This sentiment keeps popping up. It's a failure of vision. To suggest
that "single people" or "ordinary people" or any other set of presumably
average and uninteresting people will never be able to fully utilise the
amazing properties of X, and that they can and should be satisfied with
some limited version of X or the even more limited alternative Y, is to
completely miss the point. And to actually provide no more than that is
to build a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Look at pretty much any modern technology and you can be sure that when
it was first invented someone wearing the then equivalent of a brown
cardigan said "yes, that's all very well, but what use will ordinary
people ever have for it?".
When the first little fire sputtered into life in some Neanderthal cave
you can bet that some troglodyte said "no point make bigger, me warm
enough, more hot waste of effort", but of course he hadn't thought of
bronze, iron, steel, glass, welding or rocketry. Or the steam engine or
the internal combustion engine. What luck that his kids ignored him, eh?
As William Gibson wrote, "the street finds its uses for things".
I can't think of anything I would or could do with a terabit Internet
link - but it's not me who needs it. It's the kids now in school who
will build it, and their kids will think it commonplace. And they will
look back at you and me and think "how did our grandparents ever manage
with only a couple of gigabits? How limiting!" And while they are
thinking that, some bright young things will report that they think
they've got a primitive exabit link working...
Regards, K.
PS: There are only three real values for network speeds, just as there
are only three values for amount of personal fortune, RAM, disk space
and CPU speed. The three values are "not enough", "enough" and "I don't
know". Always aspire to "I don't know".
I see a potential market for perhaps hundreds of aircraft in the coming century.
lol
Owen
That comment was made from a customer perspective (myself) while I wonder
if I ever would wanna pay for it, although it seems like it's pretty cheap
already. As an entrepreneur, business, etc... then yes, I agree. Shoot for
the stars and land on the moon.
Your right. Actually, Bell knows that home does not need that much BW, Bell size their network for much less than that. However, from a marketing perspective, when Bell says to a client I am offering you 1G at $100 and competition are offering you 30M at $60, some clients likes that because they ignore that 1G will not make a difference compared to 30M.
Also Bell is currently using ADSL technology to provide internet service which is a dead technology. So, Bell has no choice but to move to fiber if they want to stay on the market.
KARIM M.
And just possibly for more than seven computers on the continent.
*Any* continent.