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Verizon Offers 20/20 Symmetrical FiOS Service
BlueMerle writes with news that Verizon is offering 20 Mbps symmetrical service for current FiOS customers in NY, CT, and NJ. It will cost $65 a month. Cable companies aren't in a position to match this capability.
With the advent of DOCSIS 3.0, cable companies can "bundle up" upstream channels for up to 120 Mbits. Standard DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems will have 4 downstreams and 4 upstream channels, for a total (theoretical) throughput of 200 Mbit/s DS and 120 Mbit/s US.
While the throughput is shared, there's something to be said about PowerBoost as well - they may be able to offer a 20/20 service with boost capability up to 40/40 or 80/40... or if you pay to download movie they may allow you to download that movie @ the full 200 Mbit/s.
Cable companies will be able to compete - but only if they don't keep shooting themselves in the foot with things like BitTorrent filtering.
damn you guys in the states have it hard. My connection was just upgraded from 8/1 to 20/2 for free. 50 dollars per month. Welcome to Denmark :) And its even cheaper in Sweden.
I'd like to share my experience with a similar service I've been using since year 2000 in Italy. I have a symmetrical 10 Mbits fiber optic connection from Fastweb http://www.fastweb.it/. Their offers that can compare to the Verizon one range in the 50-60 Euros per month, so Verizon is definitely cheaper. :-) but otherwise I'd have waited some month and read what the other customers said.
The question somebody asked, directly or unspoken, in this forum is: do you really get all that speed? In my case the answer is yes. I FTP at 1000 kB/s (kilobytes) with the other guys in the Fastweb network and it's common to download files at more than 400 kB/s from US servers. CDNs usually bring that figure in the 700-900 kB/s range. That bandwidth isn't guaranteed by the contract but it never shrunk noticeably in these eight years, despite the fact that the customer base grew 100 times or more. On the other side, none of the 10 or 20 Mb/s ADSL connections I saw here in Italy (with other ISPs) were faster than one tenth of their nominal bandwidth, when downloading files from the same services I use.
So, if you trust your provider to invest in its interconnection with the Internet at large, those 65$ can be worth the expense. If you think that it will somewhat cap your bandwidth, stay with what you have. In my case I got a six-months-for-free offer and I jumped in at the very beginning of the offering
Finally, do you really need all that speed? My answer is yes: you find a way to put it at use once you got it and you don't want to go back.
I had FiOS for a few months (granted, it was their 5mb/2mb package) and ran BT more or less 24/7 and never ran into any problems. Verizon has a whole host of other issues (their billing department, especially, is a joke), but as far as using your bandwidth goes they really don't seem to care if you max it out. They also don't make any serious attempt to block P2P, although they do block some of the common web services ports (i.e. you can't run an http server on port 80, ftp server on 21, etc).
Check out Treesandthings.com for offbeat news
I very recently moved to Seoul and finally setup the internet yesterday. First thing I did was to test the speeds and here are the results.
Speed test in Korea: 94.7Mb down - 11.4Mb up
Speed test to Japan: 11.4Mb down - 7.8Mb up
Speed test to USA: 2.7Mb down - 0.9Mb up
My DSL in the US is working at ~630Kb up (have ATT which promises between 512Kb - 764Kb up). So even if I upgraded the service, my slingbox would barely perform better.....
There's a subtle implication there that uploading torrents is automatically an illegitimate purpose. However, many Linux distributions are available that way, as one example of a legitimate purpose for uploading a torrent. Torrent != piracy.
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
To use DOCSIS 3.0, not only would you need new modems that are compatible with this standard, but the network itself also needs to be upgraded. Lines need to have higher bandwidth and the CTMS has to be upgraded/replaced with DOCSIS 3.0-compatible hardware. Some MSOs still use DOCSIS 1.1, which is scary considering how long DOCSIS 2.0 has been out.
DOCSIS 3.0 has only been out for less than a year. Cable modem networks have significantly less upstream bandwidth than downstream bandwidth -- analog tv is to blame for this.
I'd rather have FiOS anyways; I drool over a symmetrical connection.
And yes, IACMT (cable modem technician) (though not a field tech).
20918 kb/s up, 8181 kb/s down