Digi, Romania's largest ISP launches 10 Gbps fixed broadband for just 10,1 EUR/mo

[Raizeno]

Summary

- DIGI is launching Fiberlink 10 Gbps, Romania's fastest internet service for new and existing customers;
- The price of the service is 50 lei(10euro)/month  (VAT included) for the Fiberlink 10 G package and 45 lei/month (VAT included) for the Fiberlink 2.5 G package;
- In December 2021 the service will be available in Bucharest and in 2022 in all county residences.
DIGI launches today, September 30, for the first time in Romania, Fiberlink 10 G, the fastest fiber optic internet service, bringing customers speeds of up to 10 Gigabits per second. By introducing this innovative service to the market, the company becomes the first operator in Romania to offer a product that reaches 10 Gbps and thus marks the evolution towards a new stage of development.
The Fiberlink 10 Gbps high-speed internet service will be made available to the company's customers in three phases. In the first phase, customers living in areas of Sector 1 in Bucharest (available on the website) will benefit from the advantages of this product, and in December the service will be offered to the entire capital. From 2022, the Fiberlink 10 G subscription will be available in all county seats, starting with Brasov, Cluj, Constanta, Craiova, Iasi, Oradea and Timisoara.
The monthly price of a Fiberlink 10 G subscription is 50 lei (10 euro) (VAT included), and for the Fiberlink 2.5 G service it is 45 lei (9 euro) (VAT included)
"Romania is included, as of today, in the category of countries where the new generation of digital services is operating, thanks to Fiberlink 10 G fiber optic internet technology. This is a bold initiative by our company to significantly improve the customer experience and hopefully facilitate access to the internet of the future. The performance of this service is 10 times better than 1 Gbps technology, a package launched by DIGI eight years ago. For this progress I thank all our colleagues who have shown constant commitment so that DIGI is the first operator in Romania to provide its customers with the best communications services at the most attractive and affordable prices on the market," said Valentin Popoviciu, Vice President DIGI | RCS & RDS.
 

 

Quotes

Quote

Known as Fiberlink 10 G, it is initially being made available to customers living in the sector 1 area of Bucharest and throughout the capital from December, before being rolled out nationally, starting in Brasov, Cluj, Constanta, Craiova, Iasi, Oradea and Timisoara, in 2022. The monthly cost of the Fiberlink 10 G subscription is RON50 (€10), while Digi’s Fiberlink 2.5 G service costs RON45, with VAT included in both cases

 

My thoughts

Wonder how much is Linus paying for that 10Gbps

 

Sources

https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2021/10/01/digi-launches-10-giga-service/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/pyimbe/10gbps_internet_12/

[leadeater]

Wish our residential 10Gb plans were this cheap, 10x this and that's about how much it costs here.

[Raizeno]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Wish our residential 10Gb plans were this cheap, 10x this and that's about how much it costs here.

yeah internet is dirt cheap and very good here but the problem is that the equipment to take advantage of that connection is very expensive for Romania , unless you do direct connection to the pc.

[MultiGamerClub]

Im paying 80€ a month just for 150/150 fiber.. And this is 10 EURO? Fucking hell!

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Wish our residential 10Gb plans were this cheap, 10x this and that's about how much it costs here.

Be glad you have the option, our whole street is stuck with only one ISP and their CGN+asymmetric (highest plan 500/25 mbps) BS.....

[Elisis]

2 hours ago, huilun02 said:

But who asked?

The point of news is finding out stuff that you might not know. Don't be insufferable just because you don't care about the topic.

[poochyena]

Do they explain how its so cheap? Its $70 for google fiber here. $100/month for 2gig. We have a lot of competition too, I have 3 or 4 ISPs available to me and most people in the city.

[tim0901]

2 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Its not about the topic being made. Its about having 10Gbit internet

I'd love 10Gbit/second internet and would 100% find uses for it if I had it. Off-site backups of my NAS, for example, would be much more feasible at this speed. With my current 30/8 connection (which costs over 4x as much as this) transferring 1TB would take three days and completely incapacitate the connection for the rest of the household. On a 10Gb connection that could be backed up in as little as ~15 minutes - the speed of the server's storage would become the limiting factor in the equation.

Sure the full potential of such a connection isn't going to be utilised by everyone, but if it was available in my country at that price it would be the cheapest, yet simultaneously fastest, internet connection available to consumers. I can only see this as a bad thing if their plan is to lure people in and then hike up the price.

