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Comcast CEO Shows Off Superfast Modem
Gary writes "Comcast CEO dazzled cable industry audience by showcasing a super quick modem, using a technology called DOCSIS 3.0. It was developed by the cable industry's research arm, Cable Television Laboratories. It bonds together four cable lines but is capable of allowing much more capacity enabling a data download speed of 150 megabits per second, or roughly 25 times faster than today's standard cable modems. 'The new cable technology is crucial because the industry is competing with a speedy new offering called FiOS, a TV and Internet service that Verizon Communications Inc. is selling over a new fiber-optic network. The top speed currently available through FiOS is 50 megabits per second, but the network already is capable of providing 100 mbps, and the fiber lines offer nearly unlimited potential.'"
Can someone clarify for the non-technical types (such as myself) what "superfast" actually means?
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Bonds together 4 cable lines? I though one of the big issues with cable was saturation from multiple users on the same bit of cable? Not sure here as adsl is by far more available around here
And will the backbones follow suit???
>a data download speed of 150 megabits per second
The article makes no mention of what kind of upstream speeds you'll get with this technology.
With more and more households pulling down big files, with HDTV starting to take off and the jump in downloads *that* will cause, with more multi-PC homes (four in mine), of COURSE they're going to want more bandwidth.
And until FTTH becomes more prevalent, cable is the best available option.
and what is the upstream speed?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I can imagine the fark headline for this already...
Comcast announces faster modems, with new bandwidth caps, torrent blocking.
That means 16 cables should be 625 times as fast
and 128 cables... oh my god
Quick, get the bonding glue and a spool of coax!
It's download time!!!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Comcast's customers will be able to exceed the download limit on their allegedly-unlimited connections up to 25 times faster than they can now!
In a related story, RIAA and MPAA have both filed suit in court to preemptively obtain ISP subscriber information before any infringement can occur.
"It's an important step forward for the Web 3.0," Ebeneezer Swindler, lawyer for the RIAA, said. "Someone could get on that evil BitTorrent site and download our content. This happens so fast that by the time we logged in we couldn't even see their IP addresses. Our current technology requires us to temporarily join the pirates so we could get their information... it's no good if they'd already stolen what they needed and gotten out of there!"
"It's NO good," reiterated Swindler, with peculiar emphasis on the "NO."
No government official could be reached for comment as they were busy preordering ivory backscratchers from expected additional campaign contributions from the MAFIAA.
More Twoson than Cupertino
nt
...doesn't matter much if the cable ISP's backbone feed is already saturated with today's technology cablemodem subscribers using 1Mbps to 6Mbps units. Their backend equipment and backbone feed would be crushed under the load of anything greater than 10Mbps in every customer's home, let alone 100+Mbps.
They're competing with FiOS? The connection promised by every phone company 10 years ago that was never delivered despite being given money by the government to do so? The connection technology just now being rolled out by ONE phone company in a handful of cities?
That's competition?
I love it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You need 4 cable lines running into your house to get that kind of speed. That's insane! FIOS is way better. I find it interesting that FIOS can do 100 Mbits now, thought Verizon does not offer that service yet.
I think that running Fiber to the door was a smart move for Verizon. It's killing them now, but they should be good for at least 50 years, if not longer I would think. Hell, if they can give me 3 MBit DSL on a POTS line, I'm sure they'll find a way to increase the bandwidth on FIOS over time.
So you can use up your 'unknown' monthly data limit four times as fast now! I hope that ISP's realise that a faster modem will require a higher data cap.
More information can be found at:a tions30.htmls 30_080706.html0 .html
1. Specifications: http://www.cablemodem.com/specifications/specific
2. Press release: http://www.cablelabs.com/news/pr/2006/06_pr_docsi
3. Ars Technica article: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060808-745
Now you can get your Comcast "excessive utilization" nastygram after 10 minutes of usage!
I can just use a couple 3 way splitters from Radio Shack!
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
Dude, have you seen any porn stars up close? The last thing you want is HD porn.
I easily use more bandwith then most companies in my area just for personal use, when can I get this kind of bandwith without it costing me my first born AND my second?
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Well, let's just say that it's a pretty safe bet that Hi-Def Boobies will be involved.
DOCSIS is not a technology; it is a standard for cable network communication.
C'mon Slashdot, let's be a little more creative with our titles!
The AP Article is titled, "Comcast CEO shows off super quick modem"
I guess superfast (no space) is technospeak for super quick.
At this rate, they're NEVER gonna get the Slowskies away from their beloved ADSL and get them to become Comcast subscribers...
