I am often amazed at folks who buy fancy scream machines such as Ferrari and continue to live in cities such as London, or Bombay where driving at over 25 miles an hour is a challenge. I can understand the desire to own something that sleek, expensive and fast. But you certainly almost never get a chance to live the speed.
I feel the same way about the much ballyhooed Verizon FiOS router which can shunt data at 100 megabits per second. After all VZ is still selling speeds of 15-to-30 megabits to a small number of its customers. The 100 MB/s connections are a myth, and will remain so, at least for near foreseeable future.
Of course you have a need for speed, you could always opt for many of the current options - Netgear, Linksys and Ruckus Wireless all have something to offer. Previously, Robert Young had pointed out that the bandwidth demand inside the home is going to explode, and the WAN access will have no bearing on it. (My article from Business 2.0 on this very topic is here!)
8 comments so far
10:37 AM PT
Well, if it’s the only router you use for your home/office network, then having a 100 Mb/sec router can definitely have benefits. It will increase the speed of internal traffic, even if it doesn’t do anything for your internet connectivity.
10:56 AM PT
There’s a distinction between routing and switching though. In simple wired home networks where you might have a laptop, a server, and a “broadband router”, you already have 100mbit between your laptop and server because you’re switching. You only route when you need to get to another network (like the Internet).
But routing at 100mbit… what’s the point if there aren’t any servers or P2P peers that can serve up data that fast today?
11:33 AM PT
Sorry, but all space will be filled eventually. This opens up a wide range of home applications and sets the ground work for moving serous data over the net. Faster is better, more bandwidth is better, will people use it initially? Some will most won’t but eventually services will come on line to soak up that bandwidth. Version will probable be happy to sell a number of them ;). We should always be demanding more as consumers, and bad car analogies aside you can drive fast some times in London just like you can get fast down loads from Comcast, some time, and that has value to a lot of folks. Widely available broadband was a myth f few years back (and arguable still is in some areas), so clearly nobody should sell anything beyond a 56k modem right… come on, more is good. Now if they would just actually deploy fiber in the Silconvalley instead of colluding with AT&T and nicely diving up the market share so nobody has to really compete…
12:27 PM PT
Om, I think you are misreading this. At this point in the game, try and buy a router that is less than 100 Mbps. That is the same speed you well get out of whatever is on sale for $0, after mail in rebates, at circuit city. The real point of the story is the MOCA part. What that means is that Verizon is going to take the coax your local cableco so kindly installed way back when and use it for the inbuilding wiring, saving them the cost of pulling Cat5. Meanwhile, it does this in such a way that those same cables are still good for FiOS TV.
6:05 AM PT
Why did J. Howard Marshall marry Anna Nicole Smith? Sometimes you do things just because you can.
7:12 AM PT
100mbit routers are so cheap, why bother to get one any lower? I’m running on 10 gigabit ethernet right now…
11:10 AM PT
Jesse Kopelman
“Om, I think you are misreading this. At this point in the game, try and buy a router that is less than 100 Mbps. That is the same speed you well get out of whatever is on sale for $0, after mail in rebates, at circuit city. The real point of the story is the MOCA part. What that means is that Verizon is going to take the coax your local cableco so kindly installed way back when and use it for the inbuilding wiring, saving them the cost of pulling Cat5. Meanwhile, it does this in such a way that those same cables are still good for FiOS TV.”
They are also using coax as part of your internal network if you get the home media DVR. When your STB’s are on, with no CAT5 plugged in you can see them get an I.P. address in the router.
12:59 PM PT
What is all the hooplaaaaa about?
If you don’t like VZ’s FIOS then move along to another company.
The thing that most people don’t realize is that the local cable company’s RF signal is 2 to 3xs lower than the RF coming to your house with fiber.
So you can have not so good I/W and still have a decent picture,speed and overall good quality signal.
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