[tim0901]

39 minutes ago, poochyena said:

Do they explain how its so cheap? Its $70 for google fiber here. $100/month for 2gig. We have a lot of competition too, I have 3 or 4 ISPs available to me and most people in the city.

 

The answer to this is actually fascinating.

 

My understanding from some Google-fu is that competition there is far stronger, but this is because the country had this 'neighborhood networks' thing in the past. They were basically community-built networks (fuelled in the early days by rampant piracy) that were built without government approval. They began in the early 90s before commercial internet ever came to the country, essentially forming giant LANs for playing games and sharing movies/music.

 

These networks were built above-ground on poles, which should have been illegal but the government simply didn't enforce it. As such, huge high-speed networks began springing up. And then when commercial internet arrived, their roll-out was often required to use underground deployment, which took longer and so people simply built the lines themselves above-ground. Even today there is apparently a lot of aerial fibre in Romania in areas that, legally, should be duct-based only.

 

And to top it all off, the commercial internet providers started to piggy-back these networks when they arrived in the early 90s. The entire country essentially jumped from a poor telephone network straight to full fiber thanks to community-built networks.

 

So the answer to the question of "how is it so cheap?" is that the ISPs know that if they do charge too much, the people will simply build it themselves.

 

Here's an article that goes into a bit more detail on the matter:

https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/the-curious-case-of-romanian-broadband/

 

[wamred]

So, is this just like $11 a month for 10 gig? 

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, tim0901 said:

 

The answer to this is actually fascinating.

 

My understanding from some Google-fu is that competition there is far stronger, but this is because the country had this 'neighborhood networks' thing in the past. They were basically community-built networks (fuelled in the early days by rampant piracy) that were built without government approval. They began in the early 90s before commercial internet ever came to the country, essentially forming giant LANs for playing games and sharing movies/music.

 

These networks were built above-ground on poles, which should have been illegal but the government simply didn't enforce it. As such, huge high-speed networks began springing up. And then when commercial internet arrived, their roll-out was often required to use underground deployment, which took longer and so people simply built the lines themselves above-ground. Even today there is apparently a lot of aerial fibre in Romania in areas that, legally, should be duct-based only.

 

And to top it all off, the commercial internet providers started to piggy-back these networks when they arrived in the early 90s. The entire country essentially jumped from a poor telephone network straight to full fiber thanks to community-built networks.

 

So the answer to the question of "how is it so cheap?" is that the ISPs know that if they do charge too much, the people will simply build it themselves.

 

Here's an article that goes into a bit more detail on the matter:

https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/the-curious-case-of-romanian-broadband/

 

Also, many countries like Romania didn't have mass networks for so long that they weren't faced with the same conundrum most advanced economies were, I.E they had to lay new cables to make it work so what did they lay? new fibre from the onset.   Most developed nations already have 70 years old copper everywhere and the cost of digging it up and trying to replace it all at once is way more than what they could conceivable charge for the services provided on them.   Which is why we in Australia have the NBN still being rolled out to areas 11 years later and the cost of internet not actually that much cheaper. 

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, tim0901 said:

 

 

So the answer to the question of "how is it so cheap?" is that the ISPs know that if they do charge too much, the people will simply build it themselves.

 

Here's an article that goes into a bit more detail on the matter:

https://www.thecgo.org/benchmark/the-curious-case-of-romanian-broadband/

 

The irony here is that is a case where "piracy" was the impetus, and offering a "better, legal" service actually works.

 

The equivalent to doing this in the US or Canada, about 25 years ago was running 802.11 (pre-b) point to point towers into areas that only had 28.8k modems over valleys. If the local telecom won't do it, you do it. The consequences (at least here in BC) is that eventually the cable/phone company buys you out because the purpose of the community-built network has run it's course (getting tv and internet somewhere that has been unserved until now.) 

 

That said, "cable" modems is what started "unlimited" internet in Canada and the US, but piracy is what turned "unlimited" into "metered" internet and cable companies got extremely greedy, seeing the possibility of billing landline users by the kilobyte like wireless companies were doing (which was at 5 cents a KB in 2003.) It wasn't until legal downloads (Apple iTunes) and legal streaming (Netflix, Crunchyroll) that this started moving back towards unmetered internet.

