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Cable Wants to Cut the Cord
skatephat420 writes "Wired News has featured an article on how "the cable industry wants you to chuck your cable -- at least when you're outside the house. The addition of a fourth wireless component to the cable package is now affectionately known as the 'quadruple play.'" With this addition to the standard package of voice, video and data, how long is it going to take DSL to compete?"
When the DSL provider says you're getting X bandwidth, that's what you and only you get. When the cable company says you get X bandwidth, you're actually sharing it with up to 253 neighbors.
Here's the thing. Comcast (shut up about what the ToS says, really) allows you to do that.
:25. They watched the traffic for huge amounts of e-mail, scanned the e-mails, and then cut off the spammers.
:25 in the blink of an eye, but instead they invested actual money into fixing the problem without pissing off their competent user base. I would know, I'm part of that user base. Additionally, I have some friends working Comcast tech support, and they can likewise vouch for what I've said.
When they started to crack down on spam, they didn't just kill off
They could have shut off
When my cable co says I get 5 megabits, that 5 megabits is NOT shared among my neighbors. What an idiotic and wrong thing to say.
What is accurate is that you and your neighbors share the same coax - if there are 1000 people download Linux ISOs or whatever all at once, chances are there will be congestion.
Yup. They run Linux. If you telnet in, both the login and password are "admin." You can telnet in from both the LAN and WAN sides. Indeed, you can connect to the web administration page from the WAN side. And the CGI script is broken enough to let you open arbitrary files. If it weren't for an utterly complete lack of functionality, I'd be very worried.
After all, I am strangely colored.
In my area, cable internet is $25/mo, and I don't have to pay for a phone line or cable TV service. Not everyone wants or needs a land line.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
On the other hand, I can count the number of times our landline service has gone out over the last five years on ONE hand with a few fingers left over.
VOIP and cell phones may indeed work well enough for a lot of people but it's hard to beat a standard landline for reliability and, as mentioned elsewhere, the fact that phones can work when the power is out is a pretty big trump card. Like most people, we use mostly cordless phones, but there are a couple of phones lying around that requiring no external power just in case we need them.
Mod parent up!
Verizon has made a tremendous investment into their infrastructure, and is rolling out their fiber network faster than they rolled out their DSL network. I've had FIOS for about 3 weeks now, and I must say that it's anything short of amazing.
Where Verizon has really delivered, though, is on price. Unlike Cable, Verizon actually has competitors. Cable TV loves price-fixing, and it's rare to see a community with more than one cable franchise, allowing the companies to charge exorbitant rates while gouging their customers. The remarkable thing about Verizon's DSL/FiOS offerings is that they're significantly cheaper than anything else out there. I pay $35/month for 5/2mbps fibre, while getting 3/.768 service from my cable co. costs $60/month. The STATEWIDE franchises that the cable companies have been granted are striking fear into the hearts of the cable companies. I fully expect a huge legal battle to come out of this debating the legality of such franchises to begin with -- Cable is and always has been a legal monopoly. Healthy competition (Verizon in this case) drives prices down. Hopefully once FiOS-TV is rolled out, the cable co's will be forced to cut their rates and start expanding their HD offerings -- FiOS-TV is said to have 300 channels, about 75 of which are in HD.
I suppose Verizon expects a huge return on their investment in the fibre network. It's costing them a mint. A typical fios install takes 3 installers about 6-8 hours per residence just to do the premesis wiring and termination. On the up-side, the new network will cost them a lot less to operate than their old copper network. Reduced power draw, smaller local COs, and increased reliability to name a few, not to mention that they've finally rid themselves of copper wiring.
Hopefully this and satelitte will finally kill off the corrupt cable-tv industry.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
"VOIP is reliable enough for me. Are you really that frightened not being able to dial 911?"
Having personally lived through the Ice Storm in 1998 and more recently the massive blackout, i was thankful for a reliable means of communcation, even if it weren't to contact 911. It was also nice to have a reliable method of being reached.
Even just a normal power outage is not all that uncommon in winter. Following your suggestion, we'd cross our fingers and hope that in an emergency a)The ISP is up, b)The VoIP provider is in a similar state and c) You actually have power to run your end of the VoIP equipment. Brilliant plan.
Maybe you don't need a landline, but you'll be thankful your neighbour has one when it counts.
There's NO WAY I'll rely on them for telephony. I truly wish they weren't a broadband monopoly. I can't get DSL with any reasonable speed where I live, so Comcast is the only game in town.
genuity has a ton at
4.2.2.4
4.2.2.5
4.2.2.6
4.2.2.7
4.2.2.8
they just flat out work.. i don't use comcast's all.. override the ones i get via dhcp from them and put x.x.x.4 and x.x.x.5 and they are fine...
just ran www.dslreports.com speed test.. 7200/764
nasty fast...
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