Comcast Offers 50 Mbps Residential Speeds

An anonymous reader notes that Comcast is offering a new 50-Mbps / 6-Mbps package for residential customers for $150, starting in Minneapolis-St. Paul and extending nationwide by mid-2010. The new service will use the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, which is nearing ratification. We've recently discussed Comcast's BitTorrent throttling and promise to quit it, and their low-quality 'HD' programming. How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?

Comments

WoW

[Ariastis]

50 mbps, throttled, copied to the NSA, squeezed on the same cable as too many HD channels.

Where do I send my 150$ again?

Re:WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding, not to mention everything you do is more likely to get flagged "illegal".

Re:WoW

[Lumpy]

You also forgot, it's also probably not 50mbps.

They sell the "8meg" tier here but the pipe to the headend cant handle the 8meg so if you do any speed tests OUTSIDE their reccomended you never get more than 4.4-5.

Re:WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing. Here in Richmond, Indiana Comcast recently took over the cable from Insight and the service wend from good to horrible almost overnight. I can barely use the phone service Comcast provides. Hell, there are even times people get a busy signal when trying to call me depite the fact the phone is still on the hook. I am planning on switching to Parallax, a local company for DSL and Vonage for my phone service.

Comcast can go suck a lemon for all I care.

Re:WoW

[AKAImBatman]

One of the most amusing quotes from the article:

"A decade ago we couldn't even conceive of ... YouTube," Google Inc.'s video-sharing service, said Greg Butz, Comcast's vice president for marketing and product development.

Oh my goodness! Not YouTube! Never mind services like iTunes, Amazon Unboxed, and XBox Movies which provide legal, multi-GB movie files that will happily chew through your bandwidth cap in no time flat. The real concern at hand is... YouTube.

Executives always have a way of cracking me up. :-)

Re:WoW

[MrCrassic]

To add to this, I think it will be a while before most people will see the benefits of having a 50/6 connection over something slightly slower, say 15/5, which is cheaper and usually comes with better offerings.

Append that to Comcast's already-shaky reputation as an internet and cable provider, and I think that Verizon still has a better odds of attracting more fiber-optic broadband converts. Plus, Verizon offers television service with their fast internet plans; so far as I know, Comcast doesn't.

Re:WoW

[sammy baby]

Not that I'm privy to their bandwidth statistics, but I'd be willing to wager that YouTube gets more traffic from Comcast customers than Amazon Unboxed and XBox Movies put together. Almost certainly more than iTMS by itself, too.

Not a very large wager, mind. ;)

Re:WoW

[toleraen]

I guess I never had any problems with Comcast's speeds, at least in Hudson anyway. Had the 8Mb there, and regularly got pretty close (~7.3Mb usually). Charter, on the other hand...

Re:WoW

[spydum]

Open multiple streams. That speed limitation is based on a single tcp session, which is almost entirely latency and MTU size induced (remember that formula? if not, google it). Hasn't anyone been paying attention? Why do you think you get such awesome bit torrent speeds? It's MANY tcp sessions, all streaming at once (rarely do you see a single stream over the net pushing more than 1-2Mbit/sec).

Re:WoW

[rashire]

Lets not forget the news that came out not long ago that verizon was testing 100 mbps connections on its employees.

Re:WoW

[Enderandrew]

Conversely I have 9meg from Cox, and I actually get close to those speeds.

It is PFM that a company delivers on what they're selling you!

Re:WoW

[NormalVisual]

Yeah, but I hear that they're going to be stopping those soon. Something about problems with infections of the skin around the RJ-45 connectors or something like that.

Re:WoW

[Danathar]

You also forgot, it's also probably not 50mbps.

They sell the "8meg" tier here but the pipe to the headend cant handle the 8meg so if you do any speed tests OUTSIDE their reccomended you never get more than 4.4-5. Don't know where you are. I subscribe to that service and I've been getting consistent 2MB/s (that's right...2 Megabytes) downstream and a solid 2 Megabit upstream.

The thing with cable is it's all about location. If you are in an area with nobody but you in your local "group" then more than likely you be in sweet bandwidth heaven.

If you are on a street with 10 15 year olds downloading every 720p/1080i movie via bittorrent your bandwidth is probably going to suck.

Re:WoW

[Ilgaz]

If they could push Youtube to use a real UDP/RTSP bandwidth switching, real/quicktime/vlc plugin, even as option...

Of course Youtube must keep using 1994's "embed a huge file and let browser play while downloading if it can" technology (!). If I was Adobe, I would spare thousands of developers to fix that fake media plugin and even buy the bandwidth autoswitching patents from Real Networks (which are free to GNU/OSF software).

If they weren't afraid of Google Inc. they would have already started to cap flash/flv packets. It doesn't mean they don't have such plans. I bet ISPs Worldwide already staring at their Youtube bandwidth waste.

Another option would be a P2P based video streaming plugin for Flash but we are speaking about Comcast here ;)

Re:WoW

[ShannaraFan]

Not trying to defend Comcast, but this statement simply isn't true, at least not in the Twin Cities area. I'm on the current top-tier offering from Comcast, and I routinely see 12-15Mbps results using Speakeasy's speed test. There ARE times that I don't, of course.

Re:WoW

[xSauronx]

I started attending community college back in january, and there has been a constant message regarding bandwidth: people use youtube like theres no tomorrow, please stop using youtube, and stop using myspace to conserve bandwidth.

why they dont outright blacklist them both is beyond me. hell, i was surprised that it was allowed in the first place.

Re:WoW

[Gr8Apes]

These guys are morons and should go read up on multicasting.

It was designed for precisely this type of traffic. P2P would benefit enormously if it went across multicast channels instead. But that would assume the routers of the ISP supported multicasting, and most probably do not.

Re:WoW

[jandrese]

You are probably thinking of the Bandwidth Delay Product, but if that's a problem you can usually tweak your stack get better performance. Typically, fast hosts are also lower latency on the internet, so it's not a huge problem. Hosts with high latency are almost always slow anyway.

Re:WoW

[Random Destruction]

I think the problem most ISPs are having is last mile. That's certainly the case with bell here. Multicast doesn't really help at all last mile, unless you and your neighbors happen to be getting the same packets. Considering the internet is Really Big, I doubt that would happen much.

Re:WoW

[Random Destruction]

Really? I see that all the time. As long as I choose the right hosts I rarely have any trouble saturating my 5mbps connection with a single stream.

Re:WoW

[jandrese]

Multicasting would be great for that, if it were routed on the internet. As it is, multicasting is still useful for things like routing protocols and internal projects, but out on the internet you're pretty much stuck unicasting.

Re:WoW

[Pharmboy]

I'm willing to be the pirate bay causes more bandwidth than all of those combined. And squared.

Re:WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

I know as I am an insider, the Connection in the Headend to the internet does NOT have the bandwidth to support what they are selling.

Many smaller town (140,000 or under pop) cablemodem plants are horribly undersized.

This is SOP for comcast.

Re:WoW

[Sunrun]

Problem is, Verizon's FiOS offerings aren't available in the Twin Cities Metro Area. So the question of whether or not they'll offer significant competition to Comcast's new "speed" offering is almost entirely moot.

Re:WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

In Anne Arundel county Maryland, where the cable plant has received lots of upgrades and fixes to pass the necessary tests for certification to carry their "digital voice" product, with the speed teir option on my Comcast account, I would see up to 22 Megabits or 2.75 MegaBytes sustained downloads, even during peak hours. I could also maintain nearly 720 Kbits/sec on uploads at the expense of other simultaneous connections due to saturation.

They were advertising the account as 16Mb down, 720K up.

I don't bother with silly speed test sites that are rarely accurate, especially with tricks like "powerboost".

(This was before they started breaking bittorrent connections.)

I also worked for Comcast as an in-house technician for several years. Many things could cause poor speeds. The most common one wasn't bandwidth sharing, it was poor in-house wiring or house-to-tap wiring. And the bad wiring doesn't need to be on the line going to your modem, anything in the house can put noise on the line. Second worst was damaged feeder lines on the street, usually from Verizon digging crews not being careful with their shovels.

Re:WoW

[dave024]

you are in college and still think your internet should be censored?

Re:WoW

[bkraptor]

It's sadening to see that the country I used to dream about moving to when I was a kid is slowly turning into something I don't even want to visit any more. I'm from an average city in Romania, and yet I get 10 MB/s up and down when torrenting - all for the amazing price of 19 US Dollars + VAT. I bet I'd be getting even better speeds if I weren't limitted by the 100 mbit LAN cable that goes into my router. And here I see one of your bigger ISP's offering you 50 mbps up and 6 mbps down, all for just 150 US Dollars...

Re:WoW

[gallwapa]

We shape all MIME Flash type to 900k for 25000 users.

Take that!

Clearwire won't even load youtube.com's static content!

Re:WoW

[hansamurai]

I'm in the Cities too and I have either 4 or 6 Mb service, whatever is not the top tier but one below. I get decent speeds, but I'm tempted to call Comcast about this tonight. $150 is out of my budget right now when I'm paying $60 for both internet and cable, so maybe I can negotiate a sweet deal.

Re:WoW

[jollyreaper]

One of the most amusing quotes from the article:

        "A decade ago we couldn't even conceive of ... YouTube," Google Inc.'s video-sharing service, said Greg Butz, Comcast's vice president for marketing and product development.

Oh my goodness! Not YouTube! Never mind services like iTunes, Amazon Unboxed, and XBox Movies which provide legal, multi-GB movie files that will happily chew through your bandwidth cap in no time flat. The real concern at hand is... YouTube. No, people had those ideas way back when. Here's what they got wrong:

1) broadband penetration in the US, practically nil in 1998
2) time it would take for broadband to spread
3) give-it-away business model, nobody could have imagined a youtube would break even

Most of the thinking back then was still very conventional, basically a direct translation of subscription cable channels to the web. DEN came about around then, burned brightly and flamed out. These guys were making their own content the way HBO creates original series and movies rather than only reairing Hollywood crap.

The biggest strikes against streaming content back then were:
1) crappy picture quality
2) nobody wants to watch a movie sitting at their desk

The dumbest analysts were those who did not see those factors changing. The problem the early movers had is they entered the market too soon and burned out before they could start making money.

Right now, my greatest concern is that the big-money players are still trying to set themselves up as brokers for access to the Internet. In the old days, not everyone could afford a TV transmitter and licensing fees, not everyone could put together a cable channel. There were solid technical limitations that played to big media's favor. Today, Joe Blow can put together a comedy bit and have it race around the world faster than Jay Leno. I can view anything I want from any source with my PC and could do so from my X-Box if Microsoft wasn't such a dick about locking things down, necessitating hacks like Tversity. These are just artificial barriers to entry.

Beyond that, it's still expensive to put a show together. Stupid animal tricks is one thing, a proper show to compete with what the networks can do burns money. We've yet to see an independent production company get a show off the ground and make money solely off of Internet distribution. There have been some indie movies that have had a measure of Internet success but nothing that's been a break-out success. Of course, one could argue that beak-out successes like Seinfeld, Friends, Lost, American Idle, etc, are created by the hype and coverage given by mainstream media, creating a promotional feedback loop. If an internet phenomenon show cannot be bought out by a network, it will receive no coverage because that's just free advertising.

Re:WoW

[Mister Whirly]

Bingo. It is either Qwest DSL (slow but not throttled), or the citywide Wi-Fi, which I haven't heard glowing things about. I certainly wish Verizon would wire up the Twin Cities with FIOS. Anything to dump Comcast without suffering a big speed loss would be great.

Re:WoW

[xmedar]

Don't worry about the NSA there's no information in those RST packets that will get you in trouble.

Re:WoW

[Mister Whirly]

The Speakeasy speed test numbers can be fudged by Comcasts "Speedboost" technology. Downloading really large files and taking an average over a period of time is the only real accurate way to know what kind of sustained speeds you are getting. Peak speeds are not a good indication.

Re:WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded DirectX SDK via http yesterday @ ~1850 KiB/s sustained. The max was about 1895 (I think).

Re:WoW

[AliasMarlowe]

$150 is about euro100. For 50/6 Mbps in an urban area, where there is a potential customer for every 20-30 meters of fiber, that must include a bloated profit margin!

