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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.
All these speed limits are entirely artifical.
Abusing? This is EXACTLY why I never want to go with a cable provider or a telecom.
I PAID for a given amount of bandwidth. How can it reasonably be considered abuse for me to use what I paid for.
If the cable companies are only providing their stated bandwidth "provided you don't use all that power more than XXX hours per day," well, then you aren't ACTUALLY getting what they're advertising themselves as providing, now are you?
It may be true that cable companies can't actually support all the bandwidth they sell--someone using their service continually might well affect others neaby negatively. I submit, however, that unless TOS prohibit this, then your beef is with the cable company not being able to deliver what you're paying for. Not someone "abusing" the service.
I'd wait for a bit more than a week before saying that...
So, we bitch when they cripple spam zombies, then we bitch when they raise the bandwidth cap.
Unbelievable.
Well, I, as a Comcast subscriber, am very happy with this change.
Cable rep: um....er....whats that?
I personally think that there should indeed be a law that all internet access providers must have their contention ratio prominently displayed. What good is 6Mb download if you have to share that with a thousand subscribers? Yes I know that DSL has its own contention ratios at the DSLAM but nowhere near the mess that cable trys to sell. But still they should be required to display this information as well.
When I first signed up for Comcast's services several years ago, before they put up and down restrictions on it, I'd get 512 kilobytes up and down. Now they're giving us 512 up and 48 down. Until I get back what I originally got, I don't see an improvement.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Grr,
I just went to compare rates (I'm not in the service area) and they want to know your street address before they give price.
How much does the service cost?
Do they charge more for the Internet if you don't also subscribe to Cable TV? (discount not provided for non-TV subscribers)
Is their VOIP package competitive?
Level of Internet speed is one thing.. How about comparing value? I can order an OC48 at 2.488 Gbps, but you don't want to see the bill.
The truth shall set you free!
Or are they just a bunch of ex TV retards who think of the Internet as a TV with the remote connected directly to their marketing database?
No they are a bunch of intelligent businessmen who know that somewhere around 95% of home broadband users have no need or desire to serve large amounts of data. Given a fixed amount of bandwidth (limited by customers physical connection), they choose to allocate it in a manner that best serves their customers.
Those 5% that do need to serve data can get a "business" connection that has a more balanced upstream, and whose contract allows the customer to run servers / LANs / etc off the connection.
Of course not! What were you thinking? I'll bet you thought you could even VPN with all the flashy bandwidth. Wrong again! That's BUSINESS service. Kindly remit several hundred dollars a month or more for that.
Really, all that Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and other cable Internet providers are doing by upping speeds without functionality (while prohibiting protocols that would actually use the speed) is offering extra plates at the buffet without providing extra food or ability to eat it.
Your basic web downloads will not perform any better (your limitation now is really the response time of your upstream web server). Mail services, both sending and receiving, remain essentially unchanged (unless you are receiving large file attachments, but the difference between 3 Mbps down and 5 Mbps down is mostly lost when the bottleneck again is the mail server and the ability of your PC to process the incoming mail).
What about other protocols/services?
If your local China Buffet raised the price to $20 per person, but allowed you to use 20 plates instead of 10, and only allowed you to choose from three or four different dishes (as all the other dishes were for the $50 "business diner" price), would you go for it? Or go over to Joe's DSL Diner (or Sam's Fixed wireless Cafe) for $5 per plate and have access to dozens of entrees with only 5 plates per diner?
The clue to understanding cable Internet operations is reading their financial reports. They are targeting a monthly gross revenue of $225 per subscriber. That's what they require. If your phone = $60 and your digital cable is $90 per month, they're still $75 short. Guess where cable Internet prices are going? (Hint: say goodbye to that $35 entry rate). Don't like? Then do what you can to keep their competition in business.
New to the business world ?
