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."

Comments

You'll share a pipe somewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

And if the pipe is before your destination, then you're going to be sharing bandwidth, FIOS, Cable or DSL.

Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere

[nxtw]

With HFC (hybrid fiber coax) networks where the "coax" part is shared with more than one customer, you've got one more leg of the connection that's subject to problems -- and not as easy to upgrade. Cable companies already pack as much as they can into their limited bandwidth, balancing analog, digital, and HD channels; they can't just add more bandwidth on the coax for data services without rearraning other things. So they either have to upgrade infrastructure to DOCSIS 2/3 or expand their fiber out so that each HFC node serves less customers.

DSL / Fios services do not share this issue. If congestion happens between the cable/DSL/Fios node and the Internet, operators need only increase the bandwidth available between those locations - which shouldn't be nearly as hard to do, since they'd be adding another connection alongside or better utilizing an existing fiber connection.

Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

OK why are folks just plain stupid.

FIOS connections are shared between a max of 32 home or nodes. They are rolling out GPON which will allow gigabit to the home (though no home will likely have it any time soon)

currently most FIOS users are BPON and could get nearly 100MB bidirectional. As it is Verizon has maxed out currently at 50/20 plans for the home user, and yes you can get full speed 24/7. They have built out the back end to support high speed bidirectional traffic and this can be seen by the lack of complaints by users on sites such as dslreports.com and others. Also they are demonstrating they can migrate from 40 to 100Gbps links with relative ease.

Cable on the other hand will roll out DOCSIS 3.0 later next year....but ...it will cost them 4 6MHz channels....and the resulting channel loss. Sure they will reclaim analog channels as well but FIOS has no such issue. And when FIOS converts over to all IPTV well game up call it day. They will have the ability to use two light streams to the home to manage tv and internet with speeds cable can only dream of with more bonding of channels and high revs of DOCSIS.

So sure do you share a node at some point but for FIOS users its at the CO and not 20 feet from your front door and not likely to be congested.

I know...i can dl from an internet service that cannot be spoken of...at 30mbps any time of day and i get 30mbps every time....

Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

Of course. However, the difference between coaxial networks and DSL or FIOS is that the coaxial network is in a bus toplogy, meaning that the coax segment you are on is shared with everyone else on that segment. This is a major issue because the total bandwidth over the coax is limited and not very scalable as far as subscriber capacity is concerned. Get a few people maxing our their connection and you will have problems quickly.

DSL and FIOS are examples of star toplogy; you do not share your incoming line with anyone else at all. The bandwidth converges only at the local node where high bandwidth fiber is provided to the node.

Do you see why cable is at a disadvantage here?

Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

DSL is limited in distance because it is all copper. Cable and FiOS both run fiber out to a node. They are both shared all the way to the node, but wait, do FiOS nodes contain huge 2000 port patch panels? No! you don't get your own dedicated fiber all the way to the node. It likely goes from the node out to splitters/taps etc. not that different than cable. The biggest difference is using coax from the node is cheaper which means it reaches more rural areas (it is a happy middle ground).

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.

Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you're incorrect to contrast DSL and FIOS, together, with cable as something different.

FIOS is a brand name for marketing services, not a networking technology. The underlying technology is BPON, which is an ATM-based passive optical network. A PON uses an optical splitter to combine the laser signals from many subscribers onto the same fiber at the same wavelength, exactly as a cable splitter combines RF frequencies on metal coax cable. They are both point-to-multipoint technologies, and thus "shared" bandwidth. In both technologies, the head end equipment is responsible for scheduling bandwidth to nodes that request service. In both technologies, that head end scheduler can reserve bandwidth, cap the bandwidth, or make it all best-effort. DSL, by contrast, is point-to-point. The physical medium leads to only one customer.

Speeds do not necessarily go down when other users transmit in any of the point-to-multipoint technologies. That's a function of the scheduler and whether or not it reserves bandwidth. Note that a shared medium that does allow access to some bandwidth on a best-effort basis while guaranteeing some bandwidth is preferable to separate media with the same guaranteed bandwidth. You're not worse off in the worst case, can get more bandwidth at some times, and the latency overall drops as you can burst to the full capacity of the medium even when not exceeding a bandwidth cap.

