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Is Comcast Heading the Way of the Dinosaur?
CasualRepartee writes "Comcast has been one of the most successful cable companies in the world; in many parts of the U.S., Comcast sits pretty on huge user bases that don't have many viable high-speed internet alternatives. However, poor customer service, slow speeds and generally poor business practices could make the once-great internet giant another extinct dinosaur, no ice age required.
The fact of the matter is this: Comcast is no longer the biggest and the best. Cable is taking a distant back seat to Verizon's FiOS (fiber optic service), which delivers speeds up to 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds. Unlike Comcast, FiOS delivers the full range of bandwidth to each user, whereas Comcast users are forced to share bandwidth with other users on the same coaxial cable, causing speeds to fluctuate dramatically with usage."
And if the pipe is before your destination, then you're going to be sharing bandwidth, FIOS, Cable or DSL.
Something to note -- Verizon has deployed a symmetric plan. In select areas it's 25Mbps both up and down. In other areas it's 15Mbps up/down. Check dlsreports.com for details.
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
A.) Comcast has over 12 million High Speed Internet users. They aren't going away anytime soon.
B.) DOCSIS 3.0 roll-outs, which are already started in test areas and expected to hit 25%+ in competitive Comcast markets in 2008, allows 450+ Mbps download and 125+ Mbps upload per channel in a node. For those not in the know, a node is where bandwidth is shared, and can feature many channels. Comcast is already planning to roll out 50 Mbps speeds, followed by 100 Mbps as it becomes competitive.
Bandwidth will continue to be competition-based, and Comcast is far from down and out.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Two sources:
Why, of course. If there's something you don't know about, it's got to be a media lie, right? Well, welcome to reality: cable is a shared backbone. It's an artifact of the design of cable television networks, and it's cable's biggest problem. This isn't "press puffery," it's a real problem for these people. Right now it doesn't come up much because the backbones can handle 5 megabit times 1500 customers. However, the big reason it took so long to deploy ADSL2 was because it required the phone companies to gut their infrastructure and lay down more capacity. DOCSIS 3 is going to do the same thing to the cable companies.
Please stop pretending to know things you don't actually know. Grandparent was quite correct - cable is a shared connection, and it's going to hurt the cable companies pretty badly in about two years. This is the nature of the technology. Read a book.
There's no such thing as a "FIOS back end". Fiber is a discrete network like ethernet. If you and your neighbor have FIOS, and you connect to your neighbor, it goes from you to your phone pole to their phone pole to them. It doesn't go to any "back end". Unlike DSL and cable, it never goes back to a central office, which I assume is what you mean by "back end", since that term does not come up in telecomms infrastructure. Namedropping doesn't make you clueful, even if the word sounds really convincing to you.
They don't. It's a brand new network. They won't be cutting bandwidth for at least five years. Also, please stop putting spaces before your question marks. It's obnoxious, it causes problems with line wrapping, and you look like a reject from third grade.
No.
It's a discrete network. Bandwidth sharing isn't possible. You probably mean network bandwidth arbitrage, which is very different. Do you go into your car mechanic and talk about Carnot cycles because you read about it in a slashdot article about engine efficiency? No? Then don't do that here, please, because the only difference is that, unlike the lucky greasemonkey, I am unable to laugh in your face to display for you just how much of an ass you're being. Just because you're used to calling your web server code deployments and your sql choices "back ends" doesn't mean that every time you've imagined yourself up the arbitrary need for some service provision that it's automatically called a backend, nor does it mean that the arbitrary service provision even exists.
Doesn't it bother you to get so high up on a soapbox about a network you know nothing about?
The only reason you believe that is that you know literally nothing about either technology. Doesn't it bother you to say "because I don't know jack, there is no way to differentiate between the two offers?" Verizon just dumped billions into a brand spanking new network. They hit this choke wall five years ago, because they were running on a much older general case network. Verizon is off of this hook for at least five years, and probably a decade. Comcast is just having the same set of problems that Verizon had in 2001, and the same set of problems that Verizon will have again in (checking crystal ball) approximately 2018.
Jesus H. Christ. NEITHER of these networks has anything even resembling an edge circuit. You have no idea what you're talking about. Why don't you just do us all a favor and stop pretending otherwise? The cable network is a trunk
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Thanks for posting this - I was in the middle of posting the same thing. Sure, you share a pipe - but the difference is the size of the pipe and how many other high bandwidth users you're sharing it with (and how oversubscribed it is). Around here (Philly burbs), Comcast offers "Speedboost" or "Powerboost" because they can occasionally allocate you the bandwidth, but they can't possibly give it to you all the time (they don't have it). DOCSIS 3.0 will help, but they're also trying to jam in all those new HDTV channels... FiOS, on the other hand, I NEVER see less than my rated speed, unless I'm going to a slow server or a server on a slow link. I might be sharing my downlink with up to 32 others on the BPON, but whatever they have at the CO and out is definitely not overloaded. My Mom on Comcast, though, sees a slowdown every day when the kids get home from school and log on to Xbox live.