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The Internet Cloud Networking United States

Comcast Starts Rolling Out 2-Gigabit Download Speeds to Millions of US Homes (theverge.com) 102

Comcast says it's "evolving its entire network architecture" (along with its equipment and customer devices) -- and it's not just a multi-gig network. They're calling it America's fastest -- and its largest. It's being rolled out "immediately" to millions of homes and business, "combined with up to 5x-to-10x faster upload speeds."

"Comcast plans on bringing multi-gig internet speeds to 34 cities across the U.S. by the end of this year," reports the Verge, "and will later expand its reach to more than 50 million households by the end of 2025." According to a press release, the company has already started rolling out 2-gig speeds over its broadband network in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Augusta, Georgia; Panama City Beach, Florida; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Customers in these cities will also get to take advantage of upload speeds that Comcast says are five to 10 times faster than what it currently offers. The upload speeds appear to max out at 200Mbps, even with the new Gigabit x2 plan, but Comcast intends to change that. It's launching multi-gig symmetrical speeds next year, which will enable multi-gig speeds for both downloads and uploads.

"As part of this initiative, Comcast is accelerating the transformation of its network to a virtualized cloud-based architecture that is fully prepared for 10G and DOCSIS 4.0..." explains the press release, "which will deliver multi-gig symmetrical speeds over the connections already installed in tens of millions of homes and businesses."

The big advantage of digital network technology is "rather than maintaining, updating, and replacing traditional analog network appliances by hand -- which can take days or even weeks -- Comcast engineers can reliably maintain, troubleshoot, and upgrade core network components almost instantly, with a few keystrokes on a laptop or mobile app. This also makes the network much more energy efficient and is an important element of Comcast's plan to become carbon neutral by 2035."

Editor's note: An earlier version of the story said Comcast was offering 2-gigabyte download speeds when it should have said 2-gigabit. We regret the error.
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Comcast Starts Rolling Out 2-Gigabit Download Speeds to Millions of US Homes

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  • Comcast data caps (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 11, 2022 @08:35PM (#62873025)
    I wonder how fast those will get eaten up at those speeds...
    • Big pipes like this are for allowing multiple devices to operate simultaneously. I had to break the bad news to a friend that he was paying extra for extra bandwidth that he would never be able to use on a single device.
      • by Mascot ( 120795 )

        There's no accounting for what big pipes mean to you, but for me they're for cutting down on wait times. E.g. for being able to open Steam and have a game download and start in less time than it takes me to fetch a drink, rather than waiting around for half an hour. My gaming rig has no issue filling my gigabit all by itself during that scenario.

      • by lsllll ( 830002 )

        I'm not disputing that it's crazy to overpay for service you're not going to use, but nowadays I find it hard to believe that anybody has only 1 device on their home network. I just did an "nmap -sn" on my home network and I have 30 devices that were pingable (and I don't even have any home automation devices). Granted that I'm not your average user, but my daughter's apartment has 2 TVs, 2 computers, 1 laptop, 1 (or 2) consoles, and 2 cell phones. That's 7 right there. And before you say that "2 people

        • I haven't seen the technical datasheet for their docsis 4 modem/router so I don't know if this still holds true... but in the past I've not seen any consumer grade device that can handle more than 1gig on its backplane. And that only at large packet sizes, and only when switching on the lan. Most home devices you'll be lucky to top 300meg on upload at small packet sizes, regardless of how big your "pipe" is or what technology is being used.
          • by lsllll ( 830002 )

            I agree. I have business service Comcast 1Gb/s and using a computer connected directly to the modem with no router I cannot get more than 800 (without jumbo frames), which I think is pretty good, considering on my home network over a switch I can only get about 900 using netcat.