As others have already pointed out, ALL bandwidth is shared pretty rapidly in most networks. As soon as you reach the head end, whether you call it a DSLAM or a CMTS or an OLT, you dump the data on network uplinks which might be heavily oversubscribed, and which take you to a router which might also be heavily overloaded. You're sharing all of those resources with hundreds or thousands of other users, even if you have your "guaranteed" DSL line all to yourself. Performance is really a matter of the network operator's willingness to spend money on their network core, and not of the access technology. The "last mile" has ceased to be the bottleneck that it was in the 80s and 90s.

Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere

[BosstonesOwn]

Fios users are seeing 20/20 speeds now , you might not have noticed it in the past couple weeks but they are becoming a symmetrical provider.

Fios is looking at the future , and gig connections may well become the norm once places like youtube start serving hd content. Verizon has this nailed , they are planning on rolling out a service that will need minimal upgrades for the next 50 years , Comcast isn't.

I have comcast and they are plagued by they just dont care and take customers for granted , i have 0 options besides them because of trees and distance from the co. once Fios is here im gone.

I hate Comcast

[The Breeze]

Dealing with their bureaucracy is a nightmare - especially if you are trying to get a clarification on whether their commercial TOS allows paid WiFI hotspot access. Inconsistent policies, customer service from hell, a pricing structure more suited to the "we're the phone company - we don't care - we don't have to" days...I can only hope that Comcast is indeed due for a long permament swim in a nice tar pit.

Re:I hate Comcast

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I hate Comcast

[$pace6host]

We had Comcast for years, and they took advantage of their monopoly in this area, raised rates to ridiculous levels, offered poor signal quality, and were slow in improving the infrastructure. My favorite Comcastic tactic is charging your existing customers twice what you charge your new customers -- unless the existing customers threaten to leave. Then they can find it in their hearts to offer an existing customer that price, too. Guess most of their customers don't notice there are two prices. We ended up on DSL instead of cable modem because it took them so long to offer broadband in the area. Now, I won't say Verizon is saintly, at all, but the customer service has been at least equivalent, the picture quality is incredible, we have tons more channels, and we're paying about the same as we used to pay before (for DSL from Vz + analog cable from Comcast). Comcast needs to wake up and smell the competition. We need them to stay around to serve the same purpose to Verizon when Verizon turns around and screws us in a few years. Oh, don't worry, they will. Let's hope the Comcastasaurus can adapt.

A bit dated on the FiOS speeds...

[strredwolf]

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.

Talk about choosing between two evils.

[COMICAGOGO]

I have at various times been both a Verizon and a Comcast customer. I must say that having to choose between the two for fast internet service is like being give the choice of having you right arm and leg cut off or your left arm and leg (not talking price per say.) You are pretty screwed no matter what you pick.

Any body else have the dubious honor of having been with both of these companies?

Mistakes in reasoning

[Kohath]

This story assumes two things:

1. That FIOS is available for people. The actual availability is limited.
2. That, since you are really interested in the latest Comcast news about P2P, a majority or even a large minority must also be interested. They aren't.

That second one is a hard lesson for people to learn. Just because you care about something doesn't mean anyone else will care or should care. Don't mistake your wishes for reality.

Re:Mistakes in reasoning

[hedwards]

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.

Slashvertisement

[TheSpoom]

Oh, well, I'd better go get Verizon right now!

*sigh*

They don't even really try to hide it any more, do they? This "article" reads exactly like a DSL ad.

Anyway, no, Comcast isn't going anywhere. They have a monopoly in several markets like a lot of other cable companies and so they wouldn't be going anywhere regardless of their level of suck.

Unlikely

[bconway]

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.

That's odd...

[edunbar93]

It's been my experience that every ancient monopoly with horrid customer service, horrid technical service, and outdated technology typically stays around forever. If their market starts to shrink, they'll just flog the ever-dwindling market harder and harder. It's as if they exist to extract some kind of penance from the populace for sins committed in past lives or something.

I wouldn't bet on it

[leftie]

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.

