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Comcast Offers 50 Mbps Residential Speeds
Posted by
kdawson
on Thursday April 03, @10:46AM
from the time-for-fios-leapfrog dept.
from the time-for-fios-leapfrog dept.
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 $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?
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Firehose:Comcast offers higher residential speeds by Anonymous Coward
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
WoW (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do I send my 150$ again?
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Re:WoW (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:WoW (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Re:WoW (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a very large wager, mind.
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Youtube + Profits. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Youtube + Profits. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not exactly the nicest thing to do to someones webserver, but would pretty much entirely negate comcast's throttling.
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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.
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Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter... (Score:5, Funny)
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How attractive compared to FIOs? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, if you live in an area not covered by FIOS, it's as attractive as you're going to get, buddy.
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Re:How attractive compared to FIOs? (Score:5, Informative)
At any rate, I'm not going back to Comcast even if they offer me 150/50. They're a horrible company to deal with.
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caps? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:caps? (Score:5, Funny)
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Burst vs Sustained Speed (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Fine print (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap (Score:5, Insightful)
50Mb sounds nice, but if they cut you off after 100GB per month for "excessive traffic", what good is it?
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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?
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50Mbps untill... (Score:5, Insightful)
"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..."
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Already available elsewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:What about FiOS? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What about FiOS? (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest downside is that the television is not TiVo compatible. That alone has me considering switching back to Comcast for television, but they can pry my FiOS internet service out of my cold, dead fingers.
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Re:offtopic: the new design (Score:5, Informative)
It's the whitespace between the comment and the buttons that does it. Put the following in your user stylesheet:
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Re:offtopic: the new design (Score:5, Insightful)
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