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Comcast Raises Bandwidth in Shot at DSL
bigtallmofo writes "In a move sure to be applauded by DDoS botnet owners everywhere, news.com.com is reporting that Comcast is raising the speed of its cable Internet offerings. The standard rate will change from 3 Mbps downstream and 256 Kbps upstream to 4 Mbps downstream and 384 Kbps upstream. Customers that currently pay extra for faster service will see a 50% speed increase over what they have today to 6 Mbps downstream and 768 Kbps upstream." Combine this move with the VoIP announcement and the rumblings about more Baby Bell mergers -- we should see an...interesting landscape soon.
Doesn't matter how much more bandwidth you're given if you can't use it without fear of getting a letter saying you're over whats considered reasonable bandwith use in your area, which is why I've stuck with 1.5m/384k DSL.
comcast also has invisible bandwidth caps of which they have been reluctant to publicly disclose. for those that have sbc's 6/608 or verizon's 3/768 service available to them, i would suggest dsl instead. oh yeah, comcast only gives out a paltry 2GB of newsgroups transfers, further diminishing the value of their services compared to dsl offerings with unlimited newsgroup access.
has in the last year doubled the download speed of all of it's packages from their starting point. They've done it, I think, because our cost to them has got less and they're passing it on.
Their keeping your bandwidth low has less to do with the wiring between you and them than it does with the head end setup. Most cable modems support data transfers around 40mbs, each way. Most cable companies do not have enough bandwidth or hardware at the head end to support so a large number of people having so much bandwidth... so they cap you nice and low to keep their network running fast.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Comcast upgraded our area to 4Mbit close to a year ago with no announcement or additional charge. That's great, but I've been thinking about switching back to DSL anyway since Comcast's high-speed Internet access has been dropping out several times a month in my neighborhood. Sometimes it drops out for an hour, sometimes for a whole day.
When I had DSL I only lost service once in the course of an entire year.
LINK
LINK
True, my port 80 can be accessed without a problem and I do run a small webserver from my basement, but I'd still like it to not be against the ToS to do so.
This is taken from Cisco, should tell you everything that you wanted to know about coax cables. In short, you can achieve up to 100Mb/s with it, but that might start to infringe on your TV and such...
Anyways, here it is:
This page provides detailed information about coaxial cable.
Coaxial cable consists of a copper conductor surrounded by a layer of flexible insulation. The center conductor can also be made of tin plated aluminium cable allowing for the cable to be manufactured inexpensively. Over this insulating material is a woven copper braid or metallic foil that acts as the second wire in the circuit and as a shield for the inner conductor. This second layer, or shield also reduces the amount of outside electromagnetic interference. Covering this shield is the cable jacket.
For LANs, coaxial cable offers several advantages. It can be run longer distances than shielded twisted pair, STP, unshielded twisted pair, UTP, and screened twisted pair, ScTP, cable without the need for repeaters. Repeaters regenerate the signals in a network so that they can cover greater distances. Coaxial cable is less expensive than fiber-optic cable and the technology is well known. It has been used for many years for many types of data communication such as cable television.
It is important to consider the size of a cable. As the thickness increases, it becomes more difficult to work with a cable. Remember that cable must be pulled through conduits and troughs that are limited in size. Coaxial cable comes in a variety of sizes. The largest diameter was specified for use as Ethernet backbone cable since it has greater transmission lengths and noise rejection characteristics. This type of coaxial cable is frequently referred to as Thicknet. This type of cable can be too rigid to install easily in some situations. Generally, the more difficult the network media is to install, the more expensive it is to install. Coaxial cable is more expensive to install than twisted-pair cable. Thicknet cable is rarely used anymore aside from special purpose installations.