I got nothin'
instead, multiple upstream or downstream channels are used. The real factor in achieving these speeds depends on what modulation type your cable op decides to configure on the CMTS. In a perfect world everything is 256-QAM/128-QAM, but you will often see 32-QAM implimented because the end to end cabling can't support the rf throughput required for higher bandwidth modulation types. The wiki article on DOCSIS is a good place to start for more information.
My cable modem gives me 16 Mb.. 16 x 25 = 400. WTF are you talking about :(
With that in mind, I wonder why they feel the need to offer a 150Mbps download stream, since even assuming their infrastructure will ever be able to support such a thing (doubtful?), most households will never begin to approach that kind of need. Again, it looks like they're throwing out impressive numbers to me without much meat to back it up.
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
The description stating that it "It bonds together four cable lines" is a horrible description of what is likely going on here.
Cable/tv channels are 6 MHz wide. On a typical cable system you can use 256QAM to encode digital data for transmission. In 6 MHz you can get about 39 Mbps. If you bond four channels together (24 MHz) that's 156 Mbps using 256QAM.
So what it sounds like is DOCSIS 3 supports channel bonding or perhaps simply a very wide channel.
The "four cable lines" has nothing to do with how much physical coax comes to your house. On paper an all digital 750 MHz plant could deliver on the order of 4.5 Gbps. But having 70 channels of analog really cuts into that.
The article didn't state the upload speed, and it's doubtful it matches the 25x faster download.
In fact, if they were to decrease the upload speed instead, they just might be able to make the internet model act more like the Cable TV or Satelite TV models, where your box only decrypts/protects the content and uploads your viewing behaviors, while only downloading shows and advertisments.
but why do I have to choose between two of the worst companies ever (Comcast and Verizon) to get a fast Internet connection?
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
They mean 4 channels/frequencies, not 4 cables. 40Mbps over a single channel is normal, so 160Mbps over 4 channels makes sense. Channel bonding is very normal to speed things up, they use it in 802.11n and most newer cellular data transmission protocols. I don't see why this should make slashdot. It is nothing new and nothing revolutionary.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
Prohibited uses include, but are not limited to, using the Service, Customer Equipment, or the Comcast Equipment to:
ii. post, store, send, transmit, or disseminate any information or material which a reasonable person could deem to be objectionable, offensive, indecent, pornographic, harassing, threatening, embarrassing, distressing, vulgar, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or otherwise inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful;I refuse to give up my lawful pornographic material stored on my own computer just so I can switch away from DSL.
Just having a faster modem will not result in faster downloads. It is like fixing a huge 150" tap to a 1" pipe. Unless the internet backbone, the servers, the routers, switches, bridges increase their capacities we are not going to see an across the board increase in download and upload speeds. We might see some fast on demand IP based TV solution provided by the ISP and stuff like that. But slashdot.org is probably going to load at the same speed it is currently loading and your email attachments are going to take as much to upload as it is currently taking.
"Be the change you wish to see in the world" - M. K. Gandhi
Dude, have you seen any real women up close? The last thing you want is a girlfriend.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Assume for a moment that a cable company will actually run four cable lines to your house in lieu of fiber. Most home users will have little need for that type of speed.
I remember hearing the CEO of Time Warner ask this question in regards to fios: What can't you do with 30 Mbps that you can do with 100 Mbps? He was stating that you can easily do VOD, Voice, and Data over 30 Mbps connections and there was no reason for more speed.
With that attitude, do you think these guys will actually deploy this technology?
The only application I can see for these types of speeds is private connections. I would love to have a 100 Mbps connection between my sites, but the only way to get private connections between sites is leased lines and the last time I priced a private DS3 my boss got sticker shock.
Eventually regular consumers will not care about extra speed. We may already be at that point - plenty of people like Verizon's cheap DSL (768k/128k) because it's cheap and faster than dialup. Once joe average stops caring about speed increases, the only way to sell this service will be to interconnect businesses via private circuits.....but that is a long way off.
Cable companies and telcos like Verizon need to start thinking about faster uploads, static IP, and private connections to get businesses interested.
-ted
It is not clear whether the "it" referred to is the modem or the "technology called DOCSIS 3.0". In either case, the quoted information is not true.
DOCSIS 3.0 is a suite of specifications that represents the newest release of the DOCSIS specifications that have been around for nearly a decade now. CableLabs (the usual name for "Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.") managed the process of creating the specs, and performed the actual publication, but the specs themselves were developed in almost entirely by equipment manufacturers, with input from interested (mostly large) cable operators.
