Think your 1Mbps connection is speedy? You ain't seen nothing yet. A Hong Kong ISP has unveiled a service which zips along at an impressive 1Gbps - well, for local traffic anyway. Connections outside of the island will be a bit slower than that.
The new service is being priced at $215 - around £112 - a month. People who don't reckon they need that much bandwidth can get a 100Mbps service for $34 a month, or around £19. 10Mbps, meanwhile, is available at the bargain price of $16 (around £10) to those lucky islanders.
Around 800,000 of Hong Kong's 2.2 million households will be able to take advantage of the symmetric service, being offered by HongKong Broadband Network. The company is wiring up Cisco routers and switches, and laying miles of Cat5e cable, to cope with the ultra-fast connection speeds.
Meanwhile, scientists have succeeded in firing 60 terabytes of data around the world in just 10 days. The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire was involved in the GridPP project - they aim to get speeds of up to 600Mbps by 2007. The current test ran at a relatively slow 70Mbps.
View: HongKong Broadband Network - English homepage