In the past, Thinnet coaxial cable with an outside diameter of only 0.35 cm was used in Ethernet networks. It was especially useful for cable installations that required the cable to make many twists and turns. Since Thinnet was easier to install, it was also cheaper to install. This led some people to refer to it as Cheapernet. The outer copper or metallic braid in coaxial cable comprises half the electric circuit. A solid electrical connection at both ends is important to properly ground the cable. Poor shield connection is one of the biggest sources of connection problems in the installation of coaxial cable. Connection problems result in electrical noise that interferes with signal transmission. For this reason Thinnet is no longer commonly used nor supported by latest standards, 100 Mbps and higher, for Ethernet networks.
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Comcast won't allow servers, but most DSL providers do, and they don't block your ports either usually. SBC lets you opt-out of any port blocking they do (currently just some outbound port 25 blocking I think, but only for the residential package)
Morphing Software
The problem is that their system was designed to have asymmetric bandwidth. The uplink and downlink use different paths and technology. This can't be changed by decree.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Really, it sounds more like a question about a change to their TOS, actually.
This is easily solved by services like DynDNS. But it's still in violation of the TOS.
I've been using it for sometime and never had a problem with them, however. But then, all I have is a crappy webpage I rarely update. Other than that, it's primarily so I can map my domain over to my DHCP addy and get to my mailserver (I don't use their mail services -- rather host my own thanks), move stuff around with scp or admin things with ssh remotely.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
Its not a business decision, its a technical one... Unfortunately, the DOCSIS protocol for cable modem networks specifies a different method of reserving channels for upload than download.
...and the encoding method used (typical QPSK-256 downstream and QAM-16 upstream)
:-)
Downloads typically are reserved a 6 MHz band for each subscriber, while uploads share a 24 MHz band for the whole neighborhood. This is due to two factors:
the frequencies used... (high-pass filters upstream, low-pass filters downstream)
Just thought I'd share the one thing I'm actually good at.
Comcast themselves had no idea that this would happen, and even failed to believe that the problem was on their end. People had been calling customer service for the first two weeks of the new year (Comcast made the switchover on Jan 1st), and were reporting general problems. The biggest problem was the fact that the changeover also affected just about every major DNS server Comcast had in existance, which were then also dropping packets as well. This added about a 5 second delay to most customers, in addition to the other problems occuring.
So, we have customer systems dropping packets, and Comcast servers dropping packets, and adding the two together created huge usability issues across the entire network. But Comcast still refused to take responsibility for the problems in the early weeks, with the goal being to clear up the customer service lines as opposed to take problems down. Comcast has finally appeared to fix some of the issues within the last week by sending out upgraded software to customer cable modem boxes. I still believe they are having DNS issues (but then again, when is Comcast NOT having DNS issues), but I do not know as I stopped using their DNS servers 3 years ago due to how unreliable their DNS servers are (they were failing at least 2 times a week for at least 1 day at a time).
In anycase, there has been speculation that there will be a price increase in 6 months timeframe, but this may not happen now. Origionally, the speed increase was going to coincide with a $5-$10 price increase as well, but that plan was dropped when news was leaked to customers. There was also supposed to be another $5 increase in 6 months, but that too may be dropped now as well. The other huge backlash Comcast is recieving is for removing unlimited newsgroup access for the former AT&T customers, who were origionally told at the time of the Comcast buyout that no loss of current service would occur, which was also a condition of the buyout/merger. Comcast's normal customers already had lost unlimited newsgroup access when Comcast took over the @HOME network in certain areas several years ago, and limited users to 1 gig a month newsgroup access. That limit was increased to 2 gigs a month Jan 1st at the same time they dropped support for the unlimited access for the former AT&T customers (in an atempt to appease them).