In my rural area, FTTH 100/10 Mbps costs euro75 per month, and that includes basic TV over IP. It also has no throttling or monthly quotas. The local ISP considers this attractive enough to lay a couple of kilometers of fiber to reach a handful of widely separated houses.

Re:WoW

[BlueStrat]

Yeah, but I hear that they're going to be stopping those soon. Something about problems with infections of the skin around the RJ-45 connectors or something like that.

Hmmm, that's funny...I heard it was more like the "Blipverts" from Network 23.

http://www.tv.com/max-headroom/blipverts/episode/120668/recap.html

Watch for upcoming Wikileaks videos of exploding internet customers!

Cheers!

Strat

Re:WoW

[Mister Whirly]

Is it really so shocking that a country with approximately 50% of the GNP than the US would offer services at a lower price? And is speed of internet providers really the only thing that turns you off to the US so much, or is there possibly more to the story? If that is all it takes, you may want to rethink some of your global views...

Re:WoW

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends where you're going. I think we have the 6Mb tier at home, and I was easily getting that pulling files from a university server.

Re:WoW

[Creepy]

Comcast can do this in the Twin Cities market and has no competition. Ignoring the Star Tribune newspaper's error (5Mbps max, it's actually 7), that still puts them at a theoretical peak of about 7x faster (being a token network, actual speed will probably be slower).

Here are the base broadband options (excluding Satellite):

There are 2 bare line DSL providers in the Twin Cities that I know of after the death of Rhythms and Northpoint (there are still some like EDGE that serve semi-rural suburbs like Anoka) Quest and COVAD.

Quest broadband: bare lines can run ADSL 7Mbps at most.

COVAD: bare lines are ADSL (7Mbps). Focus is business only, but they lease consumer lines to ISPs (e.g. Speakeasy).

notice - ADSL2+ (generally offered as 15Mbps service, peak at 24Mbps) and FIOS service is NOT available in the market. Quest is anemic at offering service and only bumps service when competition forces them to (meaning they bumped to 5,6, and 7Mbps only when Comcast boosted their speeds). COVAD only bumps when the business market demands, so you've got one market leader a follower, and one that mixes leading and following based on customers.

The only problem I foresee with Comcast failing to dominate the market (as they already do) is supersaturation - my neighborhood already had too much saturation when I was on Comcast last (100k down/10k up and 500ms ping times was a good speed at 7PM on a weeknight when I had 3Mbps service). Last year (or maybe 2 years ago) they buried new fiber and set up a new hub in the area, so I expect that is no longer the case.

Re:WoW

[Mister Whirly]

I have heard a few horror stories about COVAD before. Do you know if Frontier or MacLeod is still offering any type of broadband services?

Re:WoW

[Creepy]

only its not urban - it's a fairly large swath of urban to semi-rural that compromises the Twin Cities Region. For instance, it includes West Lakeland Township, which is fairly rural including farms and small developments (and many mansions) and has no formal town - it is in between small towns Lake Elmo and Lakeland and larger towns Stillwater, and Hudson (Wisconsin). I have relatives with Comcast service there.

Re:WoW

[Immortal Poet]

I had no idea supersaturation was such a huge problem for Comcast Twin Cities. I'm actually house hunting down in Minneapolis this weekend, so I'll have to add neighborhood broadband speeds to my checklist of things to look out for.

Re:WoW

[Danathar]

I don't disagree with you on the in-house wiring. I've had to face that problem myself.

I'm in Stafford, VA (a former Adelphia area) and my bandwidth has skyrocketed of late. At first I thought something got broke and powerboost was stuck in the "on" position, but it's been sustained for some time now (doing my own iperf tests). So I'm pretty happy (for now).

I feel for people where it sucks, because in some places it REALLY does suck rocks.

Re:WoW

[Koda]

I'm also in the Twin Cities of MN, and Comcast "network management" has been a source of issues and frustration in the small company with which I work. The basic speed tests, including speakeasy, will NOT show you the issue.

Doing anything that requires a sustained connection, however, will demonstrate the issue (downloading or uploading a large file, large amount of Lotus Notes replication, etc) to some degree. But the amount of throttling depends on 1) where you are on the Comcast network and 2) how congested that network segment is at any given time and 3) how long your persistent connection is active. Even when transferring files from some of our fiber-equipped offices, I have seen download speeds in MN fall to under 100Kbps for large enough files - even at offices equipped with 8Mbps "business" grade service.

After hours on the phone with Comcast and being run up several levels of support, me and several of our employees have ditched Comcast at home in the last several months, opting for DSL and /or mobile broadband. We're in the process of culling them for business use as well, as the speed of their service has become so varied and unreliable since October of last year.

Frankly, I don't care what there claimed speeds are anymore, because those peak speeds are only good for stop and go usage like surfing the internet. Small business have other things that need to get done over their network.

Re:WoW

[STrinity]

Have you ever download the .flv file for a YouTube movie? We're only talking about 2 megs per minute of video -- in other words, one video is the same size as two 4-minute 128kbps songs from iTunes. A website with a ton of pictures probably uses as much bandwidth.

Re:WoW

[bussdriver]

I get 8meg in MN. There are few people on my segment so I actually can get their speeds for most of the day and the uplink goes direct so as long as too many young people do not move in I will do ok.

That being said, I still can't actually use the bandwidth because they will just kick me off for using 'too much.'

They PEAK for a short period above 8meg which leads me to believe they have more bandwidth available; but fear allowing 10meg for more than a minute because they probably can't handle it.

We all know that if they COULD handle everybody doing 8-10 they would limit it because that is the speed at which you could stream HD video. When I actually get a 10meg boost on a HD movie trailer it almost immediately plays.

Re:WoW

[xSauronx]

im not for censorship. i dont care about the *content*, but a huge number of students are hogging bandwidth, during class, to browse myspace and youtube. its a serious classroom disruption on a regular basis, in addition the waste of bandwidth

why should they be allowed to do this? theyre entertaining themselves. they wouldnt get away with an mp3/video player or something similar.

granted, a better option may be for instructors to monitor students more closely and dismiss those who abuse class time, but theyd have to patrol class throughout each period to do this in order to monitor each pc, why should they have to go through that trouble when the trouble can be blocked at the edge routers? it would save internet bandwidth, and LAN bandwidth.

Re:WoW

[mcrbids]

We've yet to see an independent production company get a show off the ground and make money solely off of Internet distribution. There have been some indie movies that have had a measure of Internet success but nothing that's been a break-out success.

I notice that, just after accusing "big media" companies of thinking conventionally, you immediately fall victim to thinking conventionally. You're thinking that it's going to be a "production company" that exists to "make money solely off of Internet distribution".

But amazing things have been happening that don't involve a company at all, or even any specific organization! For example, one of the more popular videos ever shown on YouTube was "produced" by somebody who remains, to this day, completely anonymous. It's sparked a worldwide phenomenon involving tens of thousands of people over months of time, in a movement that appears to be still gaining steam, not losing it.

Production company? Ha! Profit? Ha! There's not even any form of sensible "organization" - more like a collection of memes and interested individuals. When millions upon millions are watching and doing, at what point do you acknowledge that the rules have fundamentally changed?

Re:WoW

[travbrad]

I live in Minnesota and would love 6mbit upload (don't really care about the download) but I'm going to wait a bit and see what other people say about it. It would suck to pay $150 only to find out my 6mbps upstream is constantly being "throttled". That's a premium price for a residential user, so I would hope for a premium quality of service (but I doubt it). I don't even see the new package on their site yet, maybe I'm not looking in the right place though I noticed the article also says the upstream is being increased on the "standard" packages from 384 to 1024kbps and from 768 to 2048kbps, which is good news. I assume this will require a router reboot or something before it takes effect?

Re:WoW

[Jardine]

I'm willing to be the pirate bay causes more bandwidth than all of those combined. And squared.

Bell Canada recently started throttling 3rd-party ISPs so one of them posted graphs showing what the throttling did to their traffic. TekSavvy has a reputation of being the ISP p2p users go to. The 2nd and 3rd graphs break down their traffic. UDP takes up the highest percentage of their traffic and Web takes up the second highest percentage. Peer to peer is third.

Re:WoW

[u-235-sentinel]

50 mbps, throttled, copied to the NSA, squeezed on the same cable as too many HD channels.

Where do I send my 150$ again?

and don't forget the 'secret' bandwidth cap they can't tell you about...

But don't go over it or you are terminated for a year...

Re:WoW

[jollyreaper]

Production company? Ha! Profit? Ha! There's not even any form of sensible "organization" - more like a collection of memes and interested individuals. When millions upon millions are watching and doing, at what point do you acknowledge that the rules have fundamentally changed? I understand what you're saying, I think I was unclear in how I stated my view.

If we're talking about people fucking around with handcams, there really is no budget. The majority of the cost for Clerks and Blair Witch was in camera rental and film processing. So yes, something like that can be turned out on a shoestring, minimal production cost. And the net means that distribution cost is way down. The thing is, if we want these artists to work full-time, we'll have to have some way of paying them for their work. Digital distribution and payments are further along than when we had this debate years ago.

When I said "production company", I'm thinking about something more ambitious than Clerks, something like Firefly. Much as I hate Fox for canceling the show, it never would have existed if gigabucks had not been ponied up in the first place. Fan efforts are amusing such as Star Wreck but there's still a marked difference between the amateurs and the professionals. How different would Firefly have been if Joss could have funded the whole thing privately and sold downloads and DVD's directly over the net, no TV networks involved? That's what I'm getting at.

The closest I've seen to that so far is the B5 Lost Tales. It's still sold via DVD but has never seen an original broadcast. JMS said he hoped to do a number of these, all direct-to-DVD sales. There would be more bang for the buck because there's no longer layers of executives needing to take a cut.

Re:WoW

[Idiomatick]

I've watched several hours of youtube i'm sure. Compared to the 0 of the others listed. Youtube + Facebook + Megaupload probably accounts for a large percentage of all website traffic. As in > 30%. Xbox live move w/e is a tiny tiny blip in comparison.

Re:WoW

[Daengbo]

Well, practically every shopping center here in the RoK has stands to sign up for Xpeed and their 100Mb/s (down) service. It's about US$35 a month. This applies even to small-town Korea, where I live.

I use about 100GB per month and no one has ever complained about my bandwidth usage.

Re:WoW

[budgenator]

why do you think multicast would help P2P? I'm not a network-Guru, but I understand the multicast allows one sever to broadcast a stream which is routed to multiple clients. P2P on the other hand allows a peer called a seeder to send specific chunks to requesting clients peers which inturn seed the chunks they have to other peers; it's completely different from the client-server protocols that multicasting is designed for. If you were running an internet radio-station or doing something like web-camming multicasting would be the cat's ass but for Bittorrent it would suck.

Re:WoW

[bill_mcgonigle]

and don't forget the 'secret' bandwidth cap they can't tell you about...

But don't go over it or you are terminated for a year...

Yes, but at least at 50 Mbps you'll get your termination over with much quicker.

Let's see, if I did my math right you can crack the rumored 200GB wall at 9 hours.

Re:WoW

[Scud]

What if they gave an orgy and nobody came? They have, it's called masterbation.

Re:WoW

[Cardcaptor_RLH85]

I have to agree with the issues on in-house wiring too. However, my issue was a combination of the drop line from the pole to my house getting eaten by squirrels and the fact that even though they should have known better, they sold us service with 3 Digital Cable boxes and internet service. Needless to say, if we tried to watch different on-demand programs on two boxes at once, that would end our internet connection or the signal on the third box would get blocky. Now that we've gotten the drop line replaced, it's not quite as bad but we still can't use on-demand on more than one box at a time without suffering through some problems.

Re:WoW

[MadUndergrad]

Lucky bastard. I have their 15/2 and never get more than 350KB/s or so. During the day it's usually no more than 125KB/s.

Re:WoW

[Eivind]

Heard about receive/transmit-windows ?

What you said WOULD be true if you sent a tcp-stream by doing this:

• Send packet 1
  
• Wait for confirmation (or timeout) of packet 1
  
• Send packet 2
  
• Wait for confirmation (or timeout) of packet 2
  
• ..
  

