There's a notice by the police box that Hutchison is going to lay fibre cable ducts in various places -- looks like along the path from HSY to YSW, and in Sok Kwu Wan.

I've heard that HEC has their own fibre network here, and maybe this is under contract to them, (and I'd bet it connects to HK via the HEC tunnel) but this could be a very interesting development. With fibre broadband you can get a stable connection at up to 100 MB/s for the same cost as the DSL we have now, at max of about 5 MB/s. Plus probably a bunch of cable TV stations (at extra charge).

See HGC Residential Broadband.


Of course, the Lands Dept and Hutchison are unlikely to tell us anything about such plans, if there are any for consumers at all.

And I've been thinking how easy it would be to lay fibre alongside the sewage pipes now being laid all over, at marginal extra cost, which will eventually reach every house in YSW. They could use a few strands to replace the conventional copper phone lines that dangle higgledy-piggledy all over the place and tidy the village up a bit as well as giving us all crystal clear cable TV, 100 MB/s broadband, and removing our shit into the bargain.

But our government's idea of Next Generation Tech is to put up a 1970s' style flashing digital clock next to a rubbish collection point.

Agreed.

That would be the logical solution....

But I'm sure the government /lands dept. will go with the option of completing the sewage pipes first, and then just digging up the paths again at a later date

I've just noticed a fairly new manhole cover in Main Street labelled "HGC Broadband".

So they really are rolling out fibre for domestic broadband here.

That will leave PCCW DSL in the dust, and also users can also ditch fixed copper line phones with IP phones.

if this means what I think it does:
http://www.hgcbroadband.com/superbroadband.html
30M bandwidth: $69/month/24 months
100M :$79

Probably a while till my village is wired though.

Noticed a few more new Hutchison hatches along the coast road from HSY to SKW . It looks like they may be laying them alongside the new watermain pipes.

Wish there was some idea of when it's all going to go live.

Today I saw a couple of guys splicing cables in the HGC manhole outside Granny chans.

We had a brief broken chat about what they were doing and the upshot was that the fibre is for "all Lamma" and the expected finish date is "end five month". whether that's the end of May, or 5 months from now is beyond my Cantonese skills - but I'm hopeful.

Just a little update from Andy, my computer goto guy, who's just replaced my overheated display card in my home office this afternoon:

Yes, it's Hutchison's high-speed optical fibre network being connected now for all of Lamma, including YSW, Hung Shing Yeh and even Sok Kwu Wan already. Yung Shue Long and Tai Peng will be next.

100 Mb Internet is coming to Lamma in about half a year or so, probably later. Quite an improvement to our current 3Mb maximum from PCCW.

HGC is using HK Electric undersea cable tunnels for this fibre, as both of them are part of the Li Ka-Shing empire. PCCW is still using just their ancient, puny microwave link on top of Po Wah Yuen to connect all of us to HK Island and the Internet. It's not profitable for them to upgrade that link for just about 1,000 Internet subscribers on Lamma. That's why they'll probably never offer any higher speed for Lamma, even though we've been asking them for almost ten years via various channels. That's also why NOW Broadband TV has only a handful of English channels, despite charging $398/month on Lamma.

Let's hope HGC is speeding up the 100 Mb service offerings, now that they've almost connected their extensive fibre network. I'll become one of their first new customers!

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My guess is that HGC will provide a backbone service and PCCW will be able to plug into it.

Can you call some of your old contacts and try to find out what and when they're doing this?

I'm wondering how they'll handle the domestic connection from the trunk lines. Are they going to dig a trench and lay cable to every house? That would seem expensive, and pretty time consuming. There could be a hefty connection charge. Or they make you sign up for at least two years.

But I'd be on board if they have the same pricing as elsewhere.

... Duh. Just realised they could share the electricity supply channels, using their filial relationship with HEC. So the domestic connection could be done without any more digging.


I doubt it.
PCCW here is using ADSL, over the copper phonelines. A quite different and incompatible technology. I don't think they cooperate anywhere in HK. Do they?

Yes, it's using the electricity channels for individual connections to each house.

