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?

WoW

[Ariastis]

50 mbps, throttled, copied to the NSA, squeezed on the same cable as too many HD channels.

Where do I send my 150$ again?

How attractive compared to FIOs?

[elrous0]

You know, as much as I would love Natalie Portman, I would settle for Natasha Henstridge if she's all I could get in my neighborhood.

In other words, if you live in an area not covered by FIOS, it's as attractive as you're going to get, buddy.

Burst vs Sustained Speed

[ChuBie]

Forget advertising about a new 50 Mbps speed that you may only see 5 of during peak times. I want to see a company advertise their guaranteed speeds for that class of service along with the peak you might hit at 4am.

offtopic: the new design

[doti]

Nice, and the new reply system is great, but I think there's too much vertical space wasted by the gray "Replay to This" and "Parent" buttons.

Re:Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter...

[daskro]

While I can't speak for every city Comcast provide service for, the business class service never suffered from the p2p doom and gloom that has been touted for months on end. I would suspect that Comcast would treat this $150.00 a month service as a business class line.

Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap

[Tsu-na-mi]

How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?

50Mb sounds nice, but if they cut you off after 100GB per month for "excessive traffic", what good is it?

Re:offtopic: the new design

[EMeta]

Agreed. Need option to change it back. When it was just text it looked a lot more like I was working while reading /.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[HockeyPuck]

Why are those even "buttons" the old linkable text was fine before.

Re:Avoiding FIOS markets

[arbiter1]

FIOS is cheaper. FIOS doesn't throttle the shit out of your uploads. I expect Comcast will avoid taking this product to markets where FIOS is available.

they don't throttle you YET! gotta remember during this how time fcc been on comcast case verizon was one companies backing comcast's side.

50Mbps untill...

[downix]

I can imagine the comments now

"Wow, 50Mbps, let me try something"
second later
"Hey, it just slowed down to 40Mbps"
second later
"what the, it slowed to 12Mbps"
one more second
"Hey, it's at 28.8Kbps!"

While back at the Comcast HQ
"Gentlemen, the beauty of the system is that it is only 50Mbps until someone actually uses. Any use of the pipeline for such bandwidth gobbling activities such as web browsing or email will be immediately countered with our new bandwidth load balancing software, reducing the available bandwidth in order to keep our profits up..."

Re:WoW

[sammy baby]

Not that I'm privy to their bandwidth statistics, but I'd be willing to wager that YouTube gets more traffic from Comcast customers than Amazon Unboxed and XBox Movies put together. Almost certainly more than iTMS by itself, too.

Not a very large wager, mind. ;)

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[zappepcs]

I'm sorry, NOT! If Comcast built their network correctly to begin with, the infrastructure COULD handle specific bandwidth requirements that could in turn be advertised correctly.

The advertised vs. actual problem occurs when the architecture of the network is itself sloppy, and relies on end users never testing their bandwidth at the same time. Generally, this works, but is NOT good for guaranteed QoS.

If every neighborhood WAN/Ring was set up with 2x the required network feeding it you would get reduced speed during an outage and guaranteed bandwidth possibilities. The problem is that requires upgrades, and we know that won't happen till some pork toting politicians says the county/state will pay for it.

Current and previous network designs were vamped up analog cable tv networks (read as router jammed in outdoor cabinet somewhere in the neighborhood) the cable companies went into the network business with less than suitable design and staff and winged it. The public is now happy to have the less than optimal service that was offered rather than demanding 'you can hear a pin drop' quality.

50Mbps is what I would equate to high end, but I'm willing to bet that the QoS is NO better than dialup, just faster most of the time. If the QoS was better, they'd advertise it.

What this means is that the cheapest upgrade to crap old equipment came with a huge bandwidth increase by default. They could give you a QoS guaranteed 15Mb/3Mb and setup the network to produce that... but nope, not happening. It 'SOUNDS' so much better to say **50Mbps**

It's nothing but marketing droid bs.

They throttle more than P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

Although its not widely publicized they have also been found to throttle Lotus Notes and iChat sessions (making them unusable after a minute or so) among other things - probably many more other things. There's alot more going on under the covers than just an assault on Bit Torrent. I VPN to work (which is one of the only ways around their throttling at this point - VPN) so its speed is fine.

But it begs the question, what good is this supposed speed you buy when Comcast doesn't actually let you use it? This is deceptive advertising at its best on Comcast's part. Their internet packages are more expensive than DSL typically and could be justified because they were "faster", but their not really, because you don't get to use that speed. I'm in the process of migrating to DSL because of Comcast's deception and denying they've been doing this. Net neutrality needs some more poster children like Comcast. ;-)

So buy hosting from somebody.

[Animats]

Commercial web hosting is so cheap that there's no reason to do it on a home machine. Don't get it from your ISP; there are hundreds of competing web hosting companies. You can get quite decent capabilities for under $10/month.

Just dont use it

[nurb432]

Or they will complain and cut you off. "up to" doesn't mean " you can use "

Re:WoW

[Danathar]

You also forgot, it's also probably not 50mbps.

They sell the "8meg" tier here but the pipe to the headend cant handle the 8meg so if you do any speed tests OUTSIDE their reccomended you never get more than 4.4-5.

Don't know where you are. I subscribe to that service and I've been getting consistent 2MB/s (that's right...2 Megabytes) downstream and a solid 2 Megabit upstream.

The thing with cable is it's all about location. If you are in an area with nobody but you in your local "group" then more than likely you be in sweet bandwidth heaven.

If you are on a street with 10 15 year olds downloading every 720p/1080i movie via bittorrent your bandwidth is probably going to suck.

Youtube + Profits.

[soren100]

"A decade ago we couldn't even conceive of ... YouTube," Google Inc.'s video-sharing service, said Greg Butz, Comcast's vice president for marketing and product development.

Of course they were dreaming of video-on-demand a decade ago,they were talking about it at least as far back as '96.

What they could not conceive of was the fact that would be getting free video that you didn't have to pay Comcast for.

So what they do now is throttle your connection back out of spite. If I have any kind of sustained download, I end up at sub-dialup speeds on my supposedly 6 mps Comcast cablemodem. It works very predictably -- 7mbs for about the first 10 seconds and it starts dropping, and then a while later I am at 40 kilobits per second, I kid you not. If I stop the transfer and start it again I get the exact same "loss of service" curve.

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

If you're downloading from something that supports resuming like HTTP or FTP, couldn't you use some kind of modified download splitter to break it up into multiple concurrent downloads, each getting restarted if it falls below a certain threshhold?

Not exactly the nicest thing to do to someones webserver, but would pretty much entirely negate comcast's throttling.

Re:WoW

[jandrese]

You are probably thinking of the Bandwidth Delay Product [wikipedia.org], but if that's a problem you can usually tweak your stack get better performance. Typically, fast hosts are also lower latency on the internet, so it's not a huge problem. Hosts with high latency are almost always slow anyway.

Re:WoW

[Sunrun]

Problem is, Verizon's FiOS offerings aren't available in the Twin Cities Metro Area. So the question of whether or not they'll offer significant competition to Comcast's new "speed" offering is almost entirely moot.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[jgarra23]

depends... are you going for "bad movie" or "bad movie with partial nudity"?


At least with the partial nudity you also get an amusing storyline, Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley and a movie that goes someplace. with the "bad movie" you get some fake-good actor like "Liam Neeson" the WORST fanbase of anything in the world, and a move that goes NOWEHERE

The reason they did it:

[IdeaMan]

All those users that posted a signature that looked exactly like the reply to this line, linked to the logout function in /.

Yeah, the buttons are too tall.