But that's not how anyone does it. Instead a window is used, and the size of the window is scaled. You allow being one window ahead of the confirmations.

So, you may send p1, get confirmation, send p2-p3 wait for confirmation, send p4-p5-p6-p7 wait for confirmation.

At some point either you start getting confirmations before you've managed to send all you where prepared to send (say in the above example the confirmation for p4 arrives before you've managed to actually send p7) that happens if the limit is your uplink, and that link is now full. You're now sending at full-speed so all is good.

Or you -don't- get confirmation in a reasonable time, the packet is lost, in which case you re-send it and if these things happen too often, shrink your window.

This all happens dynamically. For example the definition of "reasonable" time for a confirmation would in a primitive implementation be calculated as perhaps 1.5 times the AVERAGE confirmation-time for the last 50 packets.

A more mature implementation would take standard deviation into account so that 21ms 21ms 20ms 22ms 21ms 19ms *30ms* would count as a late confirmation (and probably be resent after 26ms or something of that order) whereas 30ms 100ms 47ms 62ms 112ms 51ms *150ms* would NOT count as late, it -is- more than 1.5 times the average, but the stream has high standard deviation so that's probably just randomness.

The short of it; You're plain wrong.

It is, infact NOT rare to see a "single tcp-stream" over the net carry a LOT more than 1-2Mbps, infact I'm downloading the newset ubuntu-iso this very moment, using a single ftp-session in a single tcp-stream. Speed: 22Mbps, nothing uncommon about that.

Re:WoW

[bkraptor]

Actually, that's not all. What really turns me off is the direction the US took after 9-11. Loss of freedom at the excuse of fighting terrorism and americans unable to feel this trend. I'm really glad we were a communist country for a while, because it's a lot easier for us as a people to sense when something that would potentially affect our freedom is about to happen. I can't say the same for americans.

Re:WoW

[caution live frogs]

Yeah, well try uploading anything to an SFTP server. Comcast throttles the hell out of that. They've done it in every state in which I am a customer. I know it isn't an issue on the server end, as my server is on a dedicated gigabit line. When I'm at home it takes forever to upload anything. For some reason Comcast assumes my encrypted traffic must be piracy, I guess, rather than realizing that only an idiot would use plain FTP for uploading anything important (like data backups).

Based on the quality of service I've gotten from Comcast so far, I'm not willing to pay them more for promises until I can see evidence that they actually deliver. If I'm dropping $150 a month, for starters I want real upload speeds and a dedicated IP, with no restrictions on how I choose to use my bandwidth. If I want to run a server from home, for $1800 + tax a year I ought to be able to do so.

Re:WoW

[jollyreaper]

What if they gave an orgy and nobody came? They have, it's called masterbation. Blissfully missing the joke.

Re:WoW

[Gr8Apes]

Even for BitTorrent it would be fine, except BitTorrent would have to be modified to make use of the interesting possibilities multicasting allows.

P2P applications would benefit by having the seeds segment the requested application and setting up their multicast stream(s) and then sending 1 packet that goes to all the clients. The segments would be streamed, so you'll get strips of a requested file per stream. Since the strips are sequential, any peer can join at any time, and when the stream is complete, can ask for a restart up to the point they started. There's obviously a lot of room for optimization both on the peer and the seed side of this equation, but it would result in at least an order of magnitude increase in efficiency of P2P networks.

It could also be made to have some semblance of TOR by having delegated "server seeds" that merely route to a stream from a seed or other "server seed", thus making pinpointing your P2P source(s) non-trivial.

Re:WoW

[Gr8Apes]

I do believe that was one of my unstated points.

The other being that the internet did account for precisely these usage patterns long before the current "morons" came along, and that it was already solved. The fact that the "morons" in question are ignorant of that, and that no MS OS supports it yet (I don't believe Vista fixed it) and that the routers that were bought don't support it do not negate the fact that the internet design does support it.

Re:WoW

[Gr8Apes]

You still have a router of some sort somewhere along that last mile, otherwise you can't share cable capacity. So multicasting would specifically help the last mile problem.

In fact, AT&T is implementing just such a solution for their uVerse service to enable more HD channels.

Re:WoW

[Mister Whirly]

You should really try to avoid thinking that all "Americans" think alike, and are oblivious to the way people in other countries think about us. Remember, about 50% of this county didn't like the way things were going in the last elections, and tried to change leadership. Unfortunately it didn't work out so well. But don't ever think that large majority of the population here agrees with our leader's moronic decisions all the time. It is very far from the case.

Re:WoW

[Creepy]

Realize that this is a while ago (2003?). When I had Comcast, they had NO realistic competition in the area and the former cable companies in the area were cheaper than satellite (after Comcast bought AT&T who had bought King prices skyrocketed because they stuffed more channels I never watch in their packages).

    Qwest offered 256k service for $10 cheaper than Comcast's 3Mbps service. Not only that, Qwest had no available lines and said they might start a waiting list. Several months later they finally bumped their service to 1.5Mbps and added lines in my area, and have since bumped to 7Mbps, not to mention finally started offering static IPs, but I had gone to Speakeasy long before that (which cost me more than Comcast, but offered static IPs). Anyhow, that's also why I said Qwest is really a market follower, not a leader - they wait to see what the competition does, then a few months later follows them.

I don't necessarily hate Qwest - they've improved a LOT since I hated them (back when they bought out US West, which I called US Worst and dubbed them Qworst - terrible service, terrible lines, terrible prices). I just wish they'd be more like Verizon and be proactive - if they want to differentiate, add WiMax instead of FIOS - just something proactive for once. Verizon has even started to be less evil - the decision to open their phone network, for instance (I HATE having to buy phone unlocks to undo their cripples - about damn time).

Re:WoW

[Scud]

Ah, the curse of a literal mind. -Grin-

Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter...

[pushing-robot]

What good is 50Mbps... If you are unable to P2P?

Re:Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter...

[daskro]

While I can't speak for every city Comcast provide service for, the business class service never suffered from the p2p doom and gloom that has been touted for months on end. I would suspect that Comcast would treat this $150.00 a month service as a business class line.

Re:Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I can't speak for every city Comcast provide service for, the business class service never suffered from the p2p doom and gloom that has been touted for months on end. I would suspect that Comcast would treat this $150.00 a month service as a business class line.

As a current Comcast customer, I think they would treat it as an additional $100/month profit from most of their customers.

Re:Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter...

[Anonymous Coward]

nah TFA has 150.00 for residential and 199.00 for business class.

Re:Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter...

[nurb432]

Considering everything is really p2p if you dig deep enough... your attempt at a joke is actually a serious comment.

Re:Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter...

[Phisbut]

What good is 50Mbps... If you are unable to P2P?

I know we're talking about Comcast here, but at that price, the service better be damn good and they better not block P2P. 50Mbps for $150 a month is typical american rippoff from an ISP. Up north, Videotron offers 50Mbps (althouh only 1Mbps up) for $80.

Re:Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter...

[Koda]

Wrong. Our MN office does currently use have the fastest and most expensive Comcast so-called *Business* line offered prior to today's announcement.

Unfortunately, we *have* experienced repeated issues with throttling (affecting large files and long sessions) since late last year, and Comcast support is of no help.

We will be ditching them soon.

Re:Tell me, Mr. Slashdotter...

[Wavebreak]

Move to Europe. 100Mbps for 43e a month, completely unthrottled. Or better yet, South Korea or Japan.

How attractive compared to FIOs?

[elrous0]

You know, as much as I would love Natalie Portman, I would settle for Natasha Henstridge if she's all I could get in my neighborhood.

In other words, if you live in an area not covered by FIOS, it's as attractive as you're going to get, buddy.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[chitokutai]

So in other words, Episode 1 or Species? Yikes!

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[BoberFett]

I wish I could get FIOS in Minneapolis, but I doubt it's going to happen any time soon. I cancelled Comcast for being such a crappy ISP a couple years ago and went with 1.5M/768K DSL. It's slower, but the service is far better.

At any rate, I'm not going back to Comcast even if they offer me 150/50. They're a horrible company to deal with.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[Stripe7]

However FIOS is looking more attractive to me as it becomes available here because of Comcast fiddling with bandwidth and lowering the HD quality of their channels. I prefer to get what I pay for, in particular bandwidth and HD programming, not a % of the bandwidth I pay for and badly degraded HD programming.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[Lisandro]

I would settle for Natasha Henstridge

Dude! Can i hang out with you?!

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[jank1887]

depends... are you going for "bad movie" or "bad movie with partial nudity"?

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[garaged]

totally depends on my mood, if into ....., species definitively, if into .... and just saw species, I would see episode I or V for Vendetta could work too

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Of course thats assuming they offer this service to you, which they likely won't. Take a look at some US-wide comcast speedtests sometime -- I've seen them range from ~3mbits to ~15mbits. If theres nobody competing with them locally, they have no financially incentive to upgrade their lines or offer better packages.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I too live in Minneapolis and use QWest DSL (at a slower speed too) and wouldn't switch to Comcast if they paid me $150 per month - simply because of their unethical business practices.

I'm voting with my wallet.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[jgarra23]

depends... are you going for "bad movie" or "bad movie with partial nudity"?


At least with the partial nudity you also get an amusing storyline, Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley and a movie that goes someplace. with the "bad movie" you get some fake-good actor like "Liam Neeson" the WORST fanbase of anything in the world, and a move that goes NOWEHERE

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[Cheeko]

I agree, I've been trying to drop Comcast like a diseased sh!tbrick for about a year now. The only thing keeping me is that I can't find any other service for my area that provides moderately similar service.

I would gladly pay Verizon the same $120 I pay Comcast each month for FiOS internet and TV, but they don't have it in a lot of the Urban parts of Boston yet. I could move 1 town over to the burbs and get it, but thats not where I want to live.

Comcasts horrid DVR, terrible channel quality, horrific network quality, and bandwidth throttling have driven me to my wits end at times, no amount of bandwidth will repair the ill will I have toward them.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[jmichaelg]

At&t's DSL isn't any better. I dropped Comcast as well but I'm seeing the same draw-down on download speed. Around 3 years ago, Comcast upgraded and to get business, offered a consistent 6-7M for $20/month which was wonderful. Around a year later, the price almost trebled and the service dropped so I went back to At&t.

At&t had delivered a consistent 1.6 but that's gone. Now I'm lucky when I get 1.6 whereas I'm normally seeing around .5 M with frequent drops down to .1 M. Add to that snail-like speed random DNS outages once a week or so.

I think the underlying problem is the fact that both providers are virtual monopolies, or more accurately, duopolies. If competitors were free to offer service without jumping through lots of regulatory hoops, prices would drop and service would rise.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[kernelphr34k]

I'm keeping my 15mb/15mb FIOS, k ty! I could go comcast, but I've been there, done that. They left a bad taste in my mouth which still resides. I.E The lazyest techs on the planet, refuse to work etc. Yes, I kicked the techs out of my house cause they came to do a job, and refused to work. Now, FIOS is the pretty girl, but poor, and comcast is the rich girl but ugly. I'm taking FIOS BABY!

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I live in a small town in Iowa, and I've got 100 mbit fiber at home and at work -- my best guess is it's 15 mbits up. The hardware supposedly supports gigabit, but they're not offering that yet.

And it costs me $60/mo. Cheaper, faster, more reliable, and no active P2P blocking that I know of.

My guess is, there's absolutely no way Comcast can compete with fiber, anywhere fiber is possible to get. Which means that this is just staving off the inevitable. I'd suggest that anyone who does have to deal with Comcast, try to avoid any long-term contracts, in case some upstart does start running fiber around the neighborhood...

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[will.perdikakis]

You know that Michael Madsen and Ben Kingsley star in Uwe Bolle's "discrapungent" film BloodRayne http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0383222/

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[megaditto]

Your prices aren't based on free-market costs of providing fiber hookup to small towns in Iowa.

You are only getting it cheap because the Government either pays for you with my taxes (part of military infrastructure, rural development, or something similar), or forces the ISP to subsidize you with my monthly fees (like they did for rural phone lines)

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[Do You Smell That]

You act as if Verizon is staffed by happiness fairies.

