Comcast Offers 50 Mbps Residential Speeds 332
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?
caps? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed (Score:5, Interesting)
That's going against the general notion of the packet switching, and quite difficult/expensive for the company to do (especially from an advertising standpoint.)
Perhaps a good compromise would be disclosing the total bandwidth available for a given street/town/etc and the number of users. Also average speeds during peak hours would be useful, or in general an explicit policy on bandwidth usage- you get X gb
Can I run a server? (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now, I have a DSL account through speakeasy, whose TOS promise that I can do all of this, and they won't take it away from me. The other ISPs hereabouts either flatly forbid home servers or "reserve the right" to change their permissions without notice. And they won't sell commercial service to a "home" customer. So FIOS et al would eliminate such family-and-friends services, as well as risking my friends' bands' control of their own recordings.
Anyone know of general solutions to this sort of problem? Not just for me, but for all the other geeks either doing or thinking of something similar? Is there a way we can put our own stuff online, and guarantee that the ISP can't take it away from us and use it for their own commercial purposes?
Re:WoW (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh my goodness! Not YouTube! Never mind services like iTunes, Amazon Unboxed, and XBox Movies which provide legal, multi-GB movie files that will happily chew through your bandwidth cap in no time flat. The real concern at hand is... YouTube.
Executives always have a way of cracking me up.
DOCSIS 3.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
So does that mean they'll be providing IPv6 connectivity?
Already available elsewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
but they rip out your copper (Score:1, Interesting)
Also, there's a battery in there which I'm guessing is undermaintained, so in a few years your phone will only be as reliable as the power grid.
POTS is a modern engineering marvel. Its feature set sucks, but *nothing* matches its reliability. I'm not ready to give that up yet.
Zzzz welcome to the past! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Youtube + Profits. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WoW (Score:5, Interesting)
"A decade ago we couldn't even conceive of
Oh my goodness! Not YouTube! Never mind services like iTunes, Amazon Unboxed, and XBox Movies which provide legal, multi-GB movie files that will happily chew through your bandwidth cap in no time flat. The real concern at hand is... YouTube.
1) broadband penetration in the US, practically nil in 1998
2) time it would take for broadband to spread
3) give-it-away business model, nobody could have imagined a youtube would break even
Most of the thinking back then was still very conventional, basically a direct translation of subscription cable channels to the web. DEN came about around then, burned brightly and flamed out. These guys were making their own content the way HBO creates original series and movies rather than only reairing Hollywood crap.
The biggest strikes against streaming content back then were:
1) crappy picture quality
2) nobody wants to watch a movie sitting at their desk
The dumbest analysts were those who did not see those factors changing. The problem the early movers had is they entered the market too soon and burned out before they could start making money.
Right now, my greatest concern is that the big-money players are still trying to set themselves up as brokers for access to the Internet. In the old days, not everyone could afford a TV transmitter and licensing fees, not everyone could put together a cable channel. There were solid technical limitations that played to big media's favor. Today, Joe Blow can put together a comedy bit and have it race around the world faster than Jay Leno. I can view anything I want from any source with my PC and could do so from my X-Box if Microsoft wasn't such a dick about locking things down, necessitating hacks like Tversity. These are just artificial barriers to entry.
Beyond that, it's still expensive to put a show together. Stupid animal tricks is one thing, a proper show to compete with what the networks can do burns money. We've yet to see an independent production company get a show off the ground and make money solely off of Internet distribution. There have been some indie movies that have had a measure of Internet success but nothing that's been a break-out success. Of course, one could argue that beak-out successes like Seinfeld, Friends, Lost, American Idle, etc, are created by the hype and coverage given by mainstream media, creating a promotional feedback loop. If an internet phenomenon show cannot be bought out by a network, it will receive no coverage because that's just free advertising.
Speed test suite? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to see some easy to use client / server solution that would do a batch of tests; HTTP, HTTP for >10 seconds, FTP, bit torrent and report back if any are throttled. Perhaps the information could be anonymized and stored in a data base to allow even more stats to be generated such as if there is throttling based on time of day, problems with busy periods of the day, problems with certain localities.
At the very least, some laywers interested in some class action money could invest in providing this service.
Re:WoW (Score:2, Interesting)
In my rural area, FTTH 100/10 Mbps costs euro75 per month, and that includes basic TV over IP. It also has no throttling or monthly quotas. The local ISP considers this attractive enough to lay a couple of kilometers of fiber to reach a handful of widely separated houses.