            To leverage using the 1Gb/s connection without shelling out a few hundreds of dollars for an appliance, I created a VM on a Proxmox server I already had and installed OPNSense on it. Through that I can get about 760Mb/s from the co

            • by crbowman ( 7970 )

              I have ATT fiber and consistently get 939 MegaBits/s down AND up. Real world speeds to random sites out on the internet aren't nearly the same but when I need to download 50GB updates to my engineering software it makes HUGE difference. I had comcast and ATT fiber is orders of magnitude more reliable. In several years of service I haven't had a single outage and I can use my own device (thought you have to be tech savvy for that). Finally my IPs don't bounce around every week. I've had the same IP for

              • by lsllll ( 830002 )

                Are all your ports unblocked (eg. SMTP?), because sometimes providers block some business ports.

                When I moved in 2015 from boonies to further out in the boonies, my only option was AT&T DSL. I HAD to take it, and they said I'd be getting 30 down, 5 up (up was important, because I host my company's web site and email at home). When they installed it, I tested and I was getting 8 down, 1 up, which was not going to work. I used to have Comcast business in my previous address, so I called Comcast and for

            • Yep there has been a bit of a who moves first problem for consumer lan speeds over 1 gbit. This will increase demand for next gen ethernet devices, which in turn will help bring prices down and get more of them on the network. whether anyone needs > 1 gbit now or not doesnt matter, this is a good move and should remain a viable network for a long time. and as others have said 1 gbit is good for game/app/phone installs and updates. few would use that bandwidth constantly but less time waiting for a 4 or 1
    • by Anonymous Coward

      I wonder how fast those will get eaten up at those speeds...

      Now you can exceed your data cap in the first 30 minutes of day 1 and Comcast can collect overage fees the rest of the month.

    • I'm curious how many Comcast customers have the hardware to take advantage of those speeds. Most people only have Gigabit Ethernet ports on their PC's, or 802.11ac Wi-Fi access points that seem to top out around 550 Mb/s in real-world conditions.

      • That's exactly it!

      • It's not about any single device having a gig port (other than the obvious requirement that the cable modem has multiple gig ports). It's about having a half dozen devices, TVs, etc., all running at once, streaming HD+ content.

      • Not only that salient point, but as a "Gigspeed" subscriber I've found that who I connect to really determines the bandwidth. My home can have all the speed it wants, but when I connect to Steam in San Jose my downloads top out at around 100 B/s*, out of the advertised speed of 1200 Mb/s. It's even slower for other sites.

        * This is what the Steam UI reports, "B/s" with no Kilo, Mega, Giga prefix, so...(shrugs).
        • Many people donâ(TM)t understand the last mile factor. As worded I interpret TFA to mean that it will be available, not that anyoneâ(TM)s speed will improve at a given price. I had Comcast Biz for about 12 years and it worked well, though it took some work to keep a halfway reasonable rate. When I moved recently they wouldnâ(TM)t even continue the plan / price I had, but they had no problem charging me an early termination fee.
      • by gmack ( 197796 )

        On my LAN, I have a pfSense firewall with 10gbps ports, My PC and NAS have 10gbps and a couple of devices have 2.5gbps ports. My connection to the internet is 1gbps (it could connect faster but .. ) I never hit close to a gig even counting all devices. I can do more than 1 gbps if I connect on my lan or connect to one of the other subnets through the firewall but never on the net and that's even if I bittorrent. All devices combined can't manage even half of 1 gbps.

    • I wonder how fast those will get eaten up at those speeds...

      I had AT&T, and believe it or not Comcast has actually worked out much better for me. I pay an extra $30 a month for no cap and am on the 1 Gbs / 40 Mbs plan. It isn't perfect, and I never get over 700 down, but way better than what I experienced with AT&T.

      I switched from AT&T because their piece of shit gateway wasn't working correctly. However, since it was at least able to connect to the internet they refused to replace it. Not to mention that every single time a technician came to our ne

      • by crbowman ( 7970 )

        ATT fiber has been much more reliable for me. I've managed to get rid of their box (not something every user could probably do but you can extract the certs and build you own gateway). My IP doesn't change literally every week like it did on comcast and I can buy extra statics (not that I'd need to the IP hasn't changed in 3 years). I get reliable 939MBits up and down with no data caps. I've never had an outage in 3 years. Comcast sucked for me.