Similarly, the modem that was demonstrated was built not by CableLabs but by one of those equipment manufacturers (ARRIS, for whom I work, although I have no direct association with the group that builds the DOCSIS 3.0 modem; I was a contributor to the DOCSIS 3.0 specs).
The complete sleep-inducing suite of specs may be downloaded from www.cablelabs.com.
But who cares? Does anyone actually think cable companies are going to provide any sort of significant speed boost to consumers any time soon? They've already demonstrated people are willing to pay $55 USD/month for 3 Mbps/768 kpbs service*; why should they increase those numbers?
And it's not like they're operating in a vacuum, since you can get 6 Mbps/1 Mbps ADSL for $35 USD/month.
*I'm looking at you, Charter.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
This is all very nice and impressive, but it's besides the point.
Verizon is coming into the Washington metro area with FIOS and based on informal discussions with friends and colleagues is kicking Comcast's butt.
Right now, it's primarily a price issue. High speed internet (5M/2M) is similarly price, but the FIOS TV is where Verizon has a huge advantage. Right now, most people are reporting savings of $25/month (that's SAVINGS) and this is for more channels, but standard def and high def.
Plus, the Verizon installers are, in general, far more professional because they haven't outsourced installation to guys in pickup trucks. They do it themselves, and the quality of their work is outstanding.
The good news here is for consumers... Comcast must do something they've refused to do so far... compete on price, because they have less features than Verizon. Right now, Comcast is offering limited deals (1 year, all your boxes for free), but as FIOS penetrates more neighborhoods, the prices will drop.
This really is good news for everybody.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Sure, Verizon _claims_ unlimited potential, but last month I was using a lot of potential and they capped me!
DOCSIS 3.0 mandates both IPv6 and IPv4 support in cable modems, as well as the other improvements. See http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/06mar/slides/v6op s-4/v6ops-4.ppt for a presentation about why cable MSOs (operators) are deploying IPv6 (Comcast already has IPv6 in its core network and plans to roll out to homes, because it's exhausted the 10.x address space already in IPv4, and is now onto public IPv4). So this means that DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems will really be the first mass deployed IPv6 capable devices, and some cable operators will turn IPv6 on, certainly Comcast.
The best part of this new technology?
The new modem still has the limitation of only ~300k of upstream bandwidth. It's totally win-win.
if you can get it....
i just dumped comcast entirely and it's about time. they've been blocking verizon from rolling out their TV service for quite some time. FiOS internet is FAR superior...my upload speed is faster hen my friends' comcast download speed. Their TV service competes as well. verizon's HD channels are much better in selection, signal, and picture quality. comcast blows verizon away in OnDemand selection though. FiOSTV offers 0 free movies on demand...$2.99 for Encino Man??...come on verizon.....
Even if his life depended on it...
I once spoke at a conference for Comcast execs and they (suits) have no clue as to what is a better technology. Roberts and his crew are clueless and will jump on whatever they think will keep them in the game and make them money.
They are wedded to coax because they are too cheap to invest in fiber. Remember that the reason why they could afford to create a cable modem network was because Microsoft gave them a huge cash investment in the 90's.
In Philadelphia they are piling a lot of their cash into building the city's tallest skyscraper - The Comcast Tower. Now you know where all of your cable modem fees are going.
Multiple coax cables? What a joke - wake up and smell the fiber.
As much as the cablecos would like to make us all go "oooh" and "aaah" over this technology, it's still incredibly unimpressive. We won't see rollouts of this technology for at least a year and most projections show just 40% of cable subscribers will have access to DOCSIS 3.0 by 2012. It's really not all that impressive considering that projects like UTOPIA and FIOS are currently delivering better speeds than cable and can ramp up to 100Mbps+ without much in the way of equipment upgrades. UTOPIA can even do 1Gbps+ with a minimum of new equipment. This is just another way for incumbent providers to squeeze more blood from the turnip that is their aging copper-based plant. The stock market will reward them now, but the market as a whole will be punishing them in 5-10 years.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
They already don't let us use the bandwidth that our DOCSYS 2.0 modems are capable of. What's the point in getting a modem that's 50x faster than what they'll allow us to use instead of only 2x faster? The end result is the same.
I suppose they're going to use this as another level to sell. My idiot neighbor bought the highest speed connection he could buy so it would "improve his gaming response" - really he could have bought the cheapest connection, because he doesn't need speed, he needs low latency. I told him this but he didn't believe me. If they offered an even higher speed connection, he'd buy it and still only use 256Kbps of it.
Those of us who have read the DOCSIS 2.0 spec know that it caps out at 45Mbps.