I love FIOS. Don't know how I lived without it. Doesn't change the fact that Verizon's customer service has *literally* made my wife cry. On 3 separate occasions. I guarantee you she's spent over 8 hours on the phone with them. At this point, there must be a flag on our account, because as soon as an otherwise snippy rep pulls up our account information, they start treating her incredibly nicely, and sometimes just go ahead and ask if they can transfer her to their manager.

Incompetent doesn't even begin to describe the FIOS customer service reps we've had to deal with.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[u-235-sentinel]

I wish I could get FIOS in Minneapolis, but I doubt it's going to happen any time soon. I cancelled Comcast for being such a crappy ISP a couple years ago and went with 1.5M/768K DSL. It's slower, but the service is far better.

At any rate, I'm not going back to Comcast even if they offer me 150/50. They're a horrible company to deal with.

same here. Since Concast terminated my families internet for 12 months, we decided to stick with DSL since the termination is now over and the company wants our business.

With their stock tanking, I'll bet they really want our business now.

Would we go back with a 50 Meg pipe?

Not with Concast... ever.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[thejynxed]

AT&T uses Sandvine just like Comcast. AT&T happens to be the upstream provider for my ISP, so sometimes if I do a whois on my ip address (that changes maybe once or twice per year), I get the surprise of seeing it resolve to AT&T instead of Atlantic Broadband.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[jgarra23]

You know that Michael Madsen and Ben Kingsley star in Uwe Bolle's "discrapungent" film BloodRayne


Yea, I had the misfortune of being dragged to that. So does the girl from T3 though.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll agree they're customer service sucks. I thought it hilariously funny that no more than a couple weeks after reports of how bad they really are started to surface we started to see/hear all those "How much I love my Comcast" commercials - at least in the Chicago area. Coincidence? Nope! But what a predictable move on they're part.

Re:How attractive compared to FIOs?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Actually, the government paid to lay it, so installation was free.

Are you suggesting that the cost of actually maintaining the service after the fact is higher than that?

What about FiOS?

[ubergamer1337]

It would be helpful to know how fast FiOS is, and how much it costs, to make a worthwile comparison.

Re:What about FiOS?

[jandrese]

In the DC Area I'm able to get a 30/5 FiOS package for I think $65/month now (it used to be $55, but they jacked the prices up a couple of months ago). Most areas are stuck with 5/2 service though last I heard. The good news is that I get all of that bandwidth as far as I can tell, the bad news is that it still uses PPPoE for some reason.

Re:What about FiOS?

[samkass]

I have 20 down, 5 up internet; flat-rate domestic phone service; and basic tv (with a dozen or so HD channels) for $105/mo. It's extremely reliable and fast. The HD channels appear better than Comcast but still overcompressed on some channels. The telephone is no better or worse than anyone else-- it's just there.

The biggest downside is that the television is not TiVo compatible. That alone has me considering switching back to Comcast for television, but they can pry my FiOS internet service out of my cold, dead fingers.

Re:What about FiOS?

[nwf]

I have outside of Philadelphia, and we get 15/2 as part of the triple pay for $100/mo including unlimited phone and more channels that Comcast is offering for much more. Although it almost doesn't matter, since Comcast in my area is pathetic and their support is the worst I've ever seen from any company. They actually seemed happy I left so they didn't actually have to fix their network.

Re:What about FiOS?

[Smidge204]

50/20 service is available in my area at $90/mo. Add their FiOS TV service and it's $138/mo. (annual contracts)

=Smidge=

Re:What about FiOS?

[Guanine]

Good lord that's a great deal -- I pay $59.95 per month for 6/GoodLuck service from Comcast in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. Will I be upgrading? Abso-freakin'-lutely not. I only pay them because there is, I promise you, quite literally, no other option. The phone lines in my building are so old, I doubt dial-up would even working correctly.

This sucks.

Re:What about FiOS?

[jank1887]

ahhh... but wait till the next 4 day power outage (I live below baltimore, and the last one wasn't that long ago.), when your cell phone runs out of juice. Those of us still on copper may just start a little phone-access profiteering..

Re:What about FiOS?

[Caduceus1]

I've got the same thing you have, and its definitely TiVo compatible - if you get the cablecards. My two TiVo HDs work like a charm - and I gave up a three dual-tuner networked DirecTiVo setup for it.

Now, without the cablecard (since you have basic service), you should still pick up the clear QAM channels, but you won't get any programming guide data for them IIRC, which effectively neuters most of the useful TiVo features.

Of course, if you get an antenna you can use the TiVo HD/Series 3 with it, and get programming data.

Re:What about FiOS?

[thesameguy]

I don't have Verizon FIOS, but Surewest's (local Sacramento thing, previously WinFirst) fiber-based IP internet/tv/phone service. The 10mb bidirectional internet is $65/mo, but they offer substantially faster speeds (up to 50, IIRC). I've never seen less than 9mb and sometimes see 12mb, but in general the speeds in both directions hover right around 10mb. They specify a 50gb/mo limit with this tier of service - it's not great, but I've not had a problem working within those guidelines - ~1.5gb/day does ok for me. I went with them specifically because the other choices - AT&T DSL & Comcast - are such a PITA to deal with. Surewest has been very straightforward about what they offer and what you pay, and the service matches the brochure to a T.

Re:What about FiOS?

[jandrese]

I use my Tivo with the Fios TV, but I have to use the IR blaster because Verizon was evil and disabled the Anynet serial port on the back of their box for no good reason. IR blasters suck (there was one revision of the Tivo software that was terrible about messing up channel changes), but it gets the job done.

Re:What about FiOS?

[samkass]

Good news to hear! I have a Series 2 non-HD TiVo without cablecard support, so I guess I'd have to upgrade. I avoided doing so because when I initially checked FiOS TV didn't support CableCard at all.

Re:What about FiOS?

[Caduceus1]

FIOS supports cablecards, although they only have had single-stream cards ("S Cards") up to this point, so to get the dual-tuner functionality you'd need to get two S cards (I think they are/were $3 each). The TiVo HD model supports multi-stream cards ("M Cards"), so if you can get one you only need 1.

You don't get any sort of two-way support (i.e. FIOS provided EPG, VOD, etc.) with cablecards in general. A future 2.0 spec provides that, but the TiVos are not built for that anyways.

I will caution - getting the cards properly set up can be a long and tortuous adventure. It depends on the skill of the technician (you cannot get them self-installed), how happy the registration computer is that day, and whether you can convince them to be patient enough to register one card at a time.

Re:What about FiOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Sweden. Here 100/100m for around $25 is quite common. I wonder who the heck would pay $150 for a 50m connection, I can get 1G fiber for roughly that price... With no throttling and guaranteed bandwidth.

If Sweden can... How can it be so hard in the USA?

Re:What about FiOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm perfectly happy with my 100Mbps for around $30 a month.
Fixed IP address, can run servers, etc, etc.
Why do you put up with expensive substandard services in the US?

Re:What about FiOS?

[Hsensei]

In North Texas where I live I get 15/15 FiOS and its about 65 a month after taxes and fees.

Re:What about FiOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't advertise this, but you can call them up and ask them for cable cards. It may take a little wrangling till you find someone who knows what you are talking about, but I hear they have them available.

Re:What about FiOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the DC Area I'm able to get a 30/5 FiOS package for I think $65/month now (it used to be $55, but they jacked the prices up a couple of months ago). Most areas are stuck with 5/2 service though last I heard. The good news is that I get all of that bandwidth as far as I can tell, the bad news is that it still uses PPPoE for some reason. I read your 'prices got jacked up' comment and just had to point out, with your FiOS connection you're getting 20 T1 equivalents down and nearly 3 up for $65 a month. Price a T1 lately? 2 years ago I bought a PRI (T1) for $550 per-month and that wasn't a half bad deal at the time. And you admitted you get your bandwidth, far more 'value' than you actually pay for. The top Tier for FiOS in many areas is 50Mbps x 5Mbps right now, for some reason the Comcast news article announcing the availability of their 50Mbps plan said FiOS offered upto 30Mbps, which isn't true. A 50Mbps package _exceeds_ a DS3 down and pretty much equals an OC1 (price an OC1 one day).. on the serious cheap. I leased a DS3 in 2005 for $3,000 per-month to power an ISP I helped build and the going rate at the time for a DS3 (45M x 45M) was about $6,000 from a Tier 1 with a full SLA. FiOS is an amazing value that, to this day, I remain in awe of. In almost no area of the country are you 'stuck' with 5M x 2M either.. that's egregiously untrue. 5M x 2M is the lowest end FiOS package. I'm literally not aware of _anywhere that can't purchase significantly higher capacity.. most places can get at lease 30Mbps, and many 50Mbps x 5Mbps. And watch the current emergence of the synchronous plans (20M x 20M and even 30M x 30M in some areas). It's insane, but I love it. Talk about your P2P beast, without the FAP. What's the diff regarding PPPoE or DHCP? The plans available are the same with either IP distribution method. The only negative I can think of for PPPoE over DHCP is the slightly longer connection period before you get a new IP, but your IP changes so rarely, that's hardly a big deal. All modern operating systems and routers support both, so I can't see that is anything more than a personal bias against PPPoE. You're really in the cat bird seat. I'm still waiting on FiOS. My cable company stinks and I absolutely wish I could get a triple play to save some money.. separate TV, Internet and Phone companies are egregiously expensive. My cable company doesn't offer phone in my area their HD channels skip and they don't offer DVRs. My TV company only offers TV (satellite) and my phone company doesn't even offer DSL in my area, let alone FiOS. But I know FiOS is coming.. I can see the Verizon-labelled fiber poles popping up in the area.

Re:What about FiOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious what you mean when you says FiOS isn't TiVo compatible. Last I checked if your 3rd gen TiVo had two cables cards in it, you could use both tuners and watch all the channels. I think the VOD only works with the VZ-supplied boxes and the same goes for the new, awesome interactive media guide. But you can use the TiVo-supplied guide, can't you? I'm curious what your experience is with TiVo on FiOS. At $800 for the 3rd gen, I'm still 'debating' it.

caps?

[Neil Watson]

And the monthly GB limits are?

Re:caps?

[calebt3]

42. Megabytes.

Re:caps?

[snl2587]

For $150, there had better be none. And they'd better give me a butler and a diamond-studded modem.

Re:caps?

[Fx.Dr]

Knowing Comcasts' customer service, they'll send a leather studded butler and no modem instead. Just sayin'.

Re:caps?

[Anonymous Coward]

42 Megabytes should be enough for anyone.

Re:caps?

[RedMage]

Sold!

Oh, wait...

Re:caps?

[Creepy]

they also stated they will have a tiered pricing system - $150 is max for the 50Mbps, so they may have, say $75 for 25Mbps, which would be more attractive to consumers.

AFAIK, Comcast has never had caps, but sometimes they pull the plug on excessive users because they wrote they could do that in their terms of service (which is pretty draconian, IMO). I believe the $150 service is targeted towards businesses and power users because there is no fast and cheap alternative in the area. The only way to get 5Mbps upstream is to lease a T2 or T3 line, which was running over $1000/mo last I checked.

Re:caps?

[u-235-sentinel]

And the monthly GB limits are?

Yeah, that's the question. How do we know we are breaking the unpublished rules?

And now that the 12 month suspension of our account is over, the company wants my family to sign up again with them.

I had no way to validate what they were saying our consumption was and still they don't provide that information. Our current ISP (using DSL) has a 100 Gig a month limit AND we can validate our usage. Plus the service is outstanding and the people are technical when I have questions.

Why would I go back with Concast agani???

How much actual bandwidth?

[ke5aux]

OMG PONIES?

Burst vs Sustained Speed

[ChuBie]

Forget advertising about a new 50 Mbps speed that you may only see 5 of during peak times. I want to see a company advertise their guaranteed speeds for that class of service along with the peak you might hit at 4am.

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[thanatos_x]

That's going against the general notion of the packet switching, and quite difficult/expensive for the company to do (especially from an advertising standpoint.)

