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Comcast Raises Bandwidth in Shot at DSL

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the the-battle-continues-on-and-on-and-on-and-on dept.

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.

4 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Can we run servers yet? by Skidge · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Quick Question Actually. by Bumjubeo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  3. I would rather see them dropping prices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ...

  4. Verizon FiOS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.