Comcast CEO sees 160Mbps internet in 2008

[ewilts]

From Engadget:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/30/comcast-ceo-sees-160mbps-internet-in-2008/

See also LightReading:

Comcast Closes In on 100 Mbit/s

Comcast may not be the fastest today, but they don't appear to be sitting around doing nothing either.

.../Ed

Re:Comcast CEO sees 160Mbps internet in 2008

[The Analog Kid]

The speeds great and all, but if they cap you for actually using it, what good is it?

Here we go again.

[TrailerTrash]

One of the most annoying aspects of internet culture is the constant following of this formula:

1) Determine who is the market leader, or at least very large and strong
2) Declare them DEAD. EXTINCT. HISTORY.
3) ???
4) Profit!

How exactly is ComCast supposed to die? Everyone gets rabid about their service, and goes... where? FIOS is only in a tiny percentage of Verizon's US installed base. If you're not in a major metro area, you may never get it.

Cable has solved the last mile problem. DSL is pretty much everywhere, too, because POTS laid the last mile as well. Alternatives? Municipal wireless? Seems to be dying rapidly. Satellite? Very slow.

OK, that's enough. Back to the blind, knee-jerk, ill-fated shrieking of doom already in progress... ("Microsoft? DEAD. MPAA? EXTINCT. RIAA? DINOSAUR. Proprietary software? HISTORY.")

Too bad so many of us live in AT&T land

[Brian Stretch]

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.

Re:Where is FIOS?

[rfunches]

Two sources:

1. http://www.dslreports.com/. Their Verizon Fiber Optics forum is usually updated with information about the latest rollout areas and they also have a Google Maps application where users with FiOS service "pin" their location on the map and offer a user review in some instances. The forums also include some info on overall deployment, but it's usually secondhand info so take it for what it's worth.
2. The Verizon website for your state at http://www22.verizon.com/about/community/. For instance, Verizon Virginia has a monthly FTTP construction list in PDF format.

Re:What is Verizon's Provisioning for FIOS ?

[stonecypher]

This sounds like Verizon press puffery to me.

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.

What is Verizon's provisioning on the FIOS back end ?

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.

How much do they underprovision ?

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.

It is a very safe bet that there is not 10 Mbps of Internet transit reserved for every FIOS customer

No.

so there is still sharing of bandwidth

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?

This could be better or worse than Comcast

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.

but you don't know and can't tell just from the bandwidth of the edge circuit.

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

Re:Why censorship?

[stonecypher]

Where do people get the idea that censorship is the sole domain of government? A business/school/church/organization/publication/etc. are all capable of censorship.

No, they aren't. Censorship doesn't mean "we choose not to run your piece." Censorship means "you may not run your piece anywhere." No business, church, school, organization or publication can prevent me from publishing my work; all they can do is decline their own involvement. The word comes from the latin "censura" meaning judgement, and became attached to the judgement of morals and ethics in 1592. The role of censura in Roman government was to evaluate whether or not a piece may be distributed: a publisher would go to the censura, and ask whether they may disseminate the author's work, after they'd decided that they wanted to. This was one of the mechanisms of suppressing anti-governmental or anti-praetorian text, and was frequently the means by which revolutions were crushed.

Of course, given that you're insisting that something you believe is true, ignorant of reference work, I'm willing to bet you're a descriptivist, and that you have no idea what descriptivism is. Giant shock: the language doesn't change just because you're no good at it. You can, in fact, be wrong; just because a group of people misuses a word doesn't mean its meaning has changed.

If what you said about censorship was true, then American censorship law would make no sense whatsoever. How could the government say that censorship would never, ever happen in this country, if any random company could censor?

Where do people get the idea that censorship is the sole domain of government?

From having a familiarity with a word borne of literature, legal context, or just knowing what they're talking about. Where do you get the idea otherwise? Your buddy Stan?

Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere (mod up parent)

[$pace6host]

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.

Why I can't stand Comcast.

[Gothic_Walrus]

Right now, I'm stuck with Comcast - I live in a college-run apartment building, and that's the only option they offer. Unless I find somewhere else to live next year, I'm stuck with Comcast for at least another year and a half.

