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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.'"
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
Superfast means it has the ability to go much faster than the undocumented quota that will get a subscriber kicked off the net.
>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.
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.
No, RTFA or TFCA (the comment above) - 25x faster than a 6Mbps connection.
If you can get a 20Mbps connection then - duh! - the 150Mbps connection is (roughly) 7.5x faster than what you're currently getting.
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Now you can get your Comcast "excessive utilization" nastygram after 10 minutes of usage!
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
Then you actually get to the cable network and it drops to superslow. Seriously, the whole hype thing is overdone. Anyone who's tried to use cable 7x24 knows it drops toward 30 second latency on web pages on a regular basis. The cable networks are probably overloaded/under designed. What good is superfast when the actual throughput is supersucky!!!
Expect Freedom.
The connection technology just now being rolled out by ONE phone company in a handful of cities?
Right. Before it was being rolled out, they weren't having to compete with it. Now it IS being rolled out, so they DO have to compete with it. Is this a little too complex, or something? People (including zoning boards in municipalities, property managers for large buildings, developers, etc) are going to be making lots of infrastructure decisions. Things that weren't, but now ARE available figure into that. If a cable company doesn't show any sign that they're even going to TRY to compete with a wildly faster technology that is now actually in use by actual consumers, what do you think would happen to them over time? That's not a "funny definition" of competition, it IS competition. Or... do you think that something's only a factor in competition if it magically appears on the market in exactly equal supply, with perfect adoption in exact porportion? If you're even slightly thinking that way, then Macs and Linux boxes can't be competition for Windows boxes, either. Which would surprise all of those Mac owners out there, for example. Sort of like my mom would be surprised that when she had her choice of a dish provider or two, two cable companies, and Verizon's FIOS, that competition wasn't a factor in all of those sales pitches at her front door.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
oh, I see. They want us to buy new modems. OK, my questions are answered.