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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 here, I have the choice of DSL from Qwest or cable internet from Comcast. Dsl is cheaper, but significantly slower (since I can't get anything but the basic service due to distance issues).
Note to Comcast: I am sorely tempted to switch back to Comcast, but there is no way I will until you quit screwing with traffic; believe it or not, I use torrents to get legit software (linux distros and some commercial software that *gasp* I have paid for), and I can't afford to have this kind of traffic disrupted. So for me, slow dsl is the only viable alternative.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Comcast is getting OnDemand TV out to their subscribers. They also have their eggs in more than one basket with increasing revenues coming in from arena management and programming with VS. and several regional sports nets challenging Fox Sports Net.
Comcast is my cable provider. I don't like the way they operate, but I'm not switching and losing OnDemand TV and my local NBA team games as a result.
You are not alone. Everyone hates comcast, Even the employees (except for the Executives at VP and above.. and they have at least 180-190 VP's.) I left 2 years ago because I saw a sinking ship, and even then All my coworkers hated the company and it's business practices. They made incredibly stupid decisions like spending freezes on the operations side but the executives could hire new assistants and remodel their offices at $30,000-$50,000 a pop. Customer service is touted all over the place yet when you as an employee try to implement it you are told no. I know of field techs that were let go for trying to make the customer happy.
They seemed to promote the idiots to management and let go those that were valuable to the company. In other words I saw lots of people getting screwed, so I jumped ship. Because the screwing was so bad I could map out and see it was heading for me and my department.
The last straw for me was instead of hiring one of the guys in the department that knew the job and systems or a new manager position they hired a friend of one of the executives for it that did not know squat about the department, what we did, or even the business process. And this is a very common thing at comcast, hiring of managers based on the buddy system not capabilities and knowledge.
Posting anon as peole at Comcast that know me know my Slashdot ID.
Yes, any idiot can see that FTTH is the way to go, but Comcast and AT&T aren't run by just ANY idiots. Running fiber is a one-time expense, a big one to be certain but once it's in place you're good for the foreseeable future. Now, Comcast could get away with milking their hybrid fiber/coax plant for a while longer if they'd simply devote more bandwidth to Internet instead of TV, especially if DOCSIS 3 modems work, but AT&T has no such excuse. Spending lots of money on fancy electronics to get their antiquated copper plant to provide a measly 27Mbps aggregate bandwidth from the fiber node to the home (FTTN) rather than do things right the first time is going to go down in the B-school books as one of the most penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions in history. Hello, regular HDTV feeds are 20Mbps and recompressing those so you'll have enough bandwidth left for Internet, VoIP, and one measly SDTV channel makes HDTV look like an overgrown YouTube video (I exaggerate... slightly).
The sad thing is that the measly 6M/1M "Elite" tier Internet service AT&T U-verse offers is usually superior to Comcast and cheaper too. If they'd have been a little smarter they'd have skipped TV entirely (and those expensive settop boxes, TV channel fees, etc) and used all the bandwidth for Internet... assuming that they absolutely, positively won't run fiber like Verizon.
I have to disagree with the notion that we have to wait for the existing monopolies to correct their rectal-cranial inversion. It is possible for a new company to build FTTH. Having a separate company run fiber that various competing companies can plug into, as CANARIE describes, makes a lot of sense. Such a dark fiber net could be municipally run, or maybe the electric companies would like another revenue stream.
I don't agree. Number 1, you have a good point, I would love to know when FIOS is coming to Seattle, and which parts will receive it first when the service does come available. More likely we're going to be blessed with clearwire, comcast, DSL providers and wimax, with the last one being projected for next year.
I'd love to be able to add FIOS to the list, because all of those suck except for DSL and conceivably wimax when it gets here.
As for number 2, I think the majority of people ought to be interested in this. I wouldn't have cared until they were allowed to buy out the local cable provider and turn the service from pretty good into completely unusable crap. The facts that they feel entitled to charge high prices for garbage service and have a propensity to buy out smaller companies is a good reason to be concerned. Just not necessarily people outside the US, but if we're going that route, there's a lot of news that shouldn't be posted here because it only applies to other countries.
Advertising an always on connection and being wholly unable to make it through a day without interruptions, let alone a week is pretty pathetic. The expectation that we would have to call them daily for a credit was completely absurd. I've never been treated that way by either Earthlink or Qwest.
FIOS and its proprietary GPON scheme is balanced towards downloads. It's not symmetrical, and was never planned to be. The differences between BPON and GPON are moot in the consumer's context-- they're both *passive* optical networking schemes that use splitters, and that's where I have problems with it. It's inexpensive, and it's a bad long term asset play.
FIOS is one of any number of schemes, and it requires, as does cable, surrendering the consumer possibility of third party provisioning over time. In other words, you're tied to the carrier and its scheme-- Verizon in the case of FIOS.
Although the same thing can be said about cable in most markets, the upstream switch is all important. Those beige cans now sitting in various neighborhoods don't have the concurrent peak throughput you speak of. Open up one of those cans if you like and look inside, then put what you see into a spreadsheet. This is the eventual downfall of FIOS; it's a short term solution, and it's not bi-directionally symmetrical.
Gigabit to the den isn't going to be very practical in FIOS. Worse, Verizon promises a lot of communities FIOS deployments, but then takes years to get started as the capital costs are huge, and Verizon has a weak market cap and can't do everything they promise right away. This has the effect of causing communities to take the bait, then wait years. Look at Ft Wayne IN for a peak of how slow it can go.
Congestion hasn't started because their approach isn't taxed very much yet.