        • ATT fiber has been much more reliable for me. I've managed to get rid of their box (not something every user could probably do but you can extract the certs and build you own gateway). My IP doesn't change literally every week like it did on comcast and I can buy extra statics (not that I'd need to the IP hasn't changed in 3 years). I get reliable 939MBits up and down with no data caps. I've never had an outage in 3 years. Comcast sucked for me.

          No one offers fiber to my neighborhood yet, unfortunately. My options are pretty much AT&T Uverse/DSL or Comcast. I haven't had any issues with my IP address changing, but I have my router configured to update the CNAME record for my domain so I wouldn't even notice if it did.

    • I wonder how fast those will get eaten up at those speeds...

      I'm just curious if the cities they listed are cities where Comcast actually has some sort of competition.
      I have clients in cities all over Washington and Oregon state. 200/20 service is still ~$250/mo at most of them....except for the one client that is in a city with a few other local fiber providers. We get 400/50 for $150/mo.

    • by crt ( 44106 )

      Well, let's see... the Comcast data cap in my area is 1.2TB, so @ 2Gbps, that's about... 80 minutes.

      I used to think the Comcast caps were really only to bust people who sat around and torrented non-stop... but these days with multiple people streaming 4K video in the house (legally) I get warnings from them almost every month. They really need to get more realistic here.

      • by boskone ( 234014 )

        We would break it anytime we had guests, otherwise we'd end up just under. I found that they let me pay them another $20-30 a month and now it's really unlimited. it works for me and I don't have to watch what people are using data for.

  • by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Sunday September 11, 2022 @08:43PM (#62873039)
    If they are talking "symmetrical" gigabit, that is a huge change. There are not a lot of applications for >1Gbit download. (There are some, but the majority of households really don't need that, and internal network hardware >1Gbit is still pretty expensive and uncommon for home use). But going from the existing slow speeds to >1G upload is a major difference and may help a lot for people working from home.
    • by Gavino ( 560149 )
      Cloud backups require big uploads and if they don't bring symmetric links, then why bother? Governments don't want big uploads as it's a lazy security measure in that infected computers can DDoS less. I'd rather have big upload speeds and have smart tech at the ISP that will shut off anyone involved in virus / malware / DDoS activity.
    • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      Everything I've read says the faster upload speeds are counting on the broad rollout of the new DOCSIS 4.0 technology though. All of the big cable providers are researching and testing it now (and I believe there are two different methods for accomplishing it, with one major provider banking on one method being best while the others are betting on the other one)?

      https://www.lightreading.com/c... [lightreading.com]?

      Until they get that piece in place, issuing updated cable modems to users and everything? The existing system is

      • by kriston ( 7886 )

        I just installed a Comcast modem that had "42 MHz Upload" on the label.

        Does this mean it still uses the legacy cable-TV T-channels for upload, or does it mean it has 42 MHz-wide channel bandwidth?

    • But going from the existing slow speeds to >1G upload is a major difference and may help a lot for people working from home.

      Not only are many people sitting somewhere in the house on an overly congested wifi network that can barely sustain a couple of 100mbits but in my case I have the privilege of being transparently routed through my corporate VPN, which can barely handle 30mbps to say nothing of the hundreds available on my home internet.

      And I only work for one of the 20 wealthiest countries on the planet, so clearly they can't provide a decent network on their end /s.

    • by Shatrat ( 855151 )

      They are absolutely not. One of the major disadvantages to DOCSIS (cable) networks is very low upstream bandwidth compared to XGS-PON and GPON (ftth protocols).

    • by DewDude ( 537374 )

      They just want to have a "leg up" on Verizon; but they can't claim their speeds are faster if they don't actually meet that. It's like Cox tried to insult Verizon as being "late" to the fiber game; till a judge ruled a hybrid fiber-coax network didn't count and they got their asses handed to them for false advertising.
       
        I'm willing to bet the speeds will meet that criteria for the minimum required amount of time. Kinda like that "Boost" shit they had years ago.