I for one can not wait until Verizon brings fiber to the home. I live in one of the lucky few test/rollout states (NJ) which will begin to recieve service during this year. Comcast is going to have some serious problems when that occurs, as the initial pricing is actually cheaper then Comcast's normal cable modem service, and is faster then Comcast's premium 6mbps service, with much less restrictions (i.e. Verizon does not care how you use it, as long as it is legal, so servers for web, email, ftp, etc., are all allowed, and unlimited newsgroups service is included).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
"(xiv) run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited services and servers include, but are not limited to, e-mail, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;"
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Few people understand how Cable bandwidth actually works. It all hinges on your QAM modulation and the number of customers combined to the downstreams and upstreams. The max dowstream bandwidth at docsis 1.1 per cmts blade is about 35Mbit and the max upstream is roughly 10Mbit. This is at 256 QAM on the downstream and 16 QAM on the upstream and upstream channel width of 3.2Mhz. Now I manage 18 CMTS in my day job, that average customer count per blade is around 1250. Each blade has it's own downstream channel and 6 upstreams. So now you have 35 Mbit on the downstream shared between 1250 customers and approximately 125 customers sharing 10 Mbit up. You can get more bandwith by reducing the node combining down to a 1:1 ratio where each node has it's own upstream channel but that involves plant redesign work and additional investment in more CMTS's (big $$$$) and by running different frequencies. But the big gain would be to move to docsis 3.0 (2.0 only offers an additional 10Mbit on the upstream) where they say each downstream channel will be able to offer 200Mbit down and 100Mbit up. And yes I am a RF Network Engineer.
I've been using the PointClark dynamic DNS service that is associated with the ClarkConnect Linux distribution. I run an SSH server for tunneling with Squid and sometimes Apache to stream music from home (password protected; access limited to my IP address at work). Comcast doesn't say "boo."
Their terms of service are as flexible as my options...if Comcast doesn't want me to run a piddly little personal server, I can take my business to a number of DSL providers.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
You're a little off on the numbers.. but here is some better info.
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/8084
The big reason for the difference between up and down is the fact that the head end can transmit much faster than the modem can upload.
most modems are DOCSIS 1.0 or 1.1
This gives a bandwidth of 30-38mbps down and 5-10mbps up per "node" on the cable companies network. Compare a "node" to an ethernet hub where everyone shares the bandwidth.
The only thing in common is the fact that they use coaxial cable, but even then they use different impedences (10base2 is 50 Ohm, DOCSIS is 75 Ohm).
10base2 is a baseband CSMA/CD system. IIRC, the baseband encoding is Manchester.
DOCSIS is a modulated FDM/TDMA system. Upstream is QPSK, downstream varies between 64QAM and 256QAM depending on the ranging results during the initial modem negotiaions. In the US, channels are on 6 MHz spacing, and the carrier frequency is set the provider to fit in with their digital cable channels.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Cable modem companies had serious performance problems in the early years - cable TV distribution equipment was pretty shoddy, and the cable modem equipment was relatively experimental, so the native performance wasn't very good, and they didn't have any effective way to limit user's upstream bandwidth. They were absolutely terrified that somebody would trash their neighborhood's cable modem performance by using too much upstream, and especially terrified that the bandwidth would be hogged by somebody running a Pr0n website, back when pr0n on the internet was still a somewhat scandalous concept. Their performance really wasn't all that good, and Pac Bell's "Web Hog" TV ads, while dishonest, were extremely effective.
So they made inflexible hard-core policies against running anything server-like, and it became a religion for them. The fact that they didn't understand what a "server" really was wasn't relevant - an Instant Messaging client is a server, and interactive game programs are servers, and they like both of those, and "email servers" don't consume scarce upstream bandwidth, they use plentiful downstream bandwidth.
Napster was another big issue - not only was it a bandwidth hog, but it was Pirating Content, and TV stations are really in the content business so that was obviously Bad Bad Bad. Not everybody at Comcast was clueless - when I talked with some of their engineers privately, their opinion was "Like, duh, why do you *think* people buy broadband? It's so they can download music faster, and Napster's the best marketing tool out there for us, even if we officially pretend to hate it."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've had cable from Comcast and Time Warner at a total of 6 different locations, and each time have been able to utilize the full 3 Mbps down at any time of day. All 6 of these locations where in densely populated areas, so that might have been part of the reason why.