Perhaps a good compromise would be disclosing the total bandwidth available for a given street/town/etc and the number of users. Also average speeds during peak hours would be useful, or in general an explicit policy on bandwidth usage- you get X gb /time period, or you get X gb /month at 50 Mbps before you get moved down to lower priority (bandwidth is capped unless there is low usage.)

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[Lumpy]

AT&T will do that for you right now.

It
's called buying a T1 or a T3 or even a OC48 if you want the bandwidth.

you gotta pay for it.

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[interiot]

Long before that happens though, customers will collect their own information and post it online.

If there was a program that kept track of when you max out your upstream or downstream, and tried to characterize what might be triggering any throttling, that'd be very useful information to post online.

Then, if you could set up a DOCSIS sniffer and collect similar data from everyone in your neighborhood, you'd have heaps of useful data.

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[zappepcs]

I'm sorry, NOT! If Comcast built their network correctly to begin with, the infrastructure COULD handle specific bandwidth requirements that could in turn be advertised correctly.

The advertised vs. actual problem occurs when the architecture of the network is itself sloppy, and relies on end users never testing their bandwidth at the same time. Generally, this works, but is NOT good for guaranteed QoS.

If every neighborhood WAN/Ring was set up with 2x the required network feeding it you would get reduced speed during an outage and guaranteed bandwidth possibilities. The problem is that requires upgrades, and we know that won't happen till some pork toting politicians says the county/state will pay for it.

Current and previous network designs were vamped up analog cable tv networks (read as router jammed in outdoor cabinet somewhere in the neighborhood) the cable companies went into the network business with less than suitable design and staff and winged it. The public is now happy to have the less than optimal service that was offered rather than demanding 'you can hear a pin drop' quality.

50Mbps is what I would equate to high end, but I'm willing to bet that the QoS is NO better than dialup, just faster most of the time. If the QoS was better, they'd advertise it.

What this means is that the cheapest upgrade to crap old equipment came with a huge bandwidth increase by default. They could give you a QoS guaranteed 15Mb/3Mb and setup the network to produce that... but nope, not happening. It 'SOUNDS' so much better to say **50Mbps**

It's nothing but marketing droid bs.

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[Smidge204]

I'm sorry, NOT! If Comcast built their network correctly to begin with, the infrastructure COULD handle specific bandwidth requirements that could in turn be advertised correctly. And what happens when the source of the slow-down is external to your ISP's infrastructure? This, I think, is the real problem with "guaranteeing" connection speeds.

You might be able to guarantee YOUR network, but Joe Shmoe isn't going to understand the difference when his favorite website gets slashdotted and takes forever to load. Then the lawyers come out.

The only solution is to put that little * next to the speed on the advert and not actually guarantee anything.
=Smidge=

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak for Comcast's service, but my FiOS 20/20mbps does indeed give me 20mbps both down an up. You just need to be connected to services that can cope. Try a popular torrent rather than one of those crap web based "speed tests".

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[zappepcs]

I've been in a business that guarantees bandwidth and latency for some 20 years. YES you can guarantee just your portion of it.

What you are saying is that end users are too fucking stupid to learn how it works. While I'll agree that there are some who are, people in general are smart enough to understand a simple explanation of how it works.

Car analogy: You can guaranteed highway speeds capabilities of 120mph on a car. Do people sue Ford because they can't go over 70mph in their mustang?

No matter which way you do it there will be a small percentage of users who won't understand. They also have blinking clocks on their VCRs and are often seen with shoe laces untied.

I've been explaining the very same problem to people for a lot of years, so I can say with authority that all end users are NOT that stupid.

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[ILongForDarkness]

You make some good points however the general public isn't paying for a 99.99% 90% of quoted capacity or something. They are just paying for "up to 50Mbps".

Does this suck? Yeah, because the average Joe is going to take his 4.5GB DVD divide by the speed (lets be honest here, he will usually divide by 50MBps not 50Mbps) and say hey I can get that DVD in roughly one and a half minutes. A big challenge is that our connections aren't symetric which isn't very good for P2P. You can't download as fast as you have for a download cap, you can download as fast as your share of the upload capacity of the sharers you connect to. If you have say 5 seeds with 5 connections each you will get about what the average upload cap is which is typically 512kb-1Mbps currently.

So you still have room in your pipe, what to do with it? Download 26 episodes of CSI, and every movie currently in theatres simulaneously of course. We change our web habits to match what we are allowed to do. If the ISP kills our BitTorrent connections then we try Limewire, if that doesn't work we look for the stuff on YouTube, etc.

I might only want to try out that series that I'm downloading, but it seems like a waste to get 50KB/s for one episode that will take 4hrs to download, so I download them all and then see if I like the one episode. I think forcing upload speeds to be unnecessarily slow creates wasteful downloading behavior which gives the ISPs something to bitch about. They can keep there 50/5 service if there was a 15/15 service that would be the one for me.

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[Hatta]

The problem is that requires upgrades, and we know that won't happen till some pork toting politicians says the county/state will pay for it.

We already did pay for it. We were promised 45megabit bidirectional connections. We gave the telco's over 200 billion dollars for it. That money was stolen.

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, and look what they're deploying! I guess you somehow expected it to be instantaneous. No worries, stupidity is rampant amongst your types.

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[Hatta]

Hey, we paid for it in the mid-90s for delivery by 2000! Is 8 years now instantaneous, or are you just illiterate?

Re:Burst vs Sustained Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Guaranteed speed: DS3 (45M x 45M) for $3,000/mo. if you shop really well and sign a multi-year agreement. PRI T1 (1.5M x 1.5M) for $300-600/mo. Or you can deal with shared bandwidth and for most people achieve your full bandwidth often but not always but keep your Internet price in the double digits instead.

just dont use it

[pablo_max]

thats a lot of speed. Just don't bother using it to download..at least it will make those XP/Vista updates quicker ;)

Fine print

[Hyppy]

50Mbps*

fine print -
*: for only the first 10 seconds of any sustained transaction. Additional fees and restrictions apply. Bandwidth advertised will be dropped to dial-up speeds when used for any protocol not essential to the viewing of a common web page.

Re:Fine print

[IBBoard]

dropped to dial-up speeds when used for any protocol not essential to the viewing of a common web page.

Anyone feel like trying to write Apache to run over BitTorrent for serving web pages? :D

Re:Fine print

[SailorSpork]

** ...and we define "common webpage" as anything hosted on billing.comcast.com

offtopic: the new design

[doti]

Nice, and the new reply system is great, but I think there's too much vertical space wasted by the gray "Replay to This" and "Parent" buttons.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[EMeta]

Agreed. Need option to change it back. When it was just text it looked a lot more like I was working while reading /.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Bogtha]

It's the whitespace between the comment and the buttons that does it. Put the following in your user stylesheet:

.commentBody {
padding-bottom: 0 !important;
}

Re:offtopic: the new design

[HockeyPuck]

Why are those even "buttons" the old linkable text was fine before.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Racemaniac]

i'm just happy that the dynamic view works with opera again, it didn't work for a while, now i tried to enable it again, and it works nicely again :)

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Ilgaz]

As we are supposed to speak about Comcast, I remembered Azureus bittorrent client. ;)

It has "Use fancy tabs" setting in advanced mode. Slashdot may have "Use Fancy buttons" which thousands of geeks will disable.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I would have replied sooner, but I couldn't find the "Reply to This" button.

Seriously, is this new layout for the visually impaired?

Re:offtopic: the new design

[rho]

Doesn't look so bad in light mode.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[fm6]

A minor issue. The big waste of vertical space is meandering, clueless, "who cares" subthreads.

We need to have a way to just jump past long threads we're not interested in. The Slashdotter Firefox plugin used to provide this, in the form of a "hide replies" feature. But that plugin is pretty much dead -- I guess the author got tired of trying to keep up with endless HTML tweaks.

What new reply system? I don't see anything really different.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[jo42]

offtopic: the new design Dear /.

April 1st was 2 days ago. Please give us back the previous look. The new look has these gawd awful thick box borders around posts, way too much white space thus less information presented forcing more scrolling.

Please don't drink more "Web 2.0" Kool-Aid as it makes you rather stupid.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[value_added]

.commentBody {
        padding-bottom: 0 !important;
        }


And a similar modification for those who aren't OpenStep fans, or are otherwise interested in the content without being unecessarily distracted (several hundred times per article) by giant "Reply To" buttons?

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Anonymous Coward]

I really dislike the change. This is the XP version of Slashdot. I miss Slashdot 2k. Cartoon makeover. The new buttons are truly a change for the worse. I also really miss being able to set my viewing preferences at the top of comments. I do not like the sliders on the sidebar.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[apoc.famine]

Having clicked the "I am willing to help test Slashdot's New Discussion System." link some time ago, I've been making good use of the feature where clicking on a comment title collapses or expands the thread it's in. That wouldn't be what you're looking for, is it?

Re:offtopic: the new design

[fm6]

Yes it is, as I just now discovered. I had experimented with the NDS previous, and thought it was a klunky exercise in AJAX for its own sake. But maybe this new reply system makes it worth while. And they just implemented a set of hide-show messages clicks that might be close to what I'm looking for.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[uglydog]

I'm not sure why they did it, but I do notice that with the buttons, it's easier to see the comment and quicker to find the Reply and Parent link. Not sure how much it matters, really, and I wish the buttons weren't so big, but I'll deal. I hope they work on the content next. :-P

Re:offtopic: the new design

[joNDoty]

In case you're like me and don't know how to edit your user stylesheet:
http://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/user-style-sheets.html

Thanks for the tip, Bogtha!

Re:offtopic: the new design

[The Moof]

They still are, just horribly styled.
Try this in your user stylesheet:

.nbutton, .nbutton * {
background:transparent !important;
padding:0 !important;
}
.nbutton p{
margin:0 !important;
}
.nbutton p b a{
color:#005555 !important;
font-weight:bold !important;
text-decoration:underline !important;
}

Re:offtopic: the new design

[RyoShin]

It's not just that, though- it's that the buttons themselves take up far too much space and leave too much white space.

The old style, where there was just a green bar with text links, worked perfectly. Why do we need to have buttons? Okay, perhaps you want them to stand out a bit more- so just give them a border and a different background. They don't need all that extra space.

I'm also annoyed by the added space between abbreviated comments. Perhaps a bit easier to read, it makes the page much longer without a lot of added benefit.

My last complaint is the new Keybindings list. While it's great for those who like their keyboard, I'm an old (new?) school chap- I get by fine with my PgDn button and mouse. (Mainly the PgDn button.) So it would be nice if those could be hidden for us who make no use of them.

If I had to be pigeon-holed, I'd say "I like it with a but". However, as crappy as idle.slashdot seems to be (lol Digg), I love the discussion system there and it far surpasses this one. The comments bar is along the top instead of the side, which gives much more width for comments themselves, which is especially useful as you get into an increasing number of children posts. I actually recommend to Slashdot that they throw out this new discussion design and just use the idle.slashdot.org discussion one (with less green, perhaps). Of course, looking at idle now they've incorporated most of the complaints I listed above with this style. Still, having the bar along the top is much better for discussion layout.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[JambisJubilee]

I agree. These "buttons" waste too much space compared to the text links.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[apoc.famine]

The NDS has had its ups and downs, I'll agree. There have been times when it didn't work quite right on different versions of Firefox on different platforms.

However, I think in the last week or so it's gone from clunky to pretty useful. This iteration seems especially smooth. The new ability to clearly see (via the gray boxes) what parts of the thread you're trying to minimize is really helpful. And I have to say, in-line commenting is nice as well. All in all, it's not nearly as rough as it used to be. I think I might actually like this better than the old system.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Anonymous Coward]

Links = Web 1.0
Buttons = Web 2.0
???
Profit?

Re:offtopic: the new design

[fm6]

I have to admit I like the new posting interface, and the ability to see any given post in its context in the thread. But there's still no easy way to skip lame threads.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[apoc.famine]

I collapse them like so many Vegas high-rises. But I know what you mean - when you're eight layers deep, and realize that it's all crap, it takes a bit to scroll up the the offending G-G-G-G-P thread and minimize it.