    • The other factor to consider is latency. Cable adds 10ms and as far as I know there isn't a way around that. With fiber, there is no such latency.
  • upload speeds (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ryan17238497 ( 6721782 ) on Sunday September 11, 2022 @08:50PM (#62873053)
    Who cares about download speeds of 2 Gbps? As a Comcast user, the increase in upload speeds is where the real benefits are. I currently have 1 Gbps down but am limited to 30 Mbps up. It is horrible! I hope they can deliver on 5 to 10x improvements in upload speeds.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      You are a minority use case. Most people consume media, not upload it. They don't particularly care about you, you're likely a captive audience without much in the way of real alternative to Comcast anyways. Comcast doesn't care :)

      • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        That may have been the case a few years ago, where home connections were mainly used for consuming media where the only upstream data was the requests and ACKs...

        Nowadays however, lots of people work from home and participate in video calls - both of which can routinely require significant and reliable upstream bandwidth. A lot of people i know moved to home working, but are still using LAN oriented protocols (eg SMB over VPN) for their work. So they might be editing a 50mb file on a file share, and when th

        • Are there any file sharing protocols that just do delta uploads? Not specific application solutions, but a general purpose protocol.

        • by Reeses ( 5069 )

          Also, with game streaming built in to every console, lots of people are doing that now too.

          I can only stream for about a week before I get the "you're about to hit your data cap" email from Comcast.

        • Keep in mind that huge amounts of people are uploading photos and videos to cloud sharing services from their phones on a routine basis. I almost always leave my phone disconnected from my "gigabit" home internet connection since my "5g" (read: 4g with marketing) T-Mobile connection has a much larger outbound pipe.
    • That's better than what Comcast offers in my area, 1.2Gbps down, 15Mbps up. And they want over $100 a month for that. So glad I switched to att fiber.

  • by quenda ( 644621 ) on Sunday September 11, 2022 @08:53PM (#62873059)

    between bits and bytes. I'm shocked, shocked, to paraphrase Captain Renault.

        TFA says 2Mbps, Editor david adds an order of magnitude to make it gigabytes. A big difference!
    (Not that any consumer would be likely to notice.)

    • by quenda ( 644621 )

      * that should be Gbps of course. ( And actual speed 200Mbps. ) With proofreading like that, I should apply for a job at /.

      • The upload is what's maxing out at 200Mbps. Even with that, still not bad as the title editor, so keep your day job, kid.
      • by lsllll ( 830002 )

        With proofreading like that, I should apply for a job at /.

        Yeah! You'd fit right in!

        And actual speed 200Mbps.

        So, that's 25MB/s. "200Mbps" is a tenth of 2Gbps. Seems like you made a typo yourself.

    • I would guess that 50% of the children in grades kindergarten-4th know the difference between a 'bit' and a 'byte'. And that in speed descriptions 'bits per second' is abbreviated 'bps' and 'bytes per second' would be 'Bps'. How can it be that the folks who update Slashdot content don't understand the difference ?? This has got to be the most bone-headed screwup I've seen in the last several years .....
    • That was the first thing I noticed when I read the title, you'd imagine a bunch of nerds would not only know the difference but perhaps highlight the distinction...then I realized who the editor is and it all made sense.

  • Wow. Faster UPLOAD speed?!

    It's about freaking time!

    I've been complaining about slow upload speed for years now. Every chance I get in fact.

    Using the cloud for system backups is next to impossible with only 10 freaking mbps upload:

    The fast download speed is certainly very nice, but it's not much of a priority for me. I'd be happy with just 100mps download.

    Decent upload speed on the other hand, is hard requirement for practical cloud u

  • by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Sunday September 11, 2022 @09:21PM (#62873099)

    I have dumped them for Sonic a while ago, the reason being is lack of any consistency during inconvenient times like work meetings. I can tolerate lower VC resolution but not audio freezing when I need to talk in a meeting. That and their insistence on proprietary boxes to watch TV, which is heavily pushed as a bundle with Internet. How hard is it to at least write iOS/Android/Roku apps so that the experience is on par with competition?

    • What proprietary box are you talking about? You do know that almost the entirety of their product is actually software running far away on a cloud instance, right?