But after that, I'm jumping ship as soon as I can, and never returning as long as I've got the choice.

I'm sick of having my internet go down without warning, with no indication as to how long it'll be before I can get back online to finish my homework.

I'm sick of Comcast taking channels for no reason - CSPAN2 and one of the leased access channels vanished a week ago, and the four city-run info channels are about to become digital-only at the end of the year I can't say I ever watched those channels for more than thirty seconds at a time, in passing, but they do have their uses and I know that there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Comcast is replacing them with new content - over the past year or so, I don't think we've gotten a single new channel, but others keep vanishing, one or two at a time.

I'm sick of the fact that, in a Big Ten college town with one of the nation's most successful and popular football teams, Comcast is not only refusing to carry the Big Ten Network (the only cable or satellite company here that doesn't - but is running a smear ad campaign against them. I'm sorry, but it's hard to sympathize with your cost argument doesn't hold much water when you make over five hundred million dollars in profit. And no, carrying ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 doesn't count as a response for showing football games - it counts as a basic cable package.

I'm even sick of their advertising. Nine times out of ten, the Comcast ads are so painfully bad that I'll actually stop what I'll doing so I don't have to sit through them. Whether it's the smiling, emotionless Botoxed spokeslady, the "Just Ask Zak" ads where a kid breaks into people's homes to tell them how much better Comcast could make their lives, the previously mentioned Big Ten network attack ads, or the new musical style ads about their phone service (which are so awful that I haven't been able to sit through one of them once), the ads are almost reason enough to jump ship in and of themselves.

We haven't gotten to a point yet where buying shows on demand from iTunes or where watching things online legally is quite a viable option - iTunes is still missing a lot of content I'd like to see and is too expensive to allow for following multiple programs, and the network-run streaming sites have some quality issues. Since other alternatives arenn't available, I'll just have to live with Comcast for now - I need high-speed internet for my engineering classes. But between the service issues and the fact that they seem to go out of their way to make me dislike them even more than I do now, I can't wait until the day when I can finally make sure that Comcast never sees a dime of my money again.

Re:What is Verizon's Provisioning for FIOS ?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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...).

Re:What is Verizon's Provisioning for FIOS ?

[swm]

> 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

ummm...that seems unlikely.

I'm pretty sure that for a packet to go from me to my neighbor, it has to pass through a switch, most likely at the CO.

Re:Would somebody tell me why...

[postbigbang]

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.

Why all the Comcast hate?

[fzammett]

I have Comcast, have had them for some time. As a matter of fact, I've had ONLY cable internet and basic cable for a couple of years, I'm not one of the people that gets everything through them, so I would assume I don't rate as highly as others do to them.

I've got *plenty* of speed. I've had a *total* of maybe four hours of down time over the last year or more. I've had to deal with customer service four or five times in that timeframe and each time I received good service. To summarize: I'm quite happy.

Now, it's not perfect: I've never been able to run a web server (can't access it from anywhere but my house), and the Bittorent thing lately bugs me (although I'm an infrequent BT user, usually just to grab The IT Crowd episodes or the odd Linux distro), so that doesn't affect me a whole lot. The price could be a little better, but it's not awful. And while the speed is good, it could always be better (to be fair though, I've seen significant increases in speed over the past two years at no extra cost to me, both up and down speeds). And those hidden caps, while I've never been affected (and I have often downloaded what anyone would consider a lot some months) bug me that they even exist (that's probably my only big complaint with Comcast: just tell me what the magic number is, even though "unlimited" should mean *unlimited*, at least if you make the number public I can live with it, assuming it's high enough).

I don't know, I'm certainly what most would consider a power user, and I have no major complaints. By contrast, Verizon are a bunch of bitches AFAIC... they're selling something that is borderline bogus anyway (so what if I have fiber to my house... what difference does that make when I'm hitting bottlenecks after I get past their gateway anyway?), they make a mess of neighborhoods (have you actually seen the aftermath of a Verizon fiber run? *NOT* pretty) I just don't know what all the Comcast hate is all about. They may not be Mother Teresa, maybe not be perfection incarnate, but what's the big problem exactly, and where's the *clearly* better alternative?