back to article Fancy 10 Gbps home broadband? Broadcom's built the guts of it

While network operators around the world squeeze the last drops of sweat out of their copper, silicon vendors like Broadcom have an eye firmly on a fibre future. The company, currently in the throes of a takeover by Avago technologies, has announced a reference design to help its OEMs build kit to the emerging Ethernet Passive …

  1. Tom Samplonius

    Maybe the 2005 copyright date on the EPON book should have clued you into the fact that EPON is dead. EPON (802.3ah-2004) is 1G up and 1G down, per port. GPON (G.984) is 2.5 down, and 1.25G up per port. 10G-PON or XPON (G.987) is 10G down and 1.25G up. Though some people use EPON to refer to any of the above.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    B4RN in Cumbria are already offering 1G symmetric and can easily upgrade to 10G symmetric. 10G is already available if you want it, but 1G is the standard offering as that's where the hardware sweet spot is at the moment.

  3. John Robson Silver badge

    10Gbs fibre to 4*1Gbs ethernet

    Erm - so assuming perfect trunking I'm still only able to access 40% of the available bandwidth...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 10Gbs fibre to 4*1Gbs ethernet

      If this is a PON then your bandwidth is shared anyway, with perhaps as many as 64 other subscribers on the same fibre. Getting 40% of the peak would be pretty good.

      The questions is more how to make a service like this pay. If you have end users who are actually pulling 4Gbps continuously, then they are transferring 1.8TB per hour. Look at EC2 for a baseline transit cost ($0.09 per GB): so on a metered service you are burning $162 per hour.

      1. John Robson Silver badge

        Re: 10Gbs fibre to 4*1Gbs ethernet

        So basically yes - they still can't sell a 10G connection...

      2. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        Re: 10Gbs fibre to 4*1Gbs ethernet

        The questions is more how to make a service like this pay.

        Simple. You charge $250 a month for "access to" the 10Gbit fibre, with a "generous" "free" bandwidth allocation of 100GiB. Then you charge them $50/TB over the limit. If they complain, you have them rounded up as terrorists and thrown in jail.

        Yes, I live in a country where protesting is illegal and can be classified as terrorism at the prime minister's whim.

  4. Lionel Baden
    Unhappy

    WHY WHY WHY

    Can I not buy this now !!!!!!

    1. I'm Brian and so's my wife

      Re: WHY WHY WHY

      Moar cat videos! MOAR!

    2. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: WHY WHY WHY

      WHY WHY WHY can't I buy a 10Mbit upload for less than $500 a month, or $5,000 a month is I want to actually use the bandwidth?

  5. j0nn13

    I'd settle for just being able to get fibre in the first place..... <sigh>

    1. Lionel Baden
      Facepalm

      I feel your pain

      Virtual Man hug!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "I'd settle for just being able to get fibre in the first place..... <sigh>"

      Oh, you almost certainly can get it. I buy last mile fibre all around the world and it's pretty rare that the answer from all suppliers in a country is a flat 'no'.

      What you really mean, I think, is "Why won't someone sell me fibre for a tiny fraction of what it actually costs?"

      I've had a quote for a site in Sofia in the last few days. Not from an incumbent, but an independent operator. They had a node in the city so it's not a particularly long distance service. Nevertheless the install is just shy of €20K and the monthly rental for a 30Mbps service is €920. The install charge is less than expected because the supplier will divert a spare fibre in a bundle that's already been delivered to one of their other customers farther down the same street, so the dig required is only about 50 metres.

      The argument around FTTH in lots of countries seems to be around why telcos won't sell domestic customers that service for £100 install and £30 a month.

      1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        I'll eat a $30K install cost if they keep the bandwidth costs down to something sane. Unfortunately, they want thousands of dollars per month 10Mbit continuous use. Fucking madness.

  6. Jonski

    10 Gig? Erm, no thanks

    Having recently gone from 12 Mbps ADSL to 100/20 Mbps fibre at home, I expected all sorts of drinking-from-the-firehose goodness. But TBH I was disappointed. It seems that a lot of websites have limited bandwidth themselves from their servers and I can easily max them out- or at least max out my share of their link.

    Also, YouTwitFace still has long laggy periods where I wait for their servers to get back to me.

    The upside is my whole family can now simultaneously ignore each other in high definition. I guess that's a win.

    1. James 100

      Re: 10 Gig? Erm, no thanks

      I was briefly excited when I heard that BT's "fibre on demand" offering was available on my exchange - until I spotted two things. First, it gave 330 Mbps down, 30 up, for about the same monthly fee as four bonded FTTC lines which would give 320/80 ... and secondly, I looked at my traffic graph and realised just how little of the time I'm maxing out the 80/20 I have now. Even with an ultra-high end ISP (yes, I can max out that 80/20 any time I like, 24x7: apparently, they have some of the lowest contention ratios out there) I just don't have a use for that much. Maybe it would shave a few minutes off the next Windows service pack or VM image I download - if the servers can actually deliver that - but is that really worth paying much more for?

      What I noticed straight away, though, was how much better the "80 Mbps" service from a good ISP was compared to the "50 Mbps" cable modem I had before, where they skimped much more on transit and peering bandwidth. On the cable service, streams had to buffer for a while, because the bandwidth really wasn't there; after migrating, that was all gone.

      Now, if I could cut the latency a bit, or bump the upstream bandwidth a bit, that would be nice - but it'll be a while before I actually have any use for much more than 80 Mbps downstream.

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