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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.
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.
Thank god I chose Comcast and scoffed at my folks for getting DSL. ::dials comcast and orders the extra service::
Porn is now even faster.
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?
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.
has in the last year doubled the download speed of all of it's packages from their starting point. They've done it, I think, because our cost to them has got less and they're passing it on.
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-
I apologize for moving away on you. Now that I live in Eastern CT I'm stuck with a crappy cable company, ECC. Would you please gobble up this pathetic company into your growing empire. And while you're at it would you please allow people to run servers at home with that 384 up bandwidth. I'd much rather host my own website than be forced to just share torrents all day. Oh and I promise not to extract any HD content from the new Motorola 6412
Thank you,
A former and soon hopefully future Comcast disciple.
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
Comcast upgraded our area to 4Mbit close to a year ago with no announcement or additional charge. That's great, but I've been thinking about switching back to DSL anyway since Comcast's high-speed Internet access has been dropping out several times a month in my neighborhood. Sometimes it drops out for an hour, sometimes for a whole day.
When I had DSL I only lost service once in the course of an entire year.
LINK
LINK
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
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.
Comcast themselves had no idea that this would happen, and even failed to believe that the problem was on their end. People had been calling customer service for the first two weeks of the new year (Comcast made the switchover on Jan 1st), and were reporting general problems. The biggest problem was the fact that the changeover also affected just about every major DNS server Comcast had in existance, which were then also dropping packets as well. This added about a 5 second delay to most customers, in addition to the other problems occuring.
So, we have customer systems dropping packets, and Comcast servers dropping packets, and adding the two together created huge usability issues across the entire network. But Comcast still refused to take responsibility for the problems in the early weeks, with the goal being to clear up the customer service lines as opposed to take problems down. Comcast has finally appeared to fix some of the issues within the last week by sending out upgraded software to customer cable modem boxes. I still believe they are having DNS issues (but then again, when is Comcast NOT having DNS issues), but I do not know as I stopped using their DNS servers 3 years ago due to how unreliable their DNS servers are (they were failing at least 2 times a week for at least 1 day at a time).
In anycase, there has been speculation that there will be a price increase in 6 months timeframe, but this may not happen now. Origionally, the speed increase was going to coincide with a $5-$10 price increase as well, but that plan was dropped when news was leaked to customers. There was also supposed to be another $5 increase in 6 months, but that too may be dropped now as well. The other huge backlash Comcast is recieving is for removing unlimited newsgroup access for the former AT&T customers, who were origionally told at the time of the Comcast buyout that no loss of current service would occur, which was also a condition of the buyout/merger. Comcast's normal customers already had lost unlimited newsgroup access when Comcast took over the @HOME network in certain areas several years ago, and limited users to 1 gig a month newsgroup access. That limit was increased to 2 gigs a month Jan 1st at the same time they dropped support for the unlimited access for the former AT&T customers (in an atempt to appease them).
I for one can not wait until Verizon brings fiber to the home. I live in one of the lucky few test/rollout states (NJ) which will begin to recieve service during this year. Comcast is going to have some serious problems when that occurs, as the initial pricing is actually cheaper then Comcast's normal cable modem service, and is faster then Comcast's premium 6mbps service, with much less restrictions (i.e. Verizon does not care how you use it, as long as it is legal, so servers for web, email, ftp, etc., are all allowed, and unlimited newsgroups service is included).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
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?
Cable modem companies had serious performance problems in the early years - cable TV distribution equipment was pretty shoddy, and the cable modem equipment was relatively experimental, so the native performance wasn't very good, and they didn't have any effective way to limit user's upstream bandwidth. They were absolutely terrified that somebody would trash their neighborhood's cable modem performance by using too much upstream, and especially terrified that the bandwidth would be hogged by somebody running a Pr0n website, back when pr0n on the internet was still a somewhat scandalous concept. Their performance really wasn't all that good, and Pac Bell's "Web Hog" TV ads, while dishonest, were extremely effective.
So they made inflexible hard-core policies against running anything server-like, and it became a religion for them. The fact that they didn't understand what a "server" really was wasn't relevant - an Instant Messaging client is a server, and interactive game programs are servers, and they like both of those, and "email servers" don't consume scarce upstream bandwidth, they use plentiful downstream bandwidth.
