Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Land of the true broadband - 100 Mbps

Yup, it is true. I am finally the proud owner of a fiber connection running at 100 Mbps. Gone are the "buffering" messages in videos and less than 100 Kbps download speeds for torrents. This is truly net bliss. Thinking this is some special speed, super expensive package? It is but the standard speed offered by NTT and the price is around 60 bucks a month.

If you want to get a connection yourself, you can start by visiting the English support pages of NTT at http://flets.com/english/opt/index.html. The tricky thing is each connection consists of two parts. NTT, which is basically the national phone company (though no longer a monopoly), needs to take care of the infrastructure and get you a port on the wall (or a wireless connection) and an ISP which you will use to connect to the web over the infrastructure. The total amount you pay is then the sum of what you pay for NTT and your ISP. NTT has some package deals though I opted for GOL which is an ISP that has English support. It is a tad more expensive than most of the others but being able to explain any problem you might have easily is worth the difference.

Given that back home in Cyprus my connection was 512 KBit and in the US it was 3 MBit, this is definitely a huge step up. I remember reading on Slashdot that in the US Comcast started testing a 60 MBit connection in one city with limited availability and for much more than what I am paying here. Well, may be one day they will catch up ;)

How is it for you? How much do you pay for what speed? Please leave a comment if you can with the speed, location, and amount of money you are paying. I think it would be an interesting comparison for all of us.

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