I can see where a little link on the right of the comment topic bar used to collapse the whole thread would be potentially useful. Like for all the people wading their way through this thread. :)

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Anonymous Coward]

Got anything for the horrid boxes around up-modded comments? (that is, something that kills the boxes that come out of "comment contain" versus "comment")

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Lord Flipper]

Put the following in your user stylesheet:

That seems to help. Thanks

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Lord Flipper]

It's the whitespace between the comment and the buttons that does it. Put the following in your user stylesheet: .commentBody {
padding-bottom: 0 !important;
}

Also, to get rid of the ad and/or whitespace above the "Reply-to" head, you can add this:

.lb {
height: 0 !important;
padding: 0 !important;
}

Cache has to be flushed, also, I believe, but the stle change persists afterward.

Re:offtopic: the new design

[Bogtha]

For anybody who's interested, I've put up a user stylesheet that puts things back (more or less) how they were on userstyles.org.

Too much

[moseman]

Fortunately for me, work pays my isp fees, but there is no way I could justify $150/month.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure I'll get a few ADD suffering detractors on this comment but...

The price is ludicrous and 50/6 asymmetry is too. When are things going to settle down an 10/10 for ~$30/month?

Sure....50Mbps?

[BigAssRat]

I can't get over 4Mbps on my "6Mbps" connection as it is. Now they are going to try offering 50? Right.

speed

[alxkit]

yeah, but they will block anything that is torr related. lets all browse Slashdot at 50Mbps!

Does it include Throttling?

[MrSteveSD]

Virgin Media are always trying to push their high-speed service, but they all include throttling after you have downloaded any significant amount of data. If you buy a TV show from ITunes and download it, you will suddenly find your speed switched right down.

You assume there will be a choice...

[Anonymous Coward]

The odds that this and FiOS will be available in the same areas are slim to none. Both companies will make deals to prevent competition, just like they always have.

Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap

[Tsu-na-mi]

How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?

50Mb sounds nice, but if they cut you off after 100GB per month for "excessive traffic", what good is it?

Re:Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they have an "unlimited" option? :-)

Re:Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap

[street struttin']

50Mb sounds nice, but if they cut you off after 100GB per month for "excessive traffic", what good is it? No kidding. If they are going to throttle you after you do any major data pulls, what good is it? They could offer a bajillion MBps, but if they cut you off as soon as you try to use it, who cares? Might as well stick with whatever is cheapest...

Re:Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap

[LeRaldo]

Hey, I have that plan! It's 'unlimited' up to 400GB!

Re:Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap

[bcwright]

There actually may be some amount of demand for a high "burst" speed even if the total amount of bandwidth is capped, at least if you're talking about business class service - depending on the exact numbers involved, of course. If you're running a server, there are times when you want to have that high burst rate (for example, serving up video) but the amount of traffic on your site doesn't warrant paying for having no limits on bandwidth other than what's implicit in the hardware specs. Of course, if this is a "residential-only" service and you can't run a server on it, all of this is a moot point. :-)

Re:Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap

[cpricejones]

Better ping?

Re:Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap

[Danathar]

More than likely they up the cap for the higher speeds. From what I've read they do that with each of the other tiered plans.

Re:Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap

[Muad'Dave]

...what good is it?

It's good for about 4 hours, 26 minutes, and 40 seconds. On the first day of the month.

Re:Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap

[u-235-sentinel]

How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?

50Mb sounds nice, but if they cut you off after 100GB per month for "excessive traffic", what good is it?

And don't forget, that 100 Gig limit is just a 'guess' not a number they advertise. Some people have been terminated for using as little as 40 Gigs a month and the rejects will come out saying "I'm glad you weren't my neighbor for being a bandwidth hog"...

Honestly, that's their whole argument. Pretty pathetic when you look at the rest of the world. Other countries don't have a problem with that but somehow our Internet here in America can't handle traffic considered normal elsewhere.

Sad :/

Verizon FiOS won't cover all of Verizon territory

[bcwright]

I live in fairly large metropolitan area (> 1 million) which is served by Verizon, however because most of the rest of the state is served by another provider our little island is treated by Verizon as one of their "ugly stepchildren." It appears unlikely that we'll get FiOS from Verizon before 2020, if then. (That's not a misprint BTW). In addition, there are lots of places that aren't even served by Verizon for local phone service. Given that Verizon is not interested in our money, if Comcast can provide that kind of service here I think they may well get a lot of subscribers.

What about AT&T?

[singingjim1]

I'll never see Verizon here in Florida since AT&T is the big dog here. They haven't even announced anything about next generation DSL here yet, so Comcast is the only game in town for real high-speed internet. Speaking of which, I downloaded a Quicktime update the other day and peaked at 1500 kbps with an average speed over 1000 kbps for the 23 MB download which took a few seconds to complete. Bash them all you want, but ya gotta love that speed boost for downloads. I'm not sure how it works with bandwidth and streaming, but you can definitely see a real increase in download speeds. Pirates might whine about limits on downloading their music and movies, but legitimate downloads scream. And I HATE Comcast and their crappy HDTV service, but they are the shit when it comes to broadband, at least in my area.

Re:What about AT&T?

[oahazmatt]

Maybe you haven't seen it in your area yet (I know Citrus County doesn't really have a choice) but Verizon has a nice presence in Florida, including their Tampa data center. Plus, if you go by their website, the coverage area is never properly updated.

Part of the problem comes down to installation costs. Verizon wants to get FiOS out to as many people as possible, but when you consider the cost of rolling out that fiber, and then apartment complexes that have exclusive contracts with cable companies (which is more of an issue than having no-competition: no choice) its not always beneficial to move as fast as possible.

I've always lived in areas in Florida that have at least two choices for Internet and Television. It's rare that I find an area that's actually locked in without competition.

Re:What about AT&T?

[LWATCDR]

I live right across the state from you. Guess what? I have never had a choice in Cable providers.
I think in most of Florida your choices are.
Cable or Satellite.
Cable modem, DSL, or dial up.
Not really competition IMHO.

Re:What about AT&T?

[singingjim1]

I'm in southeast Florida and since Comcast bought out Adelphia there literally is no choice in cable companies and since AT&T bought Bellsouth there's no choice in DSL, nevermind FiOS by Verizon. We'll never see that unless Verizon buys out AT&T's interest here. It's as if because we're on this skinny peninsula our options are proportionally "skinnier" as well. I want fiber to my house, but without paying to tap directly into the backbone with my own infrastructure, which is obviously out of the question, I don't see it happening anytime in the near or not-so-near future. We're locked into the non-choices available to us unless legislators step in.

Avoiding FIOS markets

[TheMiddleRoad]

FIOS is cheaper. FIOS doesn't throttle the shit out of your uploads. I expect Comcast will avoid taking this product to markets where FIOS is available.

Re:Avoiding FIOS markets

[arbiter1]

FIOS is cheaper. FIOS doesn't throttle the shit out of your uploads. I expect Comcast will avoid taking this product to markets where FIOS is available. they don't throttle you YET! gotta remember during this how time fcc been on comcast case verizon was one companies backing comcast's side.

Re:Avoiding FIOS markets

[eap]

they don't throttle you YET! gotta remember during this how time fcc been on comcast case verizon was one companies backing comcast's side. Good point. When I first subscribed to SBC's Fiber to the Premise internet service, I got sustained 2.5/2.5 service.

Now that the product has rolled out nationally and has been rebranded "Uverse", I get 5 down / .8 up.

Even though my download speed is doubled, the connection feels much slower because of the throttled upload speed.

Half the speed, twice the price.

[Anonymous Coward]

What a deal!

Can I run a server?

[jc42]

Among my questions about Internet service is whether I'm permitted to run my own servers. I have a site (with several domain names) on which I provide net space for a small collection of friends and relatives. Nothing terribly commercial, except marginally for a couple of local bands. But keeping such things on a personal machine can be a good idea. That way you don't run afoul of the ISPs' penchant for claiming ownership of any files that you put on the "hosted" web site that they so conveniently provide for you. This is especially important for the bands, who would be rather upset if they found out that their ISP had claimed their MP3s and was selling them or using them in ads.

Right now, I have a DSL account through speakeasy, whose TOS promise that I can do all of this, and they won't take it away from me. The other ISPs hereabouts either flatly forbid home servers or "reserve the right" to change their permissions without notice. And they won't sell commercial service to a "home" customer. So FIOS et al would eliminate such family-and-friends services, as well as risking my friends' bands' control of their own recordings.

Anyone know of general solutions to this sort of problem? Not just for me, but for all the other geeks either doing or thinking of something similar? Is there a way we can put our own stuff online, and guarantee that the ISP can't take it away from us and use it for their own commercial purposes?

Re:Can I run a server?

[arbiter1]

upgrade to a business connection which probley cost a bit more that is about the only option

Re:Can I run a server?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you get a DBA or incorporation, you can be a business customer, I believe-- even if your "office" is quite humble.

But business packages are directed toward business budgets. I hope you've got one.

Re:Can I run a server?

[MarcoG42]

I live in Brooklyn, NY and my ISP (Cablevision) offers a 30/5 service that allows you to run your own server from home. Now, I'm not entirely sure if my IP is static. I never read anywhere that it was, so I assume I have a dynamic IP, but I know for a fact that my IP hasn't changed since January. I host 4 domains, among other things, from my own rig and the speed is impressive. Cablevision even has some online tools to help you host from home, though they're geared more towards beginners.

Re:Can I run a server?

[Chris Mattern]

Sign up for a hosting service. A server is better off in a data center than sitting on your desk anyways. I'm looking at Server Beach myself so I can have a reliable server set up for my email and just to fool around with. For under $100 a month, they'll rent you what is, for an individual or very small business, a pretty nice box, with a decent internet connection that has a clearly defined (and reasonable) transfer limit, and you can do what want with that box as long as it doesn't start trying to hack other boxes in the center or become a spambot. They don't even get to have account on it.

Re:Can I run a server?

[Anonymous Coward]

>And they won't sell commercial service to a "home" customer

Start a business - a DBA costs next to nothing.

Re:Can I run a server?

[znerk]

They don't even get to have account on it. Why would they need an account on the virtual machine running your little bitty host, along with 150 others?

Re:Can I run a server?

[Anonymous Coward]

is $10 bucks a month too much to pay for hosting? Dreamhost, 1and1, hostgator, etc all offer obscenely cheap hosting plans...

Re:Can I run a server?

[Khyber]

The answer is you copyright your friends' band stuff. If they try using it or try taking it, use the DMCA to shut them down and collect on exorbitant fees.

Re:Can I run a server?

[joNDoty]

Anyone know of general solutions to this sort of problem? This is /. You must rephrase your question if you want an immediate response:
"There are NO general solutions to this sort of problem."

Re:Can I run a server?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in no way affiliated with them but I use
http://corenetworks.net/ its cheaper and easier than trying to make sure my cable company doesnt trash my connection

Re:Can I run a server?

[Achromatic1978]

Nah, not even that. I just rang Comcast Business and said I wanted a business-class connection for my home office. They just asked "Company Name?" and that was it. So I get 8mbps/1mbps, 5 statics, no port restrictions, no throttling, for $169 $89 for as long as I keep extending the contract.

Re:Can I run a server?

[GrifterCC]

Verizon just wired my apartment building for FiOS, and the brochure they kindly distributed after wiring my apartment during the day while I was out specifically says you can't use FiOS to host a server.

Re:Can I run a server?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Long Island an I just switched from Fios to Cablevision Boost. I get 30 dwn / 5 up on speeds. I've had it for about 4 days now and everytime I check my speeds (even during peek hours) I hit around 25 dwn / 4.6 up, pretty good. I have my own websites and mail server and Cablevision is good with that (Unblocking Port 80 & 25 is only available on the Boost service). The IP is not static it is dynamic and it rarely changes. I just use DynDns and create CNAME's on my registar to point to the DynDns names I created, works just like a static IP. So far the speeds are great and the 5 websites I have on my server range from HTML pages, Drupal and Joomla....all responding fast.

Re:Can I run a server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, I don't know, maybe you could pay a third party hosting company (i.e. not you, or your ISP) instead? There are thousands to choose from.

Not that I don't share your interest - it's great geeky fun to host your own server.

But practically speaking it's worth it, what you pay in cash you'll save on power and gain in security and stability.