Will Comcast be able to compete? Yes. It's the last mile + the inherent long term viability of the design that makes a difference. Comcast already has great position in easements, rights of way, and a distributed network where 'triple play' is paying the bills. They have the same upstream viability in terms of aggregate/peak throughput that Verizon or (AT&T) DSL has. They don't, however, have the cost of deployment-- which is going down quickly.
Instead of FIOS, we need intermediate/neighborhood distribution infrastructure that allows pure symmetry through the network, if the asset life of the deployment is going to be viable in 20 years.
The added services over time are what will be the ticket; triple/quadruple/quintuple or whatever marketing words that you'd like to describe services with. The anti-cable marketing FUD is just that. Comcast and cable in general has a great chance to win based not only on historical reasons, but because they're not mindless telcos, whose mentality hasn't shifted much since the 1960s. FIOS, in a way, is like ATM: bad technology that looks really good on the surface, but isn't market sensitive. Telcos never are: they're monopolized revenue sensitive.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
O'm on the board of my neighborhood Homeowner's Association. We're currently putting together a complaint to our county licensing department, the FCC, etc. due to Comcast's very poor installation practices lately. There's a growing number of isntalls in our neighborhood where they not only fail to bury the wire from the junction box to an approved depth to avoid damage from landscaping equipment, they do NOT bury it AT ALL. There's currently, right now, a bright orange wire lying loosely above ground at the opposite end of my townhouse row. This is a) ugly and b) unsafe. Kids playing can trip and get hurt. Our landscaping company is either going to avoid caring fro the lawn right there and let it get ugly and out of hand or risk damaging their equipment.
The wire near my house was installed by a guy driving a Comcast van in Nov 9 2007. I dug ouo tmy camera and took the first pic of this the next day, Nov 10. I just went out and took more pics today, Dec 2.
http://mysite.verizon.net/amigabill/comcast/comcast.html
IMNSHO, Comcast sucks ass and deserves to die.
"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."
While I agree with most of your comment, I have to correct you on this point. FiOS is a completely passive system between the CO and the customer. The only interruptions in the fiber you'll find are splices and splitters. There's nothing at all that would/could handle the routing of data between customers, or anything else for that matter, except at the CO. And no, I'm not talking out of my ass here. I happen to be a FiOS I&M technician (who actually paid attention while in training...).
I work for a regional phone company (CLEC) and we have had years of dealing with the folks at Verizon. They will look for any possible loophole to limit or delay service to us. Techs will claim to be unable to find an address that is a *huge* building, and leave without providing any service. They will re-interpret tariffs to benefit themselves, until our lawyers take it to the PUC.
They are a very aggressive company (in their business practices), so I can't imagine that they are suddenly going to become warm fuzzy kittens to their FIOS customers. Though I have not read them, I would imagine that their TOS (terms of service) probably contain some gotchas that will only surface later, benefiting them over their customers.
I hope their FIOS service is great, stays great, and has happy customers. I just wouldn't be naive enough to take it as a given.
BTW - not all phone companies are dinosaurs or out to screw everyone. Our company offers excellent customer service (a live person when you call!), but, then, we are neither the cheapest nor do we play in the residential space.
Let's see. Why would someone need GBE to the home.
Well, mom's in the kitchen downloading a stream at HD RATES of her favorite show, Oprah 2.0.
Dad's upstairs doing an online improvement of his golf swing.
Junior's in his bed room watching porn, with four MURPGs going, a live video of the away game that the b-ball team is playing, and carrying on audio conversations with 11 people in the game in realtime.
Sis is in the living room, having a virtual pajama party with ten of her friends. Now that the price of gasoline is $91.099/gal, everything's virtual.
Bowser's getting an online MRI scan to see if the surgery went ok. The darn robot's been chasing him around the house, but the house downstairs computer located him by GIS and now his him in the clutches of the MRI machine. Darn dog, anyway.
While some of this is science fiction, so were cell phones, HDTV, MRI units, and multi-user role playing games just 20 years ago.
Your statement reminds me of Bill Gate's declaration that everyone will be fine in just 640K of DRAM. This same madness infects passive optical distribution systems, and one day, there'll be a digital backhoe that'll rip lots of this stuff out to be replaced by non-proprietary, head-in-the-sand, cheapskate infrastructure.
Hell, Corning wins either way.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
So HFC is separating people on the same physical fiber/copper with frequencies and time slots, and FiOS is doing basically the same thing with light spectrum. With cable the drop from the pole to your house is not shared, with FiOS the fiber goes from your home to where? Probably a drop/splitter on a pole outside. If this is the case they are both "shared" even at the last mile.
Cable has exponential room to grow also. Currently there is about 1GHz available on your copper you are using about 8MHz (0.8%) of it for your cable modem. Even with the technology in place now it could offer much much more bandwidth per subscriber. DOCSIS 3.0 will add more bandwidth and channel bonding. Removing the analog channels will free up spectrum. There is a technology called "switched digital" that basically means broadcasting the channels people are watching instead of all the channels all the time. The technology in place today is not even being used to the full potential (it is cheaper not to especially where the bandwidth in place is not being used) and in theory instead of 8MHz there is nothing stopping DOCIS 5.0 or DOCSIS 6.0 from using 300 or 400 MHz. If end-user bandwidth requirements ever get that high the internet itself would be in jeopardy as the backbone fiber would not be able to sustain that much traffic.
I connected to a server on a different isp and I was able to ssh into the servers on the subnet that was unreachable to me. The traceroute between my server and my Comcastic IP reached my ip, and even my traceroute from my ip to the server succeeded. After fifteen minutes or so I was able to connect again.
Can I get an eye poke?
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