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Comcast Promising Ultra-Fast Internet
Espectr0 writes "Comcast's CEO Brian Roberts gave The Associated Press a preview of his speech for the Consumer Electronics show, and said that Comcast expects to demonstrate a technology that delivers up to 160 megabits of data per second over cable. At that speed you could download a high-definition copy of 'Batman Begins' in four minutes. The technology, DOCSIS 3.0, will start rolling out this year." Here's a note about Cisco's announcement of their DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem.
Speeds as listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Speed_Table are rather impressive. Max usable down and up speeds are 152/108 Mbit/s, respectively.
Hopefully they'll roll this out with an affordable pricing plan; they already announced that they'll be raising prices in February.
RTFA. The description of Cisco's DOCSIS 3.0 "modem", linked to from the summary, says:
Whether Cable companies will allow you to use all this is another story — probably not, because that's the simplest way for them to combat file-sharing without affecting downloads from "legitimate" servers... And I'm pretty sure, they'll continue blocking port 80, etc.
But you'll continue buying it, because the awesome download speed will trump all other concerns...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Ah, that's nothing. This 75 year old retired lady in Sweden has a 40Gbps connection. However it is experimental, and her son is Peter Löthberg, apparently one of the pioneers of the Internet in Sweden. Still, lots of people in Sweden and S Korea can get 100Mbps broadband.
Is your Comcast port 80 blocked? I've been running a webserver on mine ever since I first signed up (2000 or 2001, it was @Home then), and it still works.
Well, while not as good as proper HD disc, VC-1 or MPEG-4 or anything at 4.5 GB will give far greater quality than DVD MPEG-2.
Oh, I don't know, people using BitTorrent to download legal things, like Linux distros, OpenOffice.org, World of Warcraft patches, or anything else that offers BitTorrent downloads.
Seriously, why is that insightful? There are plenty of legal uses of BitTorrent that don't involve pirating movies.
(And, of course, things like, uh, porn and fansubs may not be available on demand. Not that I'd know anything about that. Oh, and indie films and less popular films and all sorts of digital things that aren't likely to be available on demand.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The storage media is becoming the bottleneck. It's already the slowest thing on my home 1gbps LAN.
You're also assuming single server for net speed, and completely ignoring doing several things at once.
I bet this service can be maxed out with a decently seeded torrent alone. It's easy to hit the limit on my 20/20mbps right now, you only need a handful of people with my level of service to hit the 160mbps, and that's just the US. Europe has 100/100mbps, Korea and Japan are starting on 1gbps. FiOS probably has a lot more headroom in store should cable companies start to give competition. With bandwidth comes application.
I can perform decent video conferencing with family in Europe now. In a few years the whole family could probably do the same with friends and family simultaneously.
"And I'm pretty sure, they'll continue blocking port 80, etc."
I've been running my web server (IIS7 with DNS2GO) on ports 80, using 5150 as a automatic fall back should 80 be blocked. So far all my traffic has been going through 80 for quite some time now.
I know that Comcast does not, universally, block port 80. Just a side note.
that's my word, holla...
Wrong. I will keep buying it, because like the vast majority of Comcast subscribers, I have no other choice.
After reading the article, the content of the article pretty much backs what I was thinking - that while Comcast may be using some of the bandwidth for internet, most of this looks as if it will be employed for High-Def content on demand. This is 160 meg a second on their network, not on the internet. At least, that is what I am making out of the story.
A 720p BluRay x264-compressed rip is around 4.5GB and a 1080p rip is around 8GB. The quality is very good, probably very close to the original and not worth downloading the 30-40 gigs.
I am pretty sure the GP was making reference to the recent situation where cable companies, specifically Comcast, were throttling BT traffic.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
With an outage a week since the installation of supposedly "Commercial grade" Comcast data service in Denver, and their technical staff not even opening tickets for it...
When someone tells me that Comcast is offering speed, I yawn and ask them to tell me when it will be back up, since it's down at least once a day.
Warning: Anyone thinking about purchasing Comcast in the south Denver suburbs for any serious data purpose... don't. No matter how fast they say it'll be.
When it's up, 12 Mb/s down, 2 Mb/s up is nice. But reliability is more important than those speeds. The downtime will drive you crazy if you're used to anything transported by a previous Bell entity. As bad as the Bell's may be, their crap generally stays up or they fix it.
Comcast shows no interest in fixing chronic problems at all. They're all about the 80/20 rule. If you happen to fall into the 20% that are up and down all the time, they could care less.
+++OK ATH