Re:Can I run a server?

[Achra]

I don't know about Guarantees, but depending on the size of your operation you may not be noticed.
(disclaimer: I've never used comcast, and I hear they suck)

I ran a personal webserver/cvs server/mail server/etc on Qwest DSL for about a year and a half, even though their TOS expressly disallowed it. I'm currently doing the same on Verizon Fios. Verizon blocks port 80 inbound, so my webhop redirector points to port 8080.

The only company I've ever heard of around the Seattle area that expressly allows what you're talking about is Speakeasy. I'd keep them if I was worried about TOS.

Re:Can I run a server?

[MarcoG42]

You just described exactly what I've got and what I do with the connection. Boost is the best invest I've made in an internet service in a long, long time. Though, I just point my domains to my IP since it changes so rarely, and they aren't anything that need to be up 24/7. Not mission critical by far.

Re:Can I run a server?

[gid]

I ran a web server, email server, teamspeak server, even a little quake 3 server on Comcast for years and no one said a thing to me.

Re:Can I run a server?

[bigdeadtodd]

You cant run a server as a residential customer. But Verizon will sell business services to a residential location. If you buy a static business account, all ports are open and Verizon will even set up reverse dns on your static ips for you.

Re:Can I run a server?

[Chris Mattern]

Not a virtual machine. There are certainly places that offer that. But it doesn't really interest me, although your tastes may differ. This is *dedicated* hosting. This is your own, physical, box that they rent to you and only you're on it.

Re:Can I run a server?

[znerk]

Sounds like I might just as well be spending that $100 a month on my own physical dedicated fiber line, and running my own physical box with only me accessing it. Sorry, I don't see the benefit to having it "hosted" elsewhere, at that price, unless it's a machine that I delivered to the host to have them connect it... and even that is difficult to defend at the rates you're describing.

Similarly, I don't see why a virtual machine would be an issue, or how you would even detect that it *was* a virtual machine, should the host decide to run a few whopping big servers with a few dozen virtual machines on each, instead of "your own, physical, box". If the local admin doesn't have access to your machine, I fail to see the point. There goes any backups, maintenance, etc. unless you do it yourself, in which case you might as well have your own physical machine sitting on your own physical dedicated internet access.

I'm not trying to be difficult, I just don't understand the logic. Consider this an open request for reasons as to why someone would want this.

Re:Can I run a server?

[Chris Mattern]

The internet connection is probably the main thing. We're talking a 10 Mbps line to the Internet, bandwidth cap over 1TB/mo, static IP and you can use your own domain name and there's no contract term about not running servers, no ISP buggery of your packets, no cut off for overrunning hidden limits. Most people, including me, would have trouble getting a connection like that run to their doorstep for the price they're asking for, and they throw a server rental into the bargain. Plus the reliability of running in a data center; UPS and climate controlled room to name the two most important things. They don't maintain your server software, but they *do* support your hardware, 24/7. Server caught fire? They'll issue you a replacement within hours. The OP was asking about a hypothetical band that wants to run a reliable server for their MP3s without the pain and possible copyright implications of doing it from their home ISP. In my opinion, this is the answer to that question. Yes, you do have to do your maintenance and backups yourself. If you want more hand holding, you can get people who do more hand holding--I hear Rackspace is supposed to be pretty good. Of course, they cost rather more. But if you're comfortable running your own box and want a reliable server, this is nice.

There are, incidentally, also people who do let you deliver them your own machine to their datacenter as well (it's called co-hosting), but it's harder to dig up hard information about prices for that. I think it's actually more expensive. Not surprising; letting random hardware be loaded into your server racks has got to be kinda scary.

Re:Can I run a server?

[Archon_de_Gaul]

Dynamic DNS and/or port forwarding? My ISP blocks port 80 inbound and port 25 outbound, like most ISPs.. I just forward a different port to port 80 and hand out the URL with the port number in it. If your site truly isn't commercial as you say, there's no harm throwing a port number on there.. (ex. http://www.yoursite.dyndns.org:30/) and then forward 30 to 80 or have your web server answer on 30.

Re:Can I run a server?

[neurovish]

Get a webhost for like $7/mo with 200GB of storage and a few terabytes of transfer allotment.
Ask your friends to chip in $3 a month to cover the hosting.
If you're hosting 3 sites for people, you now have a "free" webhost and a cup of coffee.

Re:Can I run a server?

[znerk]

Thank you, that was quite informative. I now see why someone would want such a service. That's a fairly big pipe, attached to a "decent server box", and admittedly more than you're likely to find at that price, anywhere. Color me unashamedly wrong ;)

You wouldn't happen to have a URL, would you?

Verizon gives you cap free Usenet

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a big deciding factor for me. Their service is sub premium, but they have enough completeness and retention to download dvds and binaries 24/7 if you desire.

Comcast gives you 2 gig a month Usenet, and even if you pay extra for a premium feed, you still have to worry about a cap.

me thinks

[superwiz]

Comcast says "Mbps" the way airlines say "bonus miles".

Agreed, give me text please

[davidwr]

For a mostly-text medium like /., "Best viewed with any browser" should be the name of the game. All functionality should be available using vintage browsers with no add-ons, no scripting, no etc.

Well, maybe not the ancient NetScape browsers posted a few days ago, but anything much newer than that.

50Mbps untill...

[downix]

I can imagine the comments now

"Wow, 50Mbps, let me try something"
second later
"Hey, it just slowed down to 40Mbps"
second later
"what the, it slowed to 12Mbps"
one more second
"Hey, it's at 28.8Kbps!"

While back at the Comcast HQ
"Gentlemen, the beauty of the system is that it is only 50Mbps until someone actually uses. Any use of the pipeline for such bandwidth gobbling activities such as web browsing or email will be immediately countered with our new bandwidth load balancing software, reducing the available bandwidth in order to keep our profits up..."

Re:50Mbps untill...

[Anonymous Coward]

I will continue to sign up for the lowest possible speed (currently 768Kbps in my area, been upgraded twice in 3 years). Why? Not simply because it costs less, but because you actually get what you pay for. My downloads may only be 90KB/s, but on the other hand, they are ALWAYS 90KB/s. It seems the ISP only plays the bandwidth games with their "premium" services -- the measly 768Kb connection isn't worth the bother.

All the better, I say. If you don't need the bandwidth, this is the smart way to go.

Re:50Mbps untill...

[Slithe]

So does this mean it is Schrodinger's Internet connection?

Sustainable Speed and Usability

[jpdzahr]

If an ISP can not deliver Sustainable Speed and Usability then there is no value to the service other than net trollers. So if during peak time you lose speed and you can't serve up Web pages then it's simply a service for AOLers http://www.findthebestlawyers.com/

DOCSIS 3.0

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

The new service will use the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, which is nearing ratification.

So does that mean they'll be providing IPv6 connectivity?

Re:DOCSIS 3.0

[Wesley Felter]

So does that mean they'll be providing IPv6 connectivity? No, why would they? Besides, most people have NATs that block IPv6.

Re:DOCSIS 3.0

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

No, why would they?

Uh, because they're going to need to pretty soon, and DOCSIS 3.0 adds IPv6 support.

Re:DOCSIS 3.0

[Wesley Felter]

"Pretty soon" probably means 2011, so maybe they'll deploy IPv6 then. I don't see any reason why Comcast would deploy IPv6 in 2008.

Re:DOCSIS 3.0

[imunfair]

They would do it pretty quickly if they realized that they could charge you by device connected easier that way... you know, get rid of all those pesky routers NATing the traffic

It's a trap!

[77Punker]

Well, just sign up for their hosting service! I'm sure it's all part of a wonderful bundle that makes everything so cheap.

They throttle more than P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

Although its not widely publicized they have also been found to throttle Lotus Notes and iChat sessions (making them unusable after a minute or so) among other things - probably many more other things. There's alot more going on under the covers than just an assault on Bit Torrent. I VPN to work (which is one of the only ways around their throttling at this point - VPN) so its speed is fine.

But it begs the question, what good is this supposed speed you buy when Comcast doesn't actually let you use it? This is deceptive advertising at its best on Comcast's part. Their internet packages are more expensive than DSL typically and could be justified because they were "faster", but their not really, because you don't get to use that speed. I'm in the process of migrating to DSL because of Comcast's deception and denying they've been doing this. Net neutrality needs some more poster children like Comcast. ;-)

Re:They throttle more than P2P

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Net neutrality needs some more poster children like Comcast. ;-)

Comcast is enough.

Re:Verizon FiOS won't cover all of Verizon territo

[imstanny]

I live in fairly large metropolitan area (> 1 million) which is served by Verizon, however because most of the rest of the state is served by another provider our little island is treated by Verizon as one of their "ugly stepchildren." It appears unlikely that we'll get FiOS from Verizon before 2020, if then. If I read that 2 days ago, I would've beleived you. I live in a suburban area which has always been slow in adopting broadband. Cable companies kept promising "within the next year" for mroe than half a decade. I ended up upgrading to DSL, then Cable. I've been checking availability of Verizon Fios for about a year now, with a similar message. However, I decided to check yesterday and it is available!

Not sure about national deployment, but Verizon definately beat my expectations. It's a huge project and they seem to be systematically achieving their goal.

Also, a problem with optical cables has been that they have to be kept straight to sustain signal strength. This obstical has recently been eliminated by Corning, so deployment in major cities (where there are apartment buildings, and lots of 'turns' for optical cables to make) is now practical for verizon to undertake.

Besides, by 2010-2011 Verizon will be deploying 4G wireless network so you'll get the high bandwidth one way or another...

Late?

[Jax Omen]

It's the 3rd now, what is this shit?

Uh, it makes IE faster?

[xmuskrat]

Wow, this spyware installs so quick it's almost like a desktop virus!

Already available elsewhere...

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

You can already get this level of speed almost anywhere in quebec (canada) for about $100/month. It doesn't seem to go this fast unless you're doing something p2p... but if comcast throttles p2p - what is the point?

Re:Already available elsewhere...

[hcdejong]

Over here (.nl), I've got 48/48 Mbps over fiber for 50 month including TV and phone service. A few months ago (speed then was 24/24 Mbps) I did some experiments, and it actually achieved those speeds (both up and download) using a Bittorent client.

Re:Already available elsewhere...

[Anonymous Coward]

What, do you mean Videotron's "TGV" gimmick? With a *nice* monthly 50gb upload/download combined limit, which you will reach in less than 2h15 of download at this speed... (that is, if you don't upload *anything*...)

2h15 a month means less than 5 minutes a day of downloads at 50mbps, if you don't want to bust your limit (again assuming that you don't upload anything).

Why is there no intermidate speed and price?

[Starteck81]

What I find more interesting is that they skipped any intermediary options in pricing and bandwidth. For example FIOS has a 5 by 2 for 40 dollars , 15 by 2 for 50 dollars and a 30 by 30(I think) for 180 dollars. Why the hell didn't Comcast offer a reasonably price intermediate speed on the order of 15Mbps up and 2Mbps down like Verizon did?

It seems very stupid to me but on the other hand what else would you expect from a company that uses it's own name as an adjective?

Pointless

[davolfman]

Bittorent is actually pretty much the only application I have ever seen to approach using the kind of bandwidth already available. The increased upload speed could probably be useful though.

DOCSIS 3.0 warning

[Ilgaz]

DOCSIS 3.0 has very sophisticated Quality Of Service (can read as unbreakable capping) technology built in. If you think it will be easy to hack, believe me nothing on DOCSIS is easy. Saying as a person who had to throw away his Motorola SB3100 because ISP rejected to update its firmware.

I tried 2 weeks before giving up and it was supposed to be easier than others since (archaic) modem had built in software upgrade option from DOCSIS 1.0 to 1.1.

We are speaking about a ISP sent RESET signal to their customers even if they download Linux ISO images or licensed/paid movies.

How attractive, you ask?

[lullabud]

Which ever one comes to San Francisco first is going to be a hell of a lot more attractive to me. I was trying to get FIOS here but couldn't because Verizon has no land service in this area. Comcast does... I think I know which one is more attractive now. To me anyway...

Srsly?

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys always talk shit about Comcast, but do you actually use it?