No details on timing of the service, even when asking high-level contacts as it's probably not firmed up yet and not scheduled for release internally yet, awaiting the completion of all the works.

Andy explained the technical details of the connections, lots of abbreviations, but my days as a former Regional IT/Telecom Manager for Asia are long behind me. But it'll be OK if you have a 100Mb LAN card which is standard nowadays anyway, plus a pretty fast Broadband modem and a router for Wifi, something in the Gb range, so probably very little setup/installation cost per household.

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Current offer for 100 MB is $99/month/24 months + $330 connection charge.

+ $30/month for a phoneline, so I'd get 30 times the speed at half the cost I'm paying now for DSL and phone.

PCCW's days are numbered.

Technical details
They install an ethernet port in the wall, so you don't need any kind of a modem. Just a cable to the PC or router.


One bit of idiocy:


They'd better not follow that literally, or you couldn't use a router to share your conection with a laptop.

Pardon my envy showing, but I'd kill for a deal like this here in Vancouver. I'm on cable, with good reliability and tech support, but at several times this price for equivalent speed and service.

Have they mentioned anything about monthly traffic quotas?

The bit about not allowing more than one computer per connection ... if they are going to hand out IPv6 addresses (because Asia-Pacific has officially run out of v4 addresses) it theoretically creates a huge subnet for each customer but doesn't allow for traditional home routers at all. So it would be easy for them to determine how many PCs are connected. And if your PC's operating system is old enough to not have IPv6 networking, you're toast. There are ways to get around this, but they're complicated, kludgy and difficult to do, provided you can find the router hardware to do it.

_________________
Lead me not into temptation;
I can find it myself, thank you.

I'm sure it can't and won't be enforced.
No one would stand for it.
My household has three laptops (one retired) and a desktop. And in the evening they're all in use, two streaming Korean soap operas. And that's on our mediocre 3Mb DSL.

None of the local broadband ISPs have a cap for home services (they might for mobile).

And HK is no closer than anywhere else to shifting to IPv6.
We'll be NATting our IPs for years to come.
When it does come though there wil be cheap routers to interface older PCs.

Alan, if Hutchison still has spare v4 addresses then this looks really good to me. It would mean they'd have a pretty difficult time figuring out what's parked behind your NATing router/WiFi access point (unless they want to go to all the silly trouble of deep packet inspection). I hope for Lamma's sake it's true, but v6 *will* strike eventually.

Here in North America most IT people still have their heads buried in the sand regarding the v4-to-v6 transition. We're going to pay dearly for that some day.

_________________
Lead me not into temptation;
I can find it myself, thank you.

I set up my sister in law's PC when she got Hutchison cable Internet. Never a mention of IPv6.

They will be planning for it but the longer they delay implementing it at the consumer end the fewer old PCs and other hardware around which will have problems and make support issues for them.

http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/eng/infra/eipv6_dev.htm

Nerds....

You're most welcome, Amphibious Nerd!

By the way, thanks for your beautiful froggy pic in Lamma Wildlife of the Day online now....

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We have 100mb in our office in Central. Speed is only to the exchange so what you find is simply that the bottleneck goes elsewhere. Think about 15mb and you get a better idea of the real practical speed.

That post was almost half a year ago.... Any news on the HGC front?

My PCCW connection speeds have been noticeably worse these past few weeks and I'm not a happy camper...

They've laid cable from the library, Main Street, to the beach, and along the path to SKW.

I assume they can uplink vis the HKE power station.

God knows what they're up to now, lacking any announcements of their plans or schedule.

It may be fitting to ask this question here, but so according to what you say, the "
"mobile broadband" we are getting on Lamma would be limited to that microwave link anyway, if all companies rely on it to transmit data?

I've noticed that even while just using a SSH terminal to connect to computers in Hong Kong, it has been painfully slow whether I use Smartone (from Jan 2010 until July 2011) or CSL 1010 (since July 2011)... Both are equally sluggish from my home in Sha Po, although remarkably fast outside, or even on the ferry.

Other tips about how all these companies connect to the Internet on Lamma?

I've also just noticed your thread on network speeds Lamma-to-America:
http://www.lamma.com.hk/forum-OK/viewtopic.php?t=6830