Of course, that's in the lab. Just as 150Mbps over DOCSIS 3.0 is. And DOCSIS 3.0 requires that you apparently use four channels. On DOCSIS 2.0 you have a dedicated 8MHz of frequency dedicated to your downstream. So we'll be able to have one-quarter the subscribers per segment/line card?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And this is not to mention them throwing you off the system for violating their unpublished, secret, bandwidth caps. In short, if you actually use the bandwidth you think you purchased, you're cut off. This is nothing more than FUD so that Comcast and the other cable companies can claim that their system beats FiOS. And the government is refusing to protect us against this false advertising.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
but the only way to get private connections between sites is leased lines and the last time I priced a private DS3 my boss got sticker shock
That's not the only way. I worked for a place a while back that ran fibre from their main office to their DR site.
Now, their DR site was fifty yards away, and some of the servers in there were production boxes...but they did string fibre on poles across the intervening freeway. They even had a redundant fibre line in case the first one was cut or damaged.
Now, their redundant fibre line was hanging from the very same hooks on the very same poles as their primary...
But they did run a private line without leasing anything.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
This is my favorite part of the original article:
/Ed
"In the presentation, Robert Stanzione, ARRIS Group chief executive, downloaded a 30- second, 300- megabyte television commercial in a few seconds while a standard modem took 16 minutes."
Now if I can just get one of those petabyte sized harddrives, with this connection I will begin downloading the internet.
~Vexed and loving it!
infected computer will really crank out the mail!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
I hope they compete like battle bots.
Wherever we have reached limits - we have broken them. Sooner or later humankind is going to figure out ways of using up 150MB. Only that companies should not just jump on the wagon and start laying fiber to the doorstep in one go. It will take time to increase the general capacity, create the demand and generate the revenues.
So the verdict is - Yes we will probably use all of it.
"Be the change you wish to see in the world" - M. K. Gandhi
From the title of this article, I thought I was finally going to be free of my v.92 modem. Curse you /. for raising my hopes!!
I don't think the upload speed of DOCSIS 3.0 will come anywhere near the download speed, so your site-to-site will be measured by your maximum upload speed only, which was carefully not mentioned in the article.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They'll all cower before my "uberfast" modem, which bonds an unspecified number of tight strings to give a speed increase up to 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 times greater than reading a DVD a byte at a time over the phone to your mate with a hex editor.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
It's a standard. I remember being one of the people stuck ... er, tasked with, reviewing the first version. It was a painful read, but definately showed that there was "something new in the air." A lot of surprising things were taken into account, especially in a time frame where DSL was just starting to kick cable's ass. I'm curious to see what the new standard includes.
Bark less. Wag more.
So many people keep using POTS. People! Get with it! This isn't 1975!
PSTN, baby.
PSTN.
They will unblock it if you are willing to pay about 4 times as much money per month ($200 vs $50). Alternatively you could do what I'm doing right now: Pay $50 per month for a dedicated host somewhere else, and tunnel to it through the FiOS connection. Whoopie! No ports blocked and only a slight increase in latency (which doesn't affect throughput due to windowing). Now of course they could start shaping the encrypted traffic like some other ISPs have done. Thus far they have not.
> It bonds together four cable lines but is capable of allowing much more capacity...
So, now my internet will have four different tubes?
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
so which home shopping and religious channels are they going to give up to use 4 channels for this new cable modem?
Actually, as I understand it, the cable companies will continue to provide the analog channels they do now... at least, the same ones that are currently broadcast Over the Air. If you get TV programming from your cable company, you're not supposed to need a digital tuner box for the broadcast channels. It's the OTA transmissions that are going to stop broadcasting the analog channels. This is a national thing, not specific to California, as the FCC is going to be selling off the frequencies currently used by OTA analog transmissions. It doesn't make sense for the FCC to care about the frequencies used on a cable connection, since that doesn't affect anything that's not hooked up to cable.
The cable companies might shift some of their analog channels around to make more room for Internet bandwidth, but I think they're required to keep the regular broadcast channels in analog, and will probably only move things like the Travel Channel and the History Channel over to exclusively digital. Even then, I don't think this newfangled cable modem technology is any big reason for them to start creating more Internet bandwidth to each home. As someone above posted, the current DOCSIS standard (2.0) in the US is capable of 43Mbps, but most of our cable Internet connections max out at 6 Mbps. So just because a new standard promises a way to get more bandwidth, I'm pretty sure Comcast isn't going to be giving us connections that can use anywhere near the amount that DOCSIS 2.0 can provide for a long time.
oh, I see. They want us to buy new modems. OK, my questions are answered.
Well..
:) Good to see something 'new'....
It's nice to see that the cable companies are doing exactly the same thing as the Trailblazer modems did 20 years ago..
