I'm assuming that the HGC broadband plan is either dead or some ways off.

I'm seeing notices regarding Smartone suspending broadband services in Tai Peng until March 2014 but customers still have to pay.

I don't hold any hope of the situation getting any better.

Hi adam,
Do you refers to home broadband? I didn't know Smartone has broadband here.
Or you are talking about mobile 3G /4G?
Where have you seen the signs?

I'm much concerned as I use my smartone 4G mobile data plan as home internet and I really need it for work...

Thank you

I saw it on a notice in the Beer Garden on Saturday.

I am part of a big business networking group and we're looking to hold SmarTone to task on a few things primarily how they hijack user sessions so they can push their own spam content to them.

I'd be interested in knowing more about the history of this latest HK ISP farce.

They've had scaffolding up on the cell antenna at 129 Tai Peng Kau Tsuen since April. I saw some workers there then, but nothing since.

I'm pretty sure this is Smartone, but they don't have any signs.

I'm guessing that the Hutchinson Fibre plan is truly dead now.

Well five years later.....




No timetable: "aims to", but it's the first public mention that this exists.
They're touting it as an inducement to investors to give them HK$5.46 billion. That should be enough to light it up.

Maybe they want to roll out this program all over the NT at once and our fibre has been fallow until it's all ready. They will no doubt give us a "special" (higher) rate than urban areas. Still, at HK$229 for 100M it would be 50 times faster and cheaper than DSL (2M , $248), and faster and more reliable than wireless. Also could replace PCCW landline phones, so save $128 month on that if you've still been using one.

That's about HK$5,460 per household if my calculation is right. I hear from people in posh areas being asked HK$12,000 from PCCW to install fibre in their homes if they're not in a brand new building.

Could take a few years!

Maybe HGC will sell its trunklines here to HKBN. Doesn't seem viable for two networks in village areas.
Or maybe HGC will finally be motivated by the competition to activate their system. Now they probably see it as just competing with their own 4G, which is more profitable.
Competition is the only reason we get any improvement in telecoms.

A friend actually got an answer out of HGC, the first response we've ever heard about. He writes:

"HGC broadband on Lamma is for 'internal projects'. So it won't be coming to us anytime soon."

This is most likely the same fiber that the Power Station is using already, just a little extension from the HGC fiber going through one or more of our Cable Tunnels to HK Island. HGC and the Power Station are "sister companies", part of the Li-ka Shing conglomerate. "Rival" PCCW does not get access to these tunnels, so we might never get faster broadband from them. All bets for faster Internet on Lamma seem to be on wireless 3G/4G right now.

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That's a bullshit evasion.
Yes, the only network that's working now is "internal".
But fibre was laid all the way from Sok Kwu Wan to Hung Shing Yeh to Yung Shue Wan ending up at the library.
It's all dark, but they're lying if they say it wasn't designed and built for home broadband.
It's identical to how they did it all over HK and Kowloon for retail customers.

We know they don't have any intention of turning it on, but we don't know the real reason they changed their plans.
They ignore the public and none of our public representatives give a shit.

I can't even listen to a low-fi internet radio stream. I spent most of this morning having my internet speed fading in and out.
I'm paying twice as much for "broadband" as I was 10 years ago and getting worse and worse service every fucking year.

The rumours seem to be that the high-capacity, state-of-the-art fiber from SKW (head connection) to YSW is for the ex-Lamma Quarry new town, to be built by a company in the same Li-ka Shing conglomerate as HGC.
Patient long-term planning by HGC, 5,000 brand-new, easy-to-connect customers in high-rises up to 13 floors in a number of years... No plans for YSW in the near future.

But there seems to be a PCCW Broadband upgrade in the plans at corporate level (VDSL2), unknown even to our PCCW modem fixing guy(s). But it will probably cost each house an undetermined amount to connect, new hardware, cable, etc. Maybe 8 Mbps or even 20+.

Maybe end of this year, but I won't believe it till I see it. I've waited and hoped for faster broadband on Lamma for almost 14 years, same speed now, but a lot more expensive.

Running my modem as a 4G hotspot seems the best and cheapest solution for home use I've seen so far, no extra cost and no extra hardware besides your mobile. But it only works great up to your monthly data allowance; using any more is still a convoluted, expensive and temporary mess with all local service providers, changing rules and extra costs almost every month, it seems.

This means just very limited and occasional downloading of TV or movies at 4G speeds. You can use our normal, overloaded 3Mbps Broadband for downloading GBs overnight; slow, but more reliable, no data limits and no extra costs.

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That makes even less sense.
Anyone can speculate, I do it myself, but you need to account for the facts.

Why not just connect from where the tunnel makes landfall between SKW and Pak Kok?
Why on earth would they lay fibre up YSW Main Street if this is for the quarry?

There won't be 5000 people in the quarry for at least 10 years, if ever; there are 5000 people in Yung Shue Wan NOW who would probably 95% sign up for fibre.
Half the cost, 50 times the speed. Say goodbye to PCCW forever.

This was done years before the quarry project was mooted.
The fibre will be old and generations out of date by the time the quarry project is built.
They can and probably will just put up a microwave relay on the hillside, simple line of sight to HK for it.






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-high ... ber_line_2
"The main high-speed link (e.g. a fibre optic connection) terminates at a hub near the customers' location. The existing copper wire infrastructure is then used to carry the high speed connection for the short remaining distance to the customers. "

So we'd still be using the crappy phone lines hanging off trees and tacked to walls, where they are struck by lightning and blow up our computers every few months.
Great.
And to do this they need to lay a fibre trunk anyway.

