Comcast Offers 50 Mbps Residential Speeds

An anonymous reader notes that Comcast is offering a new 50-Mbps / 6-Mbps package for residential customers for $150, starting in Minneapolis-St. Paul and extending nationwide by mid-2010. The new service will use the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, which is nearing ratification. We've recently discussed Comcast's BitTorrent throttling and promise to quit it, and their low-quality 'HD' programming. How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?

Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter...

[pushing-robot]

What good is 50Mbps... If you are unable to P2P?

Fine print

[Hyppy]

50Mbps*

fine print -
*: for only the first 10 seconds of any sustained transaction. Additional fees and restrictions apply. Bandwidth advertised will be dropped to dial-up speeds when used for any protocol not essential to the viewing of a common web page.

Re:caps?

[calebt3]

42. Megabytes.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[chitokutai]

So in other words, Episode 1 or Species? Yikes!

me thinks

[superwiz]

Comcast says "Mbps" the way airlines say "bonus miles".

Re:WoW

[rashire]

Lets not forget the news that came out not long ago that verizon was testing 100 mbps connections on its employees.

Re:WoW

[NormalVisual]

Yeah, but I hear that they're going to be stopping those soon. Something about problems with infections of the skin around the RJ-45 connectors or something like that.

Additional speeds

[esocid]

From DSL reports [dslreports.com]

Comcast says customers on their 6Mbps tier will see upstream speed bumps to 1Mbps at no cost, while 8Mbps downstream customers will see their upstream speeds bumped to 2Mbps. That may actually be the more exciting news for customers eager for more upstream bandwidth.

That is meaningless since no one ever gets anywhere near the supposed bandwidth, but hey maybe you'll be able to get close to that previous allotment.

Inconsistent speeds

[DragonHawk]

This sub-thread cracks me up. Wow, different people get different results.

News flash: Internet not really one giant network, but a bunch of little ones connected together. Performance varies by source, destination, intermediate route, and concurrent demand. This discovery expected to cause imminent death of the 'net.

(Consider the obligatory "series of tube" joke already made.)

Re:WoW

[Pharmboy]

I'm willing to be the pirate bay causes more bandwidth than all of those combined. And squared.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Anonymous Coward]

Links = Web 1.0
Buttons = Web 2.0
???
Profit?