It amazes me it took them so long, considering the fact that all cable systems are already multiplexing frequencies like crazy to begin with.
Ah well
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Screw download speed, I wand upload bandwidth. I have all the download capacity I need for quite some time, but upload capacity is still on the order of what it was in the days of phone lines.
I think that would be more useful then yet another soon to be capped increased download rate.
My cable co cant deal with today's modems potential, what good does this modem do?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sounds like the old days of using more than one modem to connect to a BBS. If I remember correctly it was called Shotgun.
This technology, being 25 times faster will absolutely be 50 times more expensive. Comcast customers can look forward to a pricing plan that allows them to pay for a one year package over the span of 5 years. Included in this plan will be 6 months at the reduced rate (50%) of only $1299.99 per month. We are proud to announce a partnership with GM that will allow you to get up to $5000.00 off the annual package of $31,199.99 or a free Cable Modem with the trade in of a GM vehicle.
Sign-up will begin in July 2008, and we will come to your home and install sometime between August 2008 and December 2009. All agreements void if you download more than the recommended amount. If our rep arrives for installation and you are not there, we reserve the right to charge a really insipid fee to reschedule your installation and make you wait 4-7 more months.
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."
...instead of lowering the price of 1-3 Mb service or extending the availability of broadband further out into rural areas. Or, as others have mentioned, allowing continuous use at the bitrate billed.
...pretty much uncapped if you're really getting such speeds. Enjoy it while you can... it probably won't last that good much longer.
Its about time!
No porn remarks? C'mon slashdot!
I mean, wow, people will be able to use up their 5 gig/month quota in no time.
Now you can exceed your bandwidth cap in 2 hours!
I'll be very happy to have a faster connection...though my current connection is quite fast. Comcast already gives me 10mbps down and 1.5 mbps up. I'd really be happy to have just 20mbps up and down. That would be a very fast connection.
You can have the fastest modems in the world, but the first time someone taps Comcast's physically insecure lines in your neighborhood to get the hot football game on TV for free, your modem will be brought to its knees by the noise introduced on the line by amateur coaxial connections. This will happen over and over and over... Comcast cannot physically secure its lines and therefore is inviable as an ISP.
Next!
Dial-up could be likened to providing water through an optical fibre.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I hope they compete more like GLOW constestants - except this time the only difference is the W, for wire.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
This is Comca$t. What do you think is going to happen to the price?
You might wonder why I ask who cares. I say who cares because I was under the impression that DOCSIS 2.0 was capable of 40Mbps. Comcast doesn't offer anything NEAR this. What's the "speedboost" crap they offer now? 12Mbps? Maybe if they were utilizing the 2.0 standard NOW I would give a shit about the 3.0 standard.
Several earlier posts, including one of mine, have pointed out that they will not be running new cable lines to your house.
With that attitude, do you think these guys will actually deploy this technology?
Having sat around the table with "these guys" for most of the past two years while developing the DOCSIS 3.0 specs, I can guarantee that most of the big operators will be deploying this technology as soon they can get their hands on it in sufficient quantities from the equipment vendors.
Wasn't DOCSIS 3.0 capable of somewhere around a max of 466 mbps? Why only 150, then?
Oh, wait, TV channels. D'oh! Lemme have my 466 megabit! I don't watch television!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
people keep lumping all the cablecompanies together. Cablevision is already using docsis 2. They have 15/2 basic package and for about $60 a month or so there is the boos package wich is 30/5 speeds .Boost uses docsis2.0
Cablecompanies can compete with fios as shown with cablevision.
Sort of on topic, sort of off, but does Comcast's CEO actually use Comcast as his cable provider?
I ask this as my Comcrap cable has been knocked out *again* from a thunderstorm. Since January, we've lost service due to an ice storm, a relatively light snowfall, and just plain old rain. Another occasion had the TV service freezing up because it was *raining*. We've received nominal credits (yay, a $1.30 credit on my $90 bill!)
Does the CEO have to read about FiOS offering substantially better speeds and programming at a similar or lesser price than his own cable? If he has a problem, does he have to wait on hold for an hour and a half to talk to someone, just like his technicians? Is his area stuck with a cable guide that is 3 generations behind those in the middle of freakin' Indiana? Does his HD pixellate or get out of sync every so often? Is he happy with the literal handful of HD channels available to his lineup?
Yep, I'm bitter. I use Comcast because I can't get DSL (I'd have to get a landline phone for that anyway, which I don't want) and they are the only provider. I hate it hate it hate it. I just don't understand how someone could subscribe to their service and actually *enjoy* it, given the other technology alternatives that are out there, but just aren't available yet to everyone for some unknown reason. Gahhhhh!
