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 $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?
WoW (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do I send my 150$ again?
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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To add to this, I think it will be a while before most people will see the benefits of having a 50/6 connection over something slightly slower, say 15/5, which is cheaper and usually comes with better offerings.
Append that to Comcast's already-shaky reputation as an internet and cable provider, and I think that Verizon still has a better odds of attracting more fiber-optic broadband converts. Plus, Verizon offers television service with their fast internet plans; so far as I know, Comcast doesn't.
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Re:WoW (Score:5, Funny)
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It is PFM that a company delivers on what they're selling you!
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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.
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I'd worry more if it actually were 50 MB/s (Score:2)
Inconsistent speeds (Score:4, Funny)
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 (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.
Re:WoW (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a very large wager, mind.
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Of course Youtube must keep using 1994's "embed a huge file and let browser play while downloading if it can" technology (!). If I was Adobe, I would spare thousands of developers to fix that fake media plugin and even buy the bandwidth autoswitching patents from Real Networks (which are free to GNU/OSF software).
If they weren't afraid of Google Inc. they would have already started to cap flash
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why they dont outright blacklist them both is beyond me. hell, i was surprised that it was allowed in the first place.
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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.
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.
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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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
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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Dude! Can i hang out with you?!
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caps? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:caps? (Score:5, Funny)
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For $150, there had better be none. And they'd better give me a butler and a diamond-studded modem.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Burst vs Sustained Speed (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Long before that happens though, customers will collect their own information and post it online.
If there was a program that kept track of when you max out your upstream or downstream, and tried to characterize what might be triggering any throttling, that'd be very useful information to post online.
Then, if you could set up a DOCSIS sniffer [paperlined.org] and collect similar data from everyone in your neighborhood, you'd have heaps of useful data.
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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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.
And what happens when the source of the slow-down is external to your ISP's infrastructure? This, I think, is the real problem with "guaranteeing" connection speeds.
You might be able to guarantee YOUR network, but Joe Shmoe isn't going to understand the difference when his favorite website gets slashdotted and takes forever to load. Then the lawyers come out.
The only solution is to put that little * next to the speed on the advert and not actually guarantee anything.
=Smidge=
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What you are saying is that end users are too fucking stupid to learn how it works. While I'll agree that there are some who are, people in general are smart enough to understand a simple explanation of how it works.
Car analogy: You can guaranteed highway speeds capabilities of 120mph on a car. Do people sue Ford because they can't go over 70mph in their mustang?
No matter which way
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Does this suck? Yeah, because the average Joe is going to take his 4.5GB DVD divide by the speed (lets be honest here, he will usually divide by 50MBps not 50Mbps) and say hey I can get that DVD in roughly one and a half minutes. A big challenge is that our connections aren't symetric which isn't very good for P2P. You can't download as fast as you hav
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We already did pay for it [pbs.org]. We were promised 45megabit bidirectional connections. We gave the telco's over 200 billion dollars for it. That money was stolen.
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It
's called buying a T1 or a T3 or even a OC48 if you want the bandwidth.
you gotta pay for it.
"Up to" (Score:2)
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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Anyone feel like trying to write Apache to run over BitTorrent for serving web pages?
offtopic: the new design (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:offtopic: the new design (Score:4, Insightful)
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It has "Use fancy tabs" setting in advanced mode. Slashdot may have "Use Fancy buttons" which thousands of geeks will disable.
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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padding-bottom: 0 !important;
}
And a similar modification for those who aren't OpenStep fans, or are otherwise interested in the content without being unecessarily distracted (several hundred times per article) by giant "Reply To" buttons?
Re:offtopic: the new design (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason they did it: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, the buttons are too tall.
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Doesn't look so bad in light mode.
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We need to have a way to just jump past long threads we're not interested in. The Slashdotter Firefox plugin used to provide this, in the form of a "hide replies" feature. But that plugin is pretty much dead -- I guess the author got tired of trying to keep up with endless HTML tweaks.
What new reply system? I don't see anything really different.
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April 1st was 2 days ago. Please give us back the previous look. The new look has these gawd awful thick box borders around posts, way too much white space thus less information presented forcing more scrolling.
Please don't drink more "Web 2.0" Kool-Aid as it makes you rather stupid.
Does it include Throttling? (Score:2)
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?
Why is there no intermidate speed and price? (Score:2)
It seems very stupid to me but on the other hand what else would you expect from a company that uses it's own name as an adjective?
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It's good for about 4 hours, 26 minutes, and 40 seconds. On the first day of the month.
Verizon FiOS won't cover all of Verizon territory (Score:3, Informative)
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I live in fairly large metropolitan area (> 1 million) which is served by Verizon, however because most of the rest of the state is served by another provider our little island is treated by Verizon as one of their "ugly stepchildren." It appears unlikely that we'll get FiOS from Verizon before 2020, if then.
If I read that 2 days ago, I would've beleived you. I live in a suburban area which has always been slow in adopting broadband. Cable companies kept promising "within the next year" for mroe than half a decade. I ended up upgrading to DSL, then Cable. I've been checking availability of Verizon Fios for about a year now, with a similar message. However, I decided to check yesterday and it is available!
Not sure about national deployment, but Verizon definately beat my expectations. It's a huge project and
Avoiding FIOS markets (Score:2)
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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?
It's a trap! (Score:2)
So buy hosting from somebody. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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me thinks (Score:3, Funny)
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..."
DOCSIS 3.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
So does that mean they'll be providing IPv6 connectivity?
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Uh, because they're going to need to pretty soon [potaroo.net], and DOCSIS 3.0 adds IPv6 support.
Already available elsewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
DOCSIS 3.0 warning (Score:2)
I tried 2 weeks before giving up and it was supposed to be easier than others since (archaic) modem had built in software upgrade option from DOCSIS 1.0 to 1.1.
We are speaking about a ISP sent RESET signal to their customer
How attractive, you ask? (Score:2)
Additional speeds (Score:3, Funny)
Compared to FiOS (Score:2)
Well, I live in the Minneapolis area. FiOS is not available here. So I'd say Comcast has the advantage.
Just dont use it (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in Minneapolis (Score:2)
Zzzz welcome to the past! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
What they advertise isn't what you get (Score:5, Informative)
Only one little problem... They only Delivered 1-Mbps!! After numerous complaints, I finally got a tech out here that told me they had reduced everybody's speed to make room for their TV, telephone and other products.
Re:What about FiOS? (Score:5, Informative)
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This sucks.
FIOS vs Comcast vs ATT (Score:2)
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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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Now, without the cablecard (since you have basic service), you should still pick up the clear QAM channels, but you won't get any programming guide data for them IIRC, which effectively neuters most of the useful TiVo features.
Of course, if you get an antenna you can use the TiVo HD/Series 3 with it, and get pr
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=Smidge=
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Part of the problem comes down to installation costs. Verizon wants to get FiOS out to as many people as possible, but when you consider the cost of rolling out that fiber, and then apartment complexes that have exclusive contracts with cable companies (whic