Slashdot Mirror
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.
Too bad we aren't going to see any speed close to that for personal use, at least not without forking over hefty sacks of bling.
maybe fast for other things but not for bittorrent
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.
Having your modem capable of these speeds is good technically, but I have the "premier" comcast service now and it does not come even close to maxing out DOCSIS 1.x.
having a DOCSIS 3.x modem would be like having a firehose into your house but only having measly garden hose pressure amount of water going through it.
4 minutes would download about 4.5 gigs, which is basically DVD quality... of course you can upconvert this to whichever HD resolution you want, but it's still going to look like crap compared to a 'proper' 30-40 gigs encode. OTOH having something that could d/load a blue-ray/hd-dvd level encode in less than an hour would be pretty good, but in any case the odds of getting that kind of transfer speed connected to a real site are pretty low IMHO.
-- the cake is a lie
...the low, low price of $1000/month. But if you also sign up basic cable, home phone, and HBO/Starz, the package will cost $1050/month (for the first 3 months)--plus taxes and regulatory fees. It's Comcastic!
Comcast - We own you.
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
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.
So at that speed, how long do you think it'll take be be cut off for 'excessive use'? I'd give it 5 minutes, tops.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
what's that in Libraries of Congress per second?
the coolest club on
I happen to live in a first-to-roll-out neighborhood for fibre to each home/appartment. Available in my street in 2 months, I get symmetric 20/20 internet bandwidth for some 30 euro/month. Speeds up to 100/100 Mbps are also available (. In addition the fibre carries your voip, radio and tv signals. So I'm guessing the 100/100 is just a convenient maximum speed for internet given that most people either have 10 or 100 stuff in their home.
Wonder what this 160 is supposed to be priced at and how the technology scales in the future.
-- Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I'll believe it when they actually offer it, there are plenty of ways for them to tie down that speed into an undesirable product. Excessive pricing, throttling, bundling, lock-in, hidden caps...
How fast is the upload, and for that matter, how many download sources are there that can actually hit that speed for numerous users? Even in a torrent it's tough to find enough seeders to equal those speeds. If it can be done, how many suscribers can hit that speed before they crowd each other out?
I think the biggest boost to my practical download speed would be an increase to other people's upload speeds. That sort of breakthrough would be far more exciting.
I'm confused - Comcast has admitted they can't handle the speeds they're already providing to customers, what's the point in providing a faster end-user connection if the back-end can't support it?
If this is full duplex, then it will be a great deal. Otherwise it is just sad.
When I reported outages, it would take days for them to respond. When I called to cancel my service, the customer service guy reviewed my history and asked why it took so long for me to cancel.
In other news, SPAM reaches unprecedentedly high volumes.
Yeah, but will this ultra-fast connection come with port blocking, traffic shaping, unspecified caps on data transferred, and TOS that make you agree not to run a server of any kind?
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Um, have you forgot about Hammer Granny? How about the Sleepy Tech guy, who ended up falling asleep because they put him on hold for over 2 hours? (And of course, he was the one fired, while the problem remains).
No matter how fast they claim to be now, if their customer service remains a bureaucratic hell, no way.
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.
I've already GOT batman - what else you got?
-"Up to" 160 mbps likely means "We'll sell you 20Mb for $50/mth to barely squeeze out our competition, but real speed will cost ya $$$$."
-Is it still a shared network? So if my neighbors are all downloading Batman Begins, is my internet download going to slow to 1mbps? I bet it will.
-Will the service be reliable, as in always on, 24x7x365, you know, like the phone companies and my FiOS connection are? I completely and totally doubt it.
-Will the charge per month keep increasing every six months? I think it will.
-Will you still charge customers for house calls even when the fault lies in your network and your equipment? I'm sure you will.
-Will you replace your unskilled, rude and generally ignorant customer service with talented, considerate and intelligent people? Only if Comcast decides to pay a decent wage, so I guess not.
-Will the VoD carry the latest movies as soon as they're legally available? If the CEO is using Batman Begins (2005) as an example, probably not.
-Will Comcast ever apologize or make amends for all the anguish, pain, suffering and overbilling they have caused their customers since Comcast came into existence? I'm not holding my breath.
My only wish is that Comcast executives, where ever they go will receive the same kind of service they themselves deliver.
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.
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...
Believe me, many of us are aware. Damn the telecom industry. Damn them to hell.
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.
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