Most of the people I know with cable no longer have the problems that were complained about 5-6 years ago.
What?
Try Speakeasy.
As one of their tech support told me the other day, "That's the great thing about Speakeasy, you buy the connection from us, and then do whatever you want with it."
That was in response to, "can I sell wireless internet to my neighbors, and not tell you about it?"
I am ameritech also. I found the notice on dslreports.com.
Port 25 Block Notice
On Mon, 1 Nov 2004, SBC Service Abuse wrote:
Thank you for contacting SBC Internet Services' Security Policy Team. We have received your request to be removed from our Port 25 filtering.
We are unable to grant your request. If your needs require that you run a mail server we recommend upgrading to an Enhanced DSL account which allows you to sun your own server/s. Please call 888-827-5722 to order and use promotion code ______. Otherwise we recommend you look into a list server such as the free service offered at http://groups.yahoo.com.
All big providers have some benefits and some negatives; I am lucky with Comcast actually; I have gotten excellent service, very few outages (1 that had anything to do with them in the last 6 months) I have never recieved any nasty letters from them at all (regardless of how much bandwidth I was using, though I was not stupid enough to uncap my modem). I have had speeds exceeding 400kb down and well over 180k up (yes i use bit-torrent, and yes Naruto is a REALLY popular torrent...). I have been with Earthlink, Verizon and now Comcast. Earthlink was very solid, but nowhere near as fast. Verizon's service and speed were awful. I had them for 4 months; I had 7 outages, atrocious speeds, and at first they told me that service wasn't available in my area (though my neighbor had it). I went with Earthlink at that address at first, then Verizon offered a cheaper deal right as my contract ended with Earthlink. Big mistake. I have gone with Comcast, got digital cable and got my internet for $40 a month; ditched my phone (saving me another $25 a month, or more) so even though I paid more for cable i ended up saving money. it isn't exactly like any of these guys are all for the little guy. of all of the providers i think Earthlink is probably the most geek-centric of them, (the have extensive and very helpful how-to articles, that I still use).
Recently, I had been using Multimedia cable, until they were bought out by Cox. And just like a Pentium IV 3.0ghz processor has more gigahurtz than an AMD64 2.0ghz processor, Cox was marketing two different speeds. Never mind that if you were not a "sporatic" user of that bandwidth, they would impose a cap so that you didn't actually *have* the bandwidth for which you paid.
Between DNS servers going down, and Cox actually dropping the connection to my cable modem, dialup would have been faster. It would have at least been reliable, and I could count on being able to check the weather and news on a consistent basis. I just up and moved to SBC DSL, because it was the only real alternative. Cox offered me a lower price if I'd stay with them, but it wasn't even worth what they were wanting.
Sure, my "maximum" bandwidth on DSL is much less; 384kbps upload, 1.5mbps download. But I get that reliably. I can rely on being able to browse the web. Over the course of a day, my DSL is far faster than cable, simply because I'm not waiting for web pages to load.
Cox has become absolutely terrible in my area. I say fuck'em. I will pay more for a reliable connection than I will for false advertisement.
Hrm. Maybe that doesn't apply to me because I am considered a "business customer" in their eyes.
As far as I can tell, the only reason I am considered a business customer, is I talked to a sales person and asked him a bunch of questions before ordering, and to get me to sign up for a more expensive plan, he gave me a $10/month discount.
And, from then on, they put me in a special queue, for business customers, and a "Dedicated Account Manager", though I don't know if that is really anything special or not.
I do have more services, ie. email address/DNS hosting than other speakeasy customers I know of...
It's only an annoyance when it does finally get released and renewed and you can't phyically get to the box to find out what the address is.
A 2kb perl script on cron can check the IP against the domain's DNS and mail the new one to an outside address (mine goes to a web-enabled cell phone)
Stripes: Because stars are overrated