 

What I expect, at some point, is that places that are better connected and have lenient immigration laws, will simply attract more streaming services/creators, or DIY p2p streaming setups. After all if you have 10Gb internet at home, and a 4K stream only needs 25-50mbps, you can easily do 200-400 streams on your own hardware, eventually. I think right now the only thing that even keeps back advancements in video content creation is the lack of hardware AV1 encoders, so everyone is still using 1080p60 to stream, because 4K streaming is essentially impossible right now without pre-encoding it.

 

[grg994]

3 hours ago, poochyena said:

Do they explain how its so cheap?

I think a big factor is that the population density in EU is much higher compared to many parts of NA or other parts of the world. It is much more economical for the ISP.

 

City structures in Central-Eastern Europe also suit internet delivery way better. Cities are not made of endless suburbs but rather block houses and housing complexes - much of the infrastructural cost of internet is for the demultiplexers at the edge of the core network which the cable modems are wired to.

 

To illustrate I live in Budapest, Hungary (~2M residents), in a family house next to a block house neighborhood. 1Gbit/s internet for 30 Euro/month became available years ago in the block houses 2 street away and it took 3-4 years(!) for the ISP to start offering the same service in my street with the family houses (before that you could have 100Mbit/s for the 20 Euro/month).

[Dracarris]

1 hour ago, grg994 said:

I think a big factor is that the population density in EU is much higher compared to many parts of NA or other parts of the world. It is much more economical for the ISP.

It's also the general price level of a country which is very low for Romania and many other Eastern-European countries. 10G fiber is available in large parts of Switzerland for a few years already at around 50$ per month.

 

Cold heart truth, people in NA are getting grossly ripped off for internet access, and yes that includes very densely populated cities.

[mariushm]

Yeah... they're gonna offer that and I have no doubt that it's real but....

 

The ppoe protocol they use will cause some cpu usage... so I don't know how fast of a computer you'd need to sustain such speeds.  even with their 1gbps plans, lots of people were complaining about cpus being loaded when doing higher speed transfers 

 

the company that offers it has lousy tech support and custom relations ... maybe things have changed since a year or two ago, but back then, if  you wanted to subscribe they would schedule to send a team to your apartment in 2-3 weeks and even then they could not commit to a time frame, you'd have to take half the day off to be home, otherwise they'd leave and reschedule. 

If there's a technical problem, a bad router or whatever, you'd have a hard time solving it quickly. 

When it works, it works, but even then it's not as "smooth" and stable service as other providers. 

 

In the town where I live, I started with their competitor UPC, which is now sold to Vodafone ... they use cable modems and docsis so the download and upload speeds are not equal. Now I have 500 mbps down, 25 mbps upload.

I started because the place I rented already had it and stuck with them. Since then, I changed two places and still using them

The UPC support was great... has some high pings late in the day at around 6-7pm , contacted support and they scheduled a team to come replace by cable modem at 9 am the next day and they even called at 8:30 to ask if I'm available because they finished somewhere else faster.

 

I also compared my internet with my sister's which the cheapest plan that company offered, something in the 300 mbps down / 100 mbps up or something like that. 

The speeds were less consistent compared to my IPS ... worked fine within Europe due to peering agreements, but transferring stuff from US or Asia, it was pure luck, depending on what ocean fibre your packets went through you got slow or fast speeds, high latency etc.

My ISP is more consistent, I'd get higher "single download thread" speeds and more "stable" speeds with whatever datacenter or site I'd test around the world.

 

 

[Doobeedoo]

I'm still dreaming to see any operator at my city to expand their fiber infrastructure sadly. Reading how they're expanding through certain neighbourhoods for years now, yet it's in so little places. Sad.

[BondiBlue]

I can only dream of having such a cheap plan. I pay just over $100 USD for 400/20 over cable (though it's not configured right, and I only get 250 down). Gigabit fiber is available one street over, but they supposedly have no plans to expand that throughout the rest of the neighborhood. It still isn't anywhere near as cheap as this plan in Romania though. 

[Roswell]

All of the "omg so cheap I pay so much more" commentary is a result of nobody understanding context.

 

Romania is a poor country with an average GDP 1/8th-ish of the US. Yes, you pay more for your internet because you make WAY more money than your counterpart in Romania.

[BondiBlue]

28 minutes ago, Roswell said:

All of the "omg so cheap I pay so much more" commentary is a result of nobody understanding context.