Napster was another big issue - not only was it a bandwidth hog, but it was Pirating Content, and TV stations are really in the content business so that was obviously Bad Bad Bad. Not everybody at Comcast was clueless - when I talked with some of their engineers privately, their opinion was "Like, duh, why do you *think* people buy broadband? It's so they can download music faster, and Napster's the best marketing tool out there for us, even if we officially pretend to hate it."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That really should have stayed in Vegas. I feel like less of a person having just glanced at the thumbs...
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.
Another important thing these companies are doing is making room for a "value" segment of the market. Cox in Phoenix, after raising all $50/mo customers from 3Mb/256 to 4MB/512 then began (very quietly) selling "Value" cable internet of bidirectional 256k for $25/mo. Now they can squeeze Qwest DSL from both directions - the cheap aspect with "better than dial-up" speed at a fairly low price, and the speed aspect, where they come much closer to obliterating Qwests's bidirectional 768. It's always about a bottom line.
I am ameritech also. I found the notice on dslreports.com.
Port 25 Block Notice
On Mon, 1 Nov 2004, SBC Service Abuse wrote:
Thank you for contacting SBC Internet Services' Security Policy Team. We have received your request to be removed from our Port 25 filtering.
We are unable to grant your request. If your needs require that you run a mail server we recommend upgrading to an Enhanced DSL account which allows you to sun your own server/s. Please call 888-827-5722 to order and use promotion code ______. Otherwise we recommend you look into a list server such as the free service offered at http://groups.yahoo.com.
All big providers have some benefits and some negatives; I am lucky with Comcast actually; I have gotten excellent service, very few outages (1 that had anything to do with them in the last 6 months) I have never recieved any nasty letters from them at all (regardless of how much bandwidth I was using, though I was not stupid enough to uncap my modem). I have had speeds exceeding 400kb down and well over 180k up (yes i use bit-torrent, and yes Naruto is a REALLY popular torrent...). I have been with Earthlink, Verizon and now Comcast. Earthlink was very solid, but nowhere near as fast. Verizon's service and speed were awful. I had them for 4 months; I had 7 outages, atrocious speeds, and at first they told me that service wasn't available in my area (though my neighbor had it). I went with Earthlink at that address at first, then Verizon offered a cheaper deal right as my contract ended with Earthlink. Big mistake. I have gone with Comcast, got digital cable and got my internet for $40 a month; ditched my phone (saving me another $25 a month, or more) so even though I paid more for cable i ended up saving money. it isn't exactly like any of these guys are all for the little guy. of all of the providers i think Earthlink is probably the most geek-centric of them, (the have extensive and very helpful how-to articles, that I still use).
Please stop giving me speed increases I haven't asked for, and instead split your billing options into several plans. I don't need 3mb/256k or 4mb/384k. I would be happy with 1.5mb/128k. And please make such a lower speed plan cheaper than your almost $50 a month current rate.
(I'd go with DSL, but the costs of a land line + DSL service is pretty much on-par with Comcast)
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
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.
Recently, I had been using Multimedia cable, until they were bought out by Cox. And just like a Pentium IV 3.0ghz processor has more gigahurtz than an AMD64 2.0ghz processor, Cox was marketing two different speeds. Never mind that if you were not a "sporatic" user of that bandwidth, they would impose a cap so that you didn't actually *have* the bandwidth for which you paid.
Between DNS servers going down, and Cox actually dropping the connection to my cable modem, dialup would have been faster. It would have at least been reliable, and I could count on being able to check the weather and news on a consistent basis. I just up and moved to SBC DSL, because it was the only real alternative. Cox offered me a lower price if I'd stay with them, but it wasn't even worth what they were wanting.
Sure, my "maximum" bandwidth on DSL is much less; 384kbps upload, 1.5mbps download. But I get that reliably. I can rely on being able to browse the web. Over the course of a day, my DSL is far faster than cable, simply because I'm not waiting for web pages to load.
Cox has become absolutely terrible in my area. I say fuck'em. I will pay more for a reliable connection than I will for false advertisement.
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
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.