With Business the BB provides gives you assured service - meaning you pay what you get. With residential plans its "best efforts" so you pay the same bill even if the service goes down for a day or two [ you might be offered some carrots if you threaten to take your business to the compitetor. ]
No Sig for you.!
First, in my experience Comcast does not block any ports... at least by default. Now, if we pull out the service/license agreement (I don't have theirs handy, but I've read enough of them), I'm sure it says that you are not allowed to run a web server. So it is against that agreement to run a web server and they could terminate the agreement. But they don't actively prevent you from running a server.
Skipping to another section of any standard ISP agreement, you'll find something prohibiting any sort of illegal activity. (ISP will cooperate with authorities, et cetera) Certainly, most BitTorrent traffic is illegal. But it seems to me that there are two issues preventing them from doing anything about it:
Comcast's primary goal is to make money. And it would seem they are pulling down a handfull of change.
And if the broadband business was killing them, I doubt they'd shoot the bandwidth up, just to spite the already beleagured DSL business.
You said it man. Nobody f#%ks with the Jesus.
Actually, with all due respect, it would be incorrect to say "many people have ordered the business services when they have been notified of excessive download" -- it's more accurate to say that a "limited amount" of individuals have done this in the interest, or in the hopes of having larger amount of data transfer being available to them - say, for instance, a family that has many teenagers and xboxes and audio streams and video communications and things like that - but the invisible caps appear to be the same regardless of the service levels you purchase.
The real problem is that people aren't given any clear guidelines how to go about limiting their bandwidth consumption (i.e. "how much is too much"), perhaps due to the invisible caps changing from month to month depending on various things, and of course, lots of people don't have a means of measuring how much they use anyway, which is probably the reasoning that Comcast uses when they instruct people to "just cut down".
They usually tell you to "just cut down", which, in the case of a single individual downloading tons of stuff is probably fairly self-explanatory, but when you have a shared connection with, say for instance, a houseful of college students, or a big family with numerous xboxes and such, this can become more difficult.
I think the solution would be to at least attempt to provide some sort of approximate guidelines, more specific than "just cut down", and perhaps institute a temporary suspension prior to cutting the service off for good. It's pretty clear that many customers would be perfectly happy to switch to DSL if their usage patterns are in excess of what Comcast would like, but DSL isn't available to them. In cases like these, it just seems that there ought to be some way to provide some sort of guidance for people as to how they can keep their connection, and not get cut off - something closer to a three strikes, you're out. The problem is that theoretically, at least, you may have used up too much bandwidth already for the current month by the time you get notified for last month's excesses, and you can do nothing but wait for the disconnect a month down the road. This has apparently happened to some people who were downloading extreme amounts of data, or to people who misunderstood what "just cut down" means. The invisible caps aren't advertised, and their existence isn't publicized anywhere, isn't in writing anywhere, and a number of customers have reported being caught totally by surprise, having had no idea that there were any kind of limitations on the data transfer they were allowed to do... DSL lines in the US certainly have no such restrictions. Nor does there appear to be any way to plead your case or get the service turned back on. These are just a couple things that Comcast could do to make the situation a little more "user friendly", I guess.
But as far as the connection, and the speeds, those are, for the most part, very stable and very good. It's just in these few isolated situations, particularly situations where you have a houseful of teenagers or college students all sharing the pipe, it becomes very difficult to know what to do; and it can be a very frustrating experience to deal with. It just seems that there has to be a better solution. Simply providing guidance to those individuals who have been warned wouldn't even require publishing any kinds of hard limits, and would still allow the limits to be computed from national aggregate data each month. Some people may not understand how to comply with "keep it under 100 gigs a month", or may not have any means to measure that, and for those customers, "just cut down" might be the best way to explain the situation, but there are plenty of tech-savvy people who have had this problem who would be more than happy to comply with "keep it under 100 gigs a month" or "keep it under 50 gigs a month" or whatever. There's just no reason to turn it into a guessing game, really.
I really don't mean to knock Comcast or anything, I am sure they hav