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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.
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.
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.