      There's barely enough "smarts" in that set top box to excrete an HDMI signal to your TV.

  • I, for one, ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nahor ( 41537 ) on Sunday September 11, 2022 @09:24PM (#62873101)

    ... welcome the day when I can upgrade my CPU and GPU with just a few keystrokes:

    upgrade core network components almost instantly, with a few keystrokes on a laptop or mobile app

    Are they trying to redefine what "network upgrade" means so they can still claim the government subsidies without actually doing anything?

    • Possibly that, or they already added the capacity years ago and are just now choosing to remotely unlock it for whatever nefarious marketing strategy they've hatched.

    • They're talking about use of a Virtualized CMTS. So for example when the next docsis version is released they can just update the code or re-deploy an updated VM instead of having to install new hardware or swap out linecards. It also allows them to scale out capacity to meet demand in ways a physical CMTS cannot easily do.
  • by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Sunday September 11, 2022 @09:27PM (#62873109)
    I pay for 1gbps from Comcast today. The only thing that gets close that is their fake speed test....suspiciously Google WiFi's speed test also is incredibly fast, probably because Comcast figured out what it was and won't throttle it. You know what's not fast? Amazon.com, Google.com, the Apple App Store, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+. Many times, this week alone, I've had insanely slow speeds, like dial-up speeds. I log into my router wondering if my wife or the kids are doing something stupid and see that no one is using up much bandwidth at all, but each page is taking like a minute to load. Amazon.com product photos weren't even loading at one point. The Comcast and Google speed test are reporting gigabit per second speeds, then why are the 3 biggest internet presences with the most massive CDN presence downloading at very low kbps speeds? (and yes, I did all the troubleshooting steps, have wired ethernet connections, rebooted the routers, etc)

    My area doesn't even have caps because my state senator threatened net neutrality and they caved (thank you Ed Markey!). However, it's well known that Comcast speeds are not as advertised and their connection kind of sucks. They're the world's most despised company for a reason. I am confident they mess with competing websites (Netflix used to perform terribly while they were negotiating with Comcast...then the 2 sides struck a deal and OVERNIGHT, my Netflix speeds went from barely functional to blindingly fast). Everyone who uses them is convinced they are doing sleazy qos tricks. We can't prove it, but use a Comcast connection for awhile and you'll notice suspicious patterns.
    • What I've found, going all the way back to 2001 on at&t DSL was that if i start a download of a huge game, and then start a speed test in a separate tab, my speedtest will show about 1/2 of normal results, but my download will increase by 12-15x which will last for a minute or so after the speed test ends. my solution? Run another speed test. On dsl in the early 2000's, I also found that the first 2MB of a large file would download 20x faster than the rest of the file. One trick i used there wa

      • Streaming services do this on purpose. The idea is to push out as many bytes as possible at the start to fill your play buffer as quickly as possible, but then drip-feed the subsequent chunks to you at playback speed (ie. much slower). It means a better experience for you and saves them a tonne of bandwidth. The same is likely true of the big file hosts too - send the first bit fast (so you think "oh wow, it's fast!"), but go slower later as by then you're not watching the progress bar as you're making a sa

    • Read the fine print, it is most likely you are paying for UP TO 1gbps. Honestly the words 'up to' should be banned from any and all advertisements. Everything is now 'up to': network speeds, store discounts, furniture sales...
      • Read the fine print, it is most likely you are paying for UP TO 1gbps. Honestly the words 'up to' should be banned from any and all advertisements. Everything is now 'up to': network speeds, store discounts, furniture sales...

        "Up to" would be a useful measure if billing was based on the percentage of that value you actually get.

        Marketing "up to 1Gbps" and a household only gets 500Mbps is fine if they're paying 50% of what a household that actually gets 1Gbps pays, for instance.

      • I can pull around 950 meg on my 1gig service... at large packet sizes. Small sizes drops off to around 300. Which is completely normal if you actually understand how networking functions. But most consumers don't, and if you try to show them a performance curve from any piece of network gear their eyes will glaze over and they'll start mumbling even more incoherently than usual. So the speedtest sites are mostly geared towards testing the "best case" scenario and return a single number because that's all mo
      • by waspleg ( 316038 )

        They forced me in to one of those contracts by sunsetting the one I was on and moving me to another one I did not consent to. The speeds are worse both up/down.