A DR site that's less than 50 MILES away is not much of a DR site - the same disaster that takes out the primary is likely to take out the DR site as well...
I mean, how else can they sell this crap if they don't have buzz on it from the fanboys (bandwidth fanboys? Comcast fanboys? hardware fanboys?). Their key word was "Entrepreneurs"; get ready with your wallet for what others have commented it is really a modest technology upgrade.
Seriously, since we are moving past the dialup and cable stage, beyond file sizes for most things, the conversation must change to *what* will we be allowed to do with the added bandwidth (as others have noticed); *how* is no longer important to most of us.
Just watch more TV? More infomercials or pointless shows? Faster download times (How many times do I need to download encyclopedia brittanica?) No Thank You.
The announcement is thoroughly worthless because they haven't explained what I will be allowed to do with it all.
25 Times what I currently get would be 250Mbps. 25 Times what I can get right now would be 500Mbps.
Don't get me wrong, 150Mbps would be an improvement, but I find it amusing they are comparing it to the average, and a bit low at that. Might be accurate for the United States, but it doesn't apply to anywhere else in the world.
I recently had transfer rates of between 500K byes/sec and 1MegByte/Sec, real-world.
"capacity enabling a data download speed of 150 megabits per second, or roughly 25 times faster than today's standard cable modems."
25 x faster? WTF are you running that's so slow? 4mbps is so last millenium, FFS.
My current cable modem is capped by videotron at 10mpbs (they can also set it to 20mpbs if I want to pay another $15/month). The modem itself is limited to 42mbps, so "bonding 4 cable lines" to achieve 150mbps is actually less total capacity than just taking 4 of my current modems (4x42 = 168 mpbs) ...
I guess its true - the US is the backwater when it comes to high speed internet. A lot of the world has 100mbps to the door (rumour has it that we'll have 1gbps sometime in the next year or two when they finish the hdtv upgrades).
This article has one key line that just makes me want to scream.
This is NOT 25 times faster than current standard cablemodems. It may be 25 times faster than Comcast currently OFFERS, but that is a significant difference.
One of the reasons uncapping modems worked as well as it did is because DOCSIS 1.1 and 2.0 are both capable of 45Mbit/sec downstream. There are current services (Disclaimer: I work for Cablevision, where one of these is offered) that are offering 30Mbit/sec download speeds - and getting them. (I personally have topped out at 29Mbit/sec.) There are other technologies than DOCSIS out there that are currently implemented which are easily capable of 100Mbit/sec.
There's absolutely nothing to get excited about with this. If anything, I admit to being puzzled as to why they weren't managing 180Mbit/sec on a modem with 4 bonded channels - 20Mbit/sec is a bit much to be writing off to overhead.
DOCSIS 3.0 is a solid step forward, but this is not the next greatest thing. There are comparative technologies available right now that would require minimal upgrades, if any. And the guy at Time Warner's right, what can't you do with 30Mbit/sec that you can with 100Mbps?
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
FiOS is great and would be a 1000 times better if they had it in my area. Like most all of us I am always in need of more bandwidth. Hopefully since I already have cable this will be available in my area once it hits the world. I can only keep my fingers crossed.
WTF?
Er...yes.
That was sort of my point. Along with the "redundant" line that is lying right next to the primary, and the fact that the DR site also hosted non-replicated production boxes.
I wasn't exactly holding this place up as a model of How To Do DR.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Cable companies are working to get rid of the analogue channels. They know that it is a massive waste of bandwidth, and digital gives them better controls anyhow. Currently Cox in my area has all the analogue channels duplicated in the digital range. If you have a digital cable it remaps the channels from the 800 block down to the normal analogue numbers. Current effect is that your DVR gets a little better recordings and they take less space (since it just stores the stream and doesn't do its own encoding) but that's not why they did it. They wouldn't go through all that trouble, and use up additional spectrum, just for a bit more space on the DVRs. They did it in preparation to axe the analogue transmissions. I'm sure it'll be quite a while in coming, but it IS coming.
Well, knock out all those analogue channels, and you've now got a hell of a lot of space for cable modem and DOCSIS 3 becomes a rather worthwhile proposition.
As cool as fibre is there's a problem: It isn't what's in the ground now, and it costs money to lay. Fibre to the home is great and all, but you are kidding yourself if you think there's going to be a fast rollout of it. The advantage of cable based technologies is that it uses existing infrastructure, and is also compatible with new rollouts. You may have heard the network that a cable modem connects to as the "HFC" network. That means "hybrid fibre coax". TV isn't done over all copper, they are building out fibre in the network quite quickly. However they don't have to run it all the way to the home for it to work.