The problem we're suffering from is demand exceeding supply via the uplink to HK. That's the main bottleneck.
We need a much fatter uplink before speeding up the "last mile" can make any difference.

I can see why PCCW would like this VDSL2; it requires you to have a copper landline, so they can keep ripping us off for that as well, instead of ditching them to use mobile and/or IP phones as you would obviously do if you have a fibre-to-home connection.

The rumours came from a person first-hand who is by far the most knowledgeable and experienced Lammaite I know in local telecom matters, so I take him much more seriously than the usual wild rumours.

What I took away from a long discussion with him recently is that we might get some faster PCCW Broadband (VDSL2) in the not-too-distant future, but it'll probably cost quite a bit to get it installed in your home in the few locations where it'll become available initially.

In the meantime, test our few 3/4G service providers in your home and use them for faster Internet for normal Internet activities, via simply switching your larger-size mobile phone to Wifi Hotspot; or a SIM card router, except for high-volume up/downloads.

Getting to use fiber might remain a dream for the foreseeable future, maybe a number of years after the new town(s) in the ex-quarry (and maybe The Baroque) will be built and at least partially occupied, so we're talking at least a decade away.
Betting on 4G and perhaps 5G getting faster and cheaper and higher FUPs before then.

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I don't doubt it's true going forward.
But I cannot believe these were the plans when they laid the fibre.
Anyway, it's clear I'm not going to get fibre here anytime before the insane rents push me off the island.

On the weekend I was in Sham Shui Po, saw several competing broadband street stalls.
200 M for $133/month; that's what we could have if the fibre under our streets was connected.
But we get 1% of the speed at 200-300% the price.

I love my (sometimes anonymous) sources!
A Google map of Lamma's EXISTING fiber broadband, the one that HGC laid a few years ago, cropped to just the Lamma part.

Nobody at all, private, commercial or Govt. has been identified yet actually using this fiber right now.

Note, no off-Lamma connections so far, so the fiber is basically useless at this point, local-only, till Top Express (the cable, fiber and pipe layers, working on the Lamma sewage pipes on right now) or another HGC infrastructure builder can convince the HGC management to go ahead and offer Internet services to residents.

PCCW hasn't bothered to upgrade their speeds for decades, actually downgrading their Lamma customers from 6 to 3Mbps over the last 10 years, while massively hiking their prices here. But if there'd be any competition (HGC looks most likely, but still just a remote chance at this point), they might consider offering higher speeds.

The rumours (from reputable, knowledgeable sources close to PCCW) are for something similar being offered to what's happening on other Outlying Islands these months (30Mbps?), but it's all just rumours at this point. If they don't sort out the off-island link (maybe to Lantau instead of HK Island?), it would all be moot anyway.

Watch this space and the various Lamma/Outlying Islands Broadband groups on Facebook.

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At least they still remember they laid fibre here.

That "FNAL" cable "in progress" comes so close to Lamma -- it must be an international link, so we couldn't plug into it directly, but they could lay a parallel one to link us up to HK while they're at it and then run a line from Mo Tat to connect the SKW end.

I don't have any hope of it happening in my lifetime though.

What bullshit are the 3 "FTTB buildings" (Fibre-to-the-Building") marked on Lamma? Two marked near the library. There certainly aren't any anywhere on Lamma, except perhaps inside HKE.

The "30 Mbps" stuff would be VDSL. Without an upgraded link to HK, all it would do is give faster speed to those who paid up for it by taking away from the rest.
Now you pay for 6 Mbps DSL and get 2 or 3, then you'd get 0.5, if you could get anything at all. Still using the same mediaeval copper phonelines that give you a chance to conduct lighting bolts directly into your PC whenever there's a storm.

Yes, that might happen, reducing the speed for everybody else. The reduction of the max. speed on Lamma Broadband from 6 to 3Mbps, while almost doubling the monthly fees ($164 to $298 for new users) in the last ten years, might be due to them selling their little Microwave link capacity to higher speed 3/4G mobile providers?

In the meantime, at no extra cost, still happy with the no-extra cost 4G hotspot speed in my home office right now. Trying successfully so far to remain within my monthly data cap of 6GB. Cheaper rates for extra GB from 11pm to 7am on some providers these days, but needs a minimum 6-month contract.



Testing all over Pak Kok, these speeds only seem possible at the Pak Kok Ferry Pier and in parts of the New Village, nowhere else we could find, testing the speeds of 3 service providers last Sat evening.

But mobile Internet is limited-data, too expensive and not really suitable for large up/downloads, despite the 3/4G upload speeds of about 30* faster than PCCW Broadband.
Slow, but reliable and unlimited broadband over night remains the best, fixed-price option for large up/downloads, it seems.

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Curious about where this local-only, offline HGC fiber fits into the HK-wide picture?

Here's the complete map from which I cropped the Lamma part:

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Now I see that the brown lines aren't "infrastructure in progress" but are existing international fibres.

From OFCA: "As at October 2015, Hong Kong has nine submarine cable systems, namely, Asia-America Gateway Cable System ("AAG"), Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 ("APCN-2"), Asia Submarine-Cable Express ("ASE"), EAC - C2C, FLAG Europe Asia ("FEA"), FLAG North Asia Loop ("FNAL") / REACH North Asia Loop ("RNAL"), Sea-Me-We 3 ("SMW3"), South-East Asia Japan Cable System ("SJC") and TGN-Intra Asia Cable System ("TGN-IA"). "
Also see http://www.cablemap.info/

The "in progress" lines are orange, like those connecting Lantau with Tuen Mun.

Just where did this come from?

HKEPC discussion forum, submitted by a Chinese friend to me.

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