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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.
As it has hiked speeds, Comcast has been giving customers more to do with that bandwidth. Its Comcast.net home page has become more of a media portal, with emphasis on higher-bandwidth services such as video news clips, on-demand video games, a flashier interface and more personalization tools.
That's all well and good, but will they let us do something actually useful with our service like run a web server? Not that I'm trying to run a big website out of my home, but I'd rather to be officially allowed to run my own photo gallery on my linux box for my family rather than have "a flashier interface," whatever that means.
All the cable companies seem to be increasing the bandwidth of their cable service. The cable company in my city recently upped to 5mb down, 1mb up. How are they making their bandwidth so much higher without changing the cables? Is it all about voltage, or has coax been able to handle this all along, that they have just been throttling back?
300kbit -> 1mbit
:)
/
750kbit -> 2mbit
1.5mbit -> 3mbit
They are asking for a one off fee of £25, but it definately looks rosey
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/03/ntl_q3_04
liqbase
The minimum price is $43 for comcast customers and ...
almost $60 otherwise.
I think $29 for 1.5/384 servce from verizon looks a lot more attractive.
The extra bandwidth will not improve my experience 2 fold
I'm hoping the next shot will be against the penalty for not subscribing to the Cable TV service. I could see them taking a proper shot to woo users off Satelite TV by offering a Cable TV discount. But nailing non-subscription TV users with a extra charge (disguised as a internet price break for having cable TV) is why they don't have me online with them yet.
The truth shall set you free!
Why dont they understand that i dont care about the download? it was more than fine at 2mb a yea ago, i just need more upload. if they had a 1/1 option i would get it in a second, or even a 1/768 for the same price. its bullcrap that they cant provide us with more upload, there just still scared that where "going to run servers". they need to get with the times like speakeasy/ /. dsl and have more open policies. -and better upstream bandwidth-
Some of us running the older DOCSIS 1 compliant cable modems can only get a max of 3Mbps download. This move could also mean more money for Comcast with more people wanting to rent their cable modem to capitalize on this increase in bandwidth.
Linux at home
I'm in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and just got the new Fiber Optic service from Verizon. I'm currently using the slowest package offered, which is 5mbps down and 2mbps up. There are also 10 down and 30 down packages. I was paying $60 a month for Comcast at 3mbps down, but now I'm paying half that for this new service. I had nothing but trouble with my Comcast connection, so this little bump in speed isn't going to help them much.
Why are US DSL lines sooo asymettric. 6Mb down, 0.25Mb up, etc.. My experience here in yrp is that things are more even, 8Mb down usually gives 2Mb up, etc.
Do US provides buy their upstream bandwidth asymetrically too? So they have to cap customers upload.
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? and are horrified/confused by the idea that other people might want to broadcast too.
Maybe I'm too cynical, and this is just how people want it.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
One of my clients has Comcast cable internet, and he's been having no end of trouble with it this past week.
When they came out for service, they gave him a new cable modem, an RCA DCM425. This thing has a built-in NAT, and no apparent way to disable it or map inbound ports-- it has an extremely sparse web interface, so I can no longer remote into his fileserver to diagnose and fix problems (a big deal, since he's 40 miles away).
One thing that the cable modem's web interface DOES do, however, is report on the maximum number of computers that it is set to provide NAT services for. This feature appears to be disabled at the moment, but it made me remember this old article.
I wonder when they're going to let the other shoe drop and start charging on a per-connected-machine basis and change their ToS to disallow the use of other NAT devices?
At least in my area, bottom-of-the-line DSL is significantly less expensive that bottom-of-the-line cable, especially if you don't already have cable. (And I don't, because I'd rather spend my time on the Internet and watching movies from Netflix. Or maybe even going outside.)
Certainly I'd appreciate more bits than my 768 connection (which usually nets me significantly less), but for basic web operations (email, browsing) it seems more than tolerable. I can even download movie trailers as long as I'm willing to be a bit patient, and I do that infrequently enough that I'm willing to be patient. If I decided that wanted to go even further down on my entertainment expenses by dumping Netflix for Bittorrent, maybe I'd want more bandwidth.
Mind you I've had reasonably terrible service from Verizon DSL, which is quite flaky, and I've heard good things about cable reliability (which seems odd, but I hear they've changed their tune since the last time I had cable in a year beginning with 19). But I find that raising both prices and bandwidth in cable doesn't lead to the price point that I want.
Ah, the rigor of anecdotal evidence. Me and every single person I know who's had Comcast has had pretty much rock-solid uptime without any connection snafus. Pretty much the polar opposite of what cable was like in my area when it was AT&T's game.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
According to many of the reports in the comcast forum at http://www.dslreports.com comcast has re-worked their contract with giganews to double the amount... perhaps you should search the forums there for more info.
I watch that kind of stuff closely (something about wanting to feed the family and not likely layoffs that usually result from such mergers), but nothing has blipped my radar till this!
Ok, anyone have any good stuff I can spread around at the office?
All outbound traffic on port 25 is or will be blocked. Outbound email must be routed through their authenticated SMTP agent.
I ordered SBC DSL basic service and was considering a switch from cable modem (mediacom). I requested that the port 25 block not be applied to my account and was refused (they advised me to upgrade to the more expensive service).
Remember that there was a recent court decision allowing ISPs to read your email when it touches their hard drive.
I dumped them, and I told them exactly why. You should too.
It was 300 gigs per month for a while, but all of a sudden it appears to be 200 or 225 gigs for last month (they just placed the calls last Friday).
The problem is that if you only get notified 13 days into the month that you went over last month, you're still dealing with everything you downloaded the first thirteen days of THIS month, and if that amount is too much for next month's cap (say they move it down to 150 gigs next month), then you just lost your internet connection and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
To add insult to injury, they say it's a "courtesy call", and suggest that you might be interested in their business offerings (which have the same exact limitations), and many people get the impression that there aren't these limitations with the business accounts, they order the more expensive business accounts, download away, with one strike already against them, and end up getting disconnected the next time around. It's evil.
They were cracking down on upload last year, but at the moment it appears to be something like 200 or 225 gigs per month combined. They crack down, though, whenever they upgrade the speeds so next month it could be 150 gigs per month or too much upload - which is usually anything over 30? or 40? gigs - something like that -
It's evil. It's just totally evil. I suppose it's better than some of these cable internet services with caps of 45 gigs a month or whatever; but it isn't anything even remotely approaching the rock-solid knowledge that you can download whatever you want, whenever you want (provided it's legal, of course) with your DSL line.
You need to be really, really careful with Comcast - they are very very unpredictable when it comes to using your internet connection. It's sort of like owning a Ferrari or something, but having a national speed limit of 70mph which you can practically reach in first gear. The speed is there, but you can't use it. It's very strange.
One day I got a call and they offered me $20/month for 6 months and $20 install. The cost to try wasn't too bad so I bit. This month, the promo period ended and my bill went up to $60. I picked up the phone and told the clerk, "drop the price or I drop the service." She said she couldn't do anything so I said, "OK, I understand. Please cancel the service." At that point, she transfered me to someone who had negotiating authority. We dickered around for a bit and I settled at $30/month, or 50% of the posted price.
What I think is happening is Comcast doesn't know what the market will bear and is willing to dicker to figure that out. I'm getting ready to call Comcast back because Pac Bell came back and offered me DSL for $20 if I buy their long distance service from them. The only place I've found that faster than DSL matters is downloading video. But all too often, if everyone is going after the same video and nobody is using bit torrent, the speed advantage vanishes. Besides, $120 per year savings will buy me and my sweetie a nice night out.