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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.
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
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.
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?"