 

Romania is a poor country with an average GDP 1/8th-ish of the US. Yes, you pay more for your internet because you make WAY more money than your counterpart in Romania.

Even so, this still shows that other countries have much better speeds available. I don't even have the option of gigabit, let alone 10 gig. If I did I'd have to pay way more for it than the difference in incomes between the US and Romania. 

[leadeater]

36 minutes ago, Roswell said:

All of the "omg so cheap I pay so much more" commentary is a result of nobody understanding context.

 

Romania is a poor country with an average GDP 1/8th-ish of the US. Yes, you pay more for your internet because you make WAY more money than your counterpart in Romania.

Yep but at least on the equipment level the cost isn't any different. None of the telecommunications and network providers are selling to Romania at a cheaper cost because hey are poor.

 

Of course like 80% to 90% of the cost in delivering services is civil ground works and consents which would be farrr cheaper there.

[Paul Thexton]

That’s an incredible price (presumably the kit to terminate the fibre will be costly?), at this point I’d be happy to have a 100/200 Mbs synchronous connection from Virgin Media here in the uk. FTTP does exist here but the installation is extremely expensive due to the infrastructure not existing. 
 

This is what I currently get from my WiFi, Ethernet isn’t wholly dissimilar other than lower latency. I’m paying £50+/month and Virgin regularly increase the price blaming it on “we need to keep investing to keep improving the service”

 

 

[tim0901]

1 hour ago, Paul Thexton said:

That’s an incredible price (presumably the kit to terminate the fibre will be costly?), at this point I’d be happy to have a 100/200 Mbs synchronous connection from Virgin Media here in the uk. FTTP does exist here but the installation is extremely expensive due to the infrastructure not existing. 
 

This is what I currently get from my WiFi, Ethernet isn’t wholly dissimilar other than lower latency. I’m paying £50+/month and Virgin regularly increase the price blaming it on “we need to keep investing to keep improving the service”

*insert typical internet comment on how you have it great compared to most of the country who are struggling on sub 50mbit connections*

 

But seriously yeah, internet here in the UK kinda sucks doesn't it? You can get FTTP from BT without having to pay serious £££ in installation fees now, but the rollout is kinda slow especially outside of London. A non-sale price of £50pm for 250/73 or £60pm for 450/110 isn't awful and certainly sounds better than what you've already got, but it's hardly a stunning deal. In theory it's available in my area, but rollout conveniently stops 2 doors down from me... on both sides...

 

I'd suggest dumping Virgin media as in my experience they're unstable, expensive trash but honestly, on the country scale, they're all as trash as each other and whichever is best pretty much seems to come down to geography. I don't think any of them are truly any worse than each other, but locally I think there are winners and losers so if Virgin is stable for you in your area then I'm not sure if I'd risk swapping without getting the opinions of others nearby.

[Paul Thexton]

17 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

I'd suggest dumping Virgin media as in my experience they're unstable, expensive trash

I’ve never had issues with stability but they’re certainly expensive. Unfortunately my openreach/ex-BT drop line is not great for DSL, offering pretty poor speeds hence why I’m still with Virgin. 

 

19 minutes ago, tim0901 said:

insert typical internet comment on how you have it great compared to most of the country who are struggling on sub 50mbit connections*

Yeah I do appreciate that. My sister lives in South Wales and her broadband speeds are typically 4-6Mbps. It’s a real shock to the system whenever I’m there

[williamcll]

On 10/26/2021 at 1:41 AM, huilun02 said:

But who asked?

me so I can laugh at people in first world countries with third world internet.

[Mark Kaine]

cool. Does it work in GER? free market and stuff,  surely?

 

I mean seriously,  cool starter pack, I wish it'd be that cheap or even available here (some people still can only get "ISDN" afaik lol)

 

On 10/27/2021 at 1:19 AM, Paul Thexton said:

I'd be happy to have a 100/200 Mbs synchronous connection

this is what gets me, most isps have very high dl speed,  low upload... imo both is equally important and having a 1:2 ratio or so helps a lot with online gaming... i used to have a 5mb/2.5mb connection 15 years ago and online gaming was a lot less laggier... which might have other reasons as well, but having synchronized up and dl speeds surely helped.  Now I have 95 dl 35 up and it kinda sucks... at least its almost 2:1, I guess...