Also, for all the bandwidth that is available on fibre, copper is no slouch. For decades we keep hearing how copper is going to die, and it keeps being wrong. Coax in particular is actually rather impressive. While there might not be a whole lot of the spectrum dedicated to Internet, there's a hell of a lot of spectrum there. Digital CATV networks generally have 1GHz in total spectrum. A large portion of that is currently occupied rather inefficiently by analogue transmission, which take 6MHz per channel, but even with that they still have enough to do data, phone, all the SD channels digitally, HD, and half a hundred pay per view channels. If you run the numbers with the encoding, you discover that it would be about 4Gbps were the whole cable used for data.
So while I'm sure fibre will continue to be built out, by both the phone companies and the cable companies, you are kidding yourself if you think in 5 years copper to the house will be dead. It'll be here for a long time yet, and they aren't stupid for developing technology that can keep using it.
and how much of a ridiculous surcharge are we going to have to pay for this? as it is the cable companies pretty much suck. Oh you want to have the DVR from us and the channel guide? you need digital cable... What does digital cable give me? basically just duplicates of every channel you already get and couple of extra ones that you will never ever watch. and some free on demand that has absolutely nothing you'll ever want to watch on it. weee open up your wallets
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
hopefully speakeasy will offer 100Mbit fiber in my area.
This is so completely overdue.
I love the Internet so much I was planning on moving to europe to get fast access.
Bellsouth/AT&T can no longer call their 256K product "fast access".
They're using their grammar skills there.
I am so sick of the cable industry's "big ideas" when it comes to Internet access. Comcast especially. The cable industry's "big plan" includes a very antiquated idea: That they can sell content *and* a service to get that content at the same time. Let me explain:
Right now your cable company coax is primarily used up by analog and digital television channels. This "content" is highly un-exclusive. Meaning you can get the same TV channels and shows from many other providers. Their entire business model is built on the idea that while this content is not exclusive to the world at-large, they do have a monopoly on its delivery to you (if you ignore satellite TV).
Now they're selling Internet access and they expect to be able to continue to enjoy their monopoly on content? They are either delusional or they fully expect to overcome Network Neutrality. Here's why:
When we've all got 16+ megabit Internet connections (~the amount needed for streaming HDTV) what's to stop us from subscribing to Internet-based television services? Better yet, what's to stop us from just getting said video feeds for free? Not to mention the fact that most TV shows don't NEED to be streamed in the first place.
The answer: Absolutely nothing. I look forward to the day when I can subscribe to Comcast Internet and then watch TV streamed over the Internet from an infinite amount of channels. Hell, I'm already doing this in a way by way of video podcasts that are automatically downloaded to my MythTV box.
By providing high-speed Internet access to their customers they're forcing themselves to compete on content and that is something the cable industry is not used to doing. If Verizon is smart, they'll start offering their FIOS TV channels to *anyone* on the Internet willing to pay for them.
150 megabits is slow anyway. Let's talk about a much more USEFUL Internet connection: At gigabit speeds.
-Riskable
http://riskable.com/
"For a market to be fair and just
Regulations are a must"
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
That's just great! At 150Mbs, I can meet my undocumented 200GB/month cap in just three hours.
(Check my math.)
Without sufficient network backbone bandwidth, such technologies are about as useful as having George Bush as President.
The top speed currently available through FiOS is 50 megabits per second, but the network already is capable of providing 100 mbps, and the fiber lines offer nearly unlimited potential*.
*Unlimited refers to how long they can remain connected to the internet. Standrad fixed data rates to be determined and held top secret by our staff apply
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Comtrash has been advertising 6Mbit cable modems around here ever since they took over from Adelphia. When the transition occured, I was without service for 10 days. When it came back up, I had 1 Mbit speed. I called them numerous times and they checked numerous times and every time, I had a maximum of 1Mbit but was paying for 6Mbit.
Finally I had an honest technician come to my home. He said they had everybody reduced to 1Mbit to allow more bandwidth for their new services that were coming and for their telephone service (VoIP?). Anyway, he didn't even waste his or my time -- he told me the truth. He said nobody every checks their speed and Comtrash didn't expect anybody to. He was surprised that I did.
So I dropped Comtrash's expensive high-speed and went with a 1.5 Mbit DSL at 1/3 the cost and 50% faster than Comcast's 6Mbit!
