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.

Getting an Internet connection is not trivial...

So it turns out, contrary to what I used to think, not all houses/apartments in Tokyo come with magical outlets connecting you to Internet at 100 Mbps. In fact, if you happen to live in what's called a "mansion type" (マンション) apartment that may be slightly old, you may need to wait for a whole month before you can get DSL/fiber hooked up. Of course once hooked up you could have a 100 Mbps connection but who is going to wait for a month? Since that would have basically meant living in hell for me, I had to find another solution and that solution came in the form of an HSDPA connection from EMobile. It basically has a SIM card in it just like a cellphone, and you get a speed of around 3.4Mbps. This is already faster than my connection back in the US (3 Mbps) but they also mentioned that before the end of the year the speed will go up to 14Mbps. Granted, it is more expensive than DSL (at around ￥６０００ per month) but I really did not have an option (well, I could have technically waited but not really, no). Getting it to work was easy with my Vaio that I got in Japan but the driver would not work with my tablet running XP Pro English when we tried it at the store (コジマ) (of course, once I got home and tried the new driver CD that came out of the box, it worked...).

Now I need to figure out how to get wireless networking, well, working with this connection. VAIO is running Vista in Japanese and that is not helping me with setting up internet connection sharing. I looked at some HSDPA wireless routers on the web but they all seem to work with a PCMCIA card which I do not have (what I have is connected to my laptop with USB) I think if I can get wireless internet connection sharing that would be the easiest/best. I will figure something out...