    • I agree, have Comcast gigabit service, but service still seems kind of spotty and sometimes video conferencing is still not great. Especially Google based video conferencing...

  • GigaBIT not GigaBYTE (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 11, 2022 @09:30PM (#62873117)

    There is a difference by a factor of 8

  • spy on you in the john in 4k!

  • ... let me do my main job and my side hustle at the same time!

  • by sethmeisterg ( 603174 ) on Sunday September 11, 2022 @09:33PM (#62873127)
    Upstream limitations, data caps, no thanks.
    • Yea well the crap cable network is all they have to sell. Obviously itâ(TM)s a dinosaur and gone soon ⦠but they have to sell a bunch of idiots before they die and then get government subsidies in the billions to hobble along â¦
  • The Comcast I know rips people off and in many cases doesn't support the advertised speed in many areas. (I had friends that had Comcast and the guy a lower rate but they could never get the speeds that thier connection was rated for)
    Not to mention that Comcast is the most hated company.
  • Those speeds and any guarantees are within Comcast network. So if your content or services lives outside of that, they donâ(TM)t guarantee anything. Marketing BS from Comcast, consume at your own risk.
  • It is true, cable internet is garbage, and all the companies who have no choice but to provide it are garbage. They're no less damaging than climate change.
  • I would say, too little, too late, however competition is good.

    After trying out Comcast "gigabit" for a year, I switched to ATT. Previously, there was only one provider per zip code, hence no competition = slower speeds = more expensive service = worse quality of service.

    Comcast gigagit was neither gigabit nor symmetric. I could be okay with 800mbit download rates, which is almost there. But it came with measly 30mbit uplink. Not kidding. Even doing two video meetings could saturate that.

    ATT came and offere

  • Thatâ(TM)s nice for those in the 24 urban cities where this is rolling out. But, what about service for rural folks who are still using modems with their AOL disks or on DSL that they were supposed to provide access to?

  • Seriously, 16 gigabits to the home ? is this total invented by combing the theoretical maximum of download and upload together or are we using middle out compression.
  • For the foreseeable future, I can't imagine anything over the 500/500 I currently have being worth bothering with. Only good thing about increasing speeds is that you can usually pay less for the same speed.

    They need to be extending service areas instead of spending money on speed no one is really using. Consider that once you fill RAM cache, a spinning disk can't handle more than about 1.2Gbit, and most current SSDs will start to struggle at about 4Gbit. A 4k video stream only needs 25Mbit, and with 500M s

    • This is probably more about the overselling ratio. If they're subscribing bandwidth 20:1, at least you might actually get 500Mbps more of the time.

      I'm on 500/500 also but there are times when everything but the speed tests are much slower than that.

      I can imagine Gigabit+ being useful if other people I know have it. Being away from home and accessing home storage at native speeds for one.

  • Do you regret anything else besides this one error?

  • ...and not delivering it. Let me know when they actually roll out symmetric speeds to customers.

  • I'm not that guy that complains when things are improved, but I have a question. What home use-cases are there that can even use 2 Gb data transfer rates (let alone require it)? I'm actually curious, because I can't think of anything.

    I have 150 Mb up/down (more like 170/170 in testing) and watching a 4K video barely affects it, I could stream half a dozen videos at one time and still have bandwidth available. And that's with less than a tenth of the bandwidth of a 2Gb pipe.

  • Comcast has been calling itself the "fastest" and claiming speeds it CANNOT deliver for ages.

    Why should this latest marketing gimmick be any different?

    Last time I had Comcast, I was paying for 50mb down. But, I rarely saw speed test results even hit 10mb down. So, at 5x faster that's 50mb down.

    With fiber, I get between 300 and 400mb down and over 500mb up. And, it costs the same or less than Comcast.

    Gee, I wonder which I'm gonna go with?

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