Fiber!

A few months back, a friendly, slightly high-strung man from NTT, the phone company, came to our door offering installation of a hikari fiber-optic line. Supported by subsidies from the Japanese government, he explained, NTT could install the new super-fast Internet connection for free, and the monthly cost would be discounted for one-year. Hikari fiber offers a “best effort” speed, he said, of 100 Mbps. A more realistic speed, he admitted, might range from 30 to 50 Mbps. My DSL line, in comparison, was getting about 3 to 5 Mbps. Was the DSL fast enough for web browsing, designing websites, downloading multi-gigabyte episodes of “Lost?” Well, yeah…. but to have 10 to 33 times faster at the same price? Okay! I couldn’t resist the pressure to keep up. Is this not Japan, where, at least according to internet lore, we live in the future? We arranged the installation.

A month and a half later, an NTT technician in white hardhat and blue jumpsuit arrived to make the hook up. Installation was quick enough. The configuration was more confusing… but by the end of the day everything was basically online.

So, is it fast? My tests at speedtest.net typically show between 15 to 25 Mbps downstream and 4 to 10 Mbps upstream. Nowhere near “best effort” speed, but certainly faster than my old connection. Big downloads, like movie trailers, software updates, music — nice and quick. Daily web-surfing, though, doesn’t feel much different than before. Haven’t tried torrents much yet, but I’ve heard that my ISP likes to limit P2P traffic.

Notes:
– My ISP, Plala, had several “security” filters turned on by default. The filters can restrict such things as Skype and torrents. Finding out where to turn off the filters was a little tricky. And are there other filters that they don’t tell us about?
– Connecting to U.S. websites (basically all those that I visit) actually got slower at first, until i realized I needed to enter the DNS server addresses recommended by Plala into my system’s control panel.
– I used to point a domain name to the web server on my home computer using a dynamic DNS service. This doesn’t work anymore, apparently blocked by Plala or the router they provided.