I don't know how they can do all the false advertising and deliver less than promised and get away with it. I contacted the city's telecommunications division and they said that Comtrash had a monopoly and that there was nothing they could do to enforce them to provide the service advertised.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Who, really, wants speeds of 160Mb/s and not want to download ISOs etc. However depending on which ISP you use (most) your limit is gonna be a fraction of the potential of the device. I mean for web browsing and other low to medium bandwidth applications, 1Mb is plenty fast enough
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
100mbps? Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
So now you can download at the limit of the bandwidth of the equipment serving your area. Oh, wait, you can already do that.
So CATV guys will have to put in equipment capable of handling more than 10 times this speed upstream, assuming they're going to have 80 customers on this system, and oversubscribe at 8 to 1. Except they'll sell more than that in lots of areas, and they WON'T put in equipment fast enough to handle more than a few of these in the first place.
That won't stop them from selling it, though.
the "modem" part of Cable Modem is a marketing word so people who have dialup modems are familiar with them.
Cable "modems" are actually bridging devices.
Most Cable providers are still running at DOCSIS 1.x and are planning a rollout to 2.x over YEARS of deployment.
Your bandwidth is constrained by your cable ISP's bandwidth to their Tier2 or Tier1 provider and your subscription plan.
My modem was capable of a theoretical 40Mb/s+ 5 years ago. I doubt comcast will be offering ANY service in the next 5 years that max out the capability of my DOCSIS 1.x modem.
Does it actually modulate or demodulate anything?
This has been in field trials in Quebec for a couple of months.
Upload isn't just for p2p.
Ever since I got a PS3, I've been video chatting with a friend of mine in England, a friend in the next city over and my family on the opposite coast. It seems the main limiting factor in our video chat quality is the upload rate of the person sending video. As a result, I get much better video from my friend in England (who has a rather large upload rate) then my friend in the next city over (who has the slowest upload rate...and is also using comcast).
Better upload rates are definately of interest.
-tom
150mb down, 768k up!
or else!
FiOS is 50 megabits per second, but the network already is capable of providing 100 mbps, and the fiber lines offer nearly unlimited potential.'"
Makes sense. They need this to stay in the market or become an acquisition like other's have been.
The main concern I have with this is people will hit their "invisible limits" with their unlimited residential accounts that much faster. Sad. The company is moving things along and I'm glad to see them beginning the process of catching up with the high end HSI market. IMO, the company won't be successful in the long run unless they disclose what people have purchased.
I thought I purchased a 6 meg pipe and an "unlimited use for a flat monthly fee" account. That's what it said in the advertisement anyway. Does anyone know what the heck Comcast really sold them? I can't find the answer. Part of the reason we hit the "New York Times". Bandwidth is an issue. I don't disagree. But hiding what customers purchased and expecting timely checks in the mail?
Sounds like fraud to me.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Why not let us have service that actually uses our current hardware somewhere close to it's potential?
]You know, if you want faster net access you can move to Northeast Utah where they have A Broadband Utopia.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Tell me about it - most school projects these days are far to be intricate to be built by the students. Inevitably they just get built by parents, with maybe a little student involvement.
The problem today with science projects is that is someone were to do some of the projects that were done in days gone by you might find yourself on a terrorist watch list. I recall getting a chemistry lab with 101 experiments, or some such thing, in junior high but it's been years since I've seen one. Then in high school a friend and I got the permission form the chemistry teacher to do some of our own experiments in the lab during lunch or after school when we were taking advanced chemistry. Just for the heck of it we grabbed an ecyclopedia from the library and looked up nitroglycerine and from the discription of how it was made we were able to make some ourselves. Do that now and you may find yourself being sent to Gitmo.
FalconShould there be a Law?
What I don't get is the "bonds together four cable lines" bit.
Somebody screwed up explaining this. It's not about bonding 4 lines but bonding 4 channels. Cables have a bunch of channels and what they are actually doing is bonding four of them in the cable together for data transition. So there's still only one cable.
FalconShould there be a Law?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPON
One fiber delivers phone data and tv.
The next epon standard is 10 gig. The US is just behind as far as broadband technology and penetration go.
Current cablemodem technology is CAPABLE of around 45Mbit/s
The 'real world' rate of 384K or 3M or 5M is due to the cable company-set cap in the device, and is becuase thats all they want you to have for what you pay them. Of course, none of this has any bearing on what the cable head-ends upstream connection is, if its a T1 (1.5M), you arent gonna get 45M no matter what they do to the cap.
So if this tech is capable of 150Mbit/s, then its only about 3 times faster that current technology, not 25.
Have you considered wireless connections between your sites? A WISP might love to do your private connections. I've had about 5 nines of uptime on a 10Mbit link for 8 months now. Cost was less than three months payments on a T1.