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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.
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.
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.