Their network management philosophy is atrocious, but...

I ALWAYS get at least my rated speed. Always.

Additional speeds

[esocid]

From DSL reports

Comcast says customers on their 6Mbps tier will see upstream speed bumps to 1Mbps at no cost, while 8Mbps downstream customers will see their upstream speeds bumped to 2Mbps. That may actually be the more exciting news for customers eager for more upstream bandwidth.

That is meaningless since no one ever gets anywhere near the supposed bandwidth, but hey maybe you'll be able to get close to that previous allotment.

Re:Additional speeds

[popeye44]

Quote: That is meaningless since no one ever gets anywhere near the supposed bandwidth, but hey maybe you'll be able to get close to that previous allotment. Well that's an awfully broad statement, As it happens I'm an 8mbit user. I get AT LEAST 8mbit day in day out. and my uploads are exactly what they say. I max them too at 768. I use the no-no word "starts with USE ends with NET" and I could start now and get 16mbit and in a few minutes it'd drop to 8.. and it will ride 8mbit the rest of the day."yes.. I've tested this.." An upgrade to 2mbit upload would tickle the crap out of me and make it nicer to serve something other than smaller files between my family and friends. I've said it on here before. As much as I hate their support. The speeds from Comcast have been outstanding for me. I know not everyone has the same experience as me.. but I'm certain not every area is oversold and overused either. Unfortunately as these things go.. Comcast starts somewhere else.. and upgrades here MUCH MUCH MUCH later.

Re:Additional speeds

[esocid]

It would be nice if the connection in my area were as good as yours is. I use usenet and will most often get speeds close to 5Mbit/s but for anything else it is a miracle if it is near 1-2Mbit/s. B/w my roommate and me we use our connection pretty heavily with usenet since it seems like that is the only reliable method. I used to have Cox and never had a problem with speeds, but that was in southeast virginia, so it may just be locational too.

Re:Additional speeds

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the 8Mbps service and I get 12Mbps for the first minute(power boost) then reliably runs at 8Mbps +-5%. I have run this for about 10GB straight with no loss in speed. The upload is rated at 384Kbps or 48KBps, I have bursted point to point at over 120KBps and have sustained 55~60KBps for hours on end. I have had 2 cable modems fail and had to deal with crappy tech and so on, but it has been years since I haven't been able to hit my rated speed at any time of the day. And for the record I live in a housing development, not in the middle of no where so I'm not the only one on the loop.

Already available and cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing exciting.
The 50Mbps broadband is already available in Quebec (Canada) for $79(CDN) since January. The upstream is limited to 1Mbps though.
A 30Mbps is also offered.

http://www.videotron.com/services/en/internet/internet-tgv50/presentation.jsp

Compared to FiOS

[Kohath]

How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?

Well, I live in the Minneapolis area. FiOS is not available here. So I'd say Comcast has the advantage.

Re:Compared to FiOS

[swb]

Except that it pays to be super skeptical about their throughput claims.

I have a customer who uses Comcast business (actually they have 3 accounts due to the fact that they are a golf club with outbuildings not tied to the main building, and those buildings use comcast+vpn) and the main building is supposed to have "business class speed" but the 768K cap on upstream renders even the upstream less than fully usable (I'm guessing that sort-of-heavy upstream usage interferes with download ACKs).

Anyway, I'll give up on DSL when Comcast loses this reputation and offers their fat bandwidth with static IPs and no throttling or blocking.

So buy hosting from somebody.

[Animats]

Commercial web hosting is so cheap that there's no reason to do it on a home machine. Don't get it from your ISP; there are hundreds of competing web hosting companies. You can get quite decent capabilities for under $10/month.

Re:So buy hosting from somebody.

[gid]

Or free if I do it from home on my linux box that's already running as a file server. That can I can do all sorts of crazy scripting stuff that might not be easily possible in a shared environment.

"Up to"

[Ossifer]

Give me "up to" 50 mbps and I'll gladly pay "up to" $150/month...

Re:"Up to"

[Koda]

Give me "up to" 50 mbps and I'll gladly pay "up to" $150/month... Hell, as a disgruntled Comcast business user, I'd be happy to buy a 1.5Mbps T1 at that price. Because the T1 connection has consistent speeds. That is simply not the case for our Comcast "Business" cable line. The overly aggressive network management has been causing issues at our small MN office, and we don't use P2P.

Just dont use it

[nurb432]

Or they will complain and cut you off. "up to" doesn't mean " you can use "

Tinfoil hat time

[antonymous]

So Comcast offers ultra-fast speeds at a ridiculous price. Rich p2p pirates purchase this service, get tracked, and get sued.

This could also lead to "harder" GB caps at lower tiers, encouraging users to bump up to a more expensive service.

While I think better last-mile speeds are important, I can't see many "residential" customers willing to pay $100 more per month for increased bandwidth - if you really need that much, you probably already have a business account. There just aren't existing net applications which gain significant performance advantages at these speeds (though I'm sure they're coming).

Comcast throttle alot more than bit torrent

[sasparillascott]

Although it hasn't been publicised greatly, Comcast throttles alot more than bit torrent. Lotus Notes gets throttled as do iChat (640x480 video conference) sessions (making them unusable after about a minute). You have to set iChat to restrict itself to 3x dial up speed to work. Comcast is probably throttling alot more than this in reality. VPN is about the only way around their throttles. What good are their "High" speeds (how they justify their more expensive prices compared to DSL) when you can't use them? BTW they've denied they've been doing this the whole time. They're definitely the perfect poster child for Net Neutrality. Comcast customers, its time to take your money elsewhere.

Why is this so special it gets news?

[everlight291]

Utopianet offers 50/50 500gigabytes for $50. And they don't give a fuck if you use P2P, just as long as you don't break your limit. That should be news!

Re:Why is this so special it gets news?

[FunkSoulBrother]

Is it available to more than 25% of the customers in the United States? 10%? 5%?

No?

Then it's not news.

Youtube + Profits.

[soren100]

"A decade ago we couldn't even conceive of ... YouTube," Google Inc.'s video-sharing service, said Greg Butz, Comcast's vice president for marketing and product development. Of course they were dreaming of video-on-demand a decade ago,they were talking about it at least as far back as '96.

What they could not conceive of was the fact that would be getting free video that you didn't have to pay Comcast for.

So what they do now is throttle your connection back out of spite. If I have any kind of sustained download, I end up at sub-dialup speeds on my supposedly 6 mps Comcast cablemodem. It works very predictably -- 7mbs for about the first 10 seconds and it starts dropping, and then a while later I am at 40 kilobits per second, I kid you not. If I stop the transfer and start it again I get the exact same "loss of service" curve.

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

If you're downloading from something that supports resuming like HTTP or FTP, couldn't you use some kind of modified download splitter to break it up into multiple concurrent downloads, each getting restarted if it falls below a certain threshhold?

Not exactly the nicest thing to do to someones webserver, but would pretty much entirely negate comcast's throttling.

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[strabes]

"It works very predictably -- 7mbs for about the first 10 seconds and it starts dropping, and then a while later I am at 40 kilobits per second, I kid you not. If I stop the transfer and start it again I get the exact same "loss of service" curve." The same exact thing happens to me when downloading large files at my university who uses Comcast. Pausing and resuming the download with downthemall bumps the speed back up to several mbps.

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[Mikachu]

Well, if you think about it, that's essentially what bittorrent does -- and in response, they began to throttle it.

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I have comcast in seattle, and I don't see this at all. I can pull down porn at 3-400k/sec for an hour and comcast doesn't care. I also use BT, but the thing is set up to throttle during mornings and evenings.

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[TheSambassador]

It might just be my area, but I get pretty consistent 300-600kB/second from most of the downloads that I do (both bittorrent and normal HTTP/FTP downloads). I don't want to sound like a Comcast whore, but my experience has been VERY good compared to the old DSL connection I used to have.

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you just don't know how to configure your bittorrent properly?

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[u-235-sentinel]

So what they do now is throttle your connection back out of spite. If I have any kind of sustained download, I end up at sub-dialup speeds on my supposedly 6 mps Comcast cablemodem. It works very predictably -- 7mbs for about the first 10 seconds and it starts dropping, and then a while later I am at 40 kilobits per second, I kid you not. If I stop the transfer and start it again I get the exact same "loss of service" curve.

Either throttle OR they terminate your connection for 12 months if you go above their 'secret' bandwidth limit.

So people will be able to hit the limit faster. Cool ;-)

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[budgenator]

I'm not seeing that kind of drop-off on my Comcast line, during OS upgrades a download starts in the 300Kbs range and only drops down to 100-150 Kbs range sustained rate.

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[Anonymous Coward]

All access service providers have the ability to throttle your traffic with standard service manager tools. This tool provides fine-grained control of each users access to the network. Service providers do other things beyond just throttling your access when you are a heavy user, which is quite common. One service provider (won't mention names) offers a VOIP product - so it throttles all Vonage, Skype traffic coming from customers using their access service, to degrade their competitors VOIP services. There are only very loose laws, rules, and guidelines that the service providers must follow in throttling traffic.

Re:Youtube + Profits.

[afidel]

Doesn't even have to be modified, Getright has that feature built in, has since the 90's.

I live in Minneapolis

[sahonen]

I abandoned Comcast for a "lower bandwidth" DSL plan because the local DSL ISP doesn't throttle. The final straw with Comcast was when I was trying to FTP something up to my web space and the connection kept resetting. They were throttling freaking FTP!

I don't think so...

[TheJerg]

http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios Now look at Denver(or Salt Lake City for that matter) on the map. Tell me what the likelihood of getting from Podunk Nebraska Or Tucson Arizona to Denver in the next 3-5 years? Verizon is probably looking at the 3 million people in the metro area as not worth the investment.

Re:I don't think so...

[Sabotage]

http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios

Now look at Denver(or Salt Lake City for that matter) on the map. Tell me what the likelihood of getting from Podunk Nebraska Or Tucson Arizona to Denver in the next 3-5 years? Verizon is probably looking at the 3 million people in the metro area as not worth the investment. I hear you, brother.

I live in Denver and the choices are Comcast or Qwest DSL, and Qwest offers shitty speeds (max 1.5Mbps down) compared to Comcast. Some areas Qwest covers have something like 7Mbps available.

I asked a friend of mine that works for Qwest to look into getting me a faster DSL speed. He did some digging and told me if I want a faster connection I should move to Highlands Ranch. Great.

So, as of right now, I'm suffering with Comcast, although I'm about to dump them for TV thanks to their HD multiplexing and lack of HD channels compared to other providers. I'd love to switch away from them completely, but nobody else in the area can offer anything close to what Comcast currently does.

I'd worry more if it actually were 50 MB/s

[Moraelin]

How many gigabytes was it again, after which they try to demonize you as some great evil predator that ruins everyone else's Internet? I mean, yippee. You get 50 MB/s and you get disconnected if you use it for an hour.

Bandwidth and Speed

[zoomshorts]

That is ALL these people can offer. PERIOD.
As time goes by, we, as consumers , expect
MORE speed at a LOWER cost.

Just like any other business, the more I purchase,
the LESS is should cost. Apparently these people
fail to realize that. Bummer.

but they rip out your copper

[Anonymous Coward]

As a mandatory part of FIOS installation, Verizon will remove all copper going into your premises. Your phone will henceforth only be as reliable as the electronics in that box on the side of your house where the fiber meets your internal copper (and that box is relatively exposed to the elements, and probably more fragile than the passive junction box used in a POTS demarc).

Also, there's a battery in there which I'm guessing is undermaintained, so in a few years your phone will only be as reliable as the power grid.

POTS is a modern engineering marvel. Its feature set sucks, but *nothing* matches its reliability. I'm not ready to give that up yet.

Re:but they rip out your copper

[jandrese]

The FIOS installation guy said the batteries are rated for 5-10 years. When they fail they are supposed to send a message back to Verizon. Verizon will then apparently mail you a replacement battery and you just replace it. I was an early adopter so I'm not sure that's true anymore though. If the box outside fails I call Verizon and they come out and replace it, just like my old junction box. The reliability has not been an issue with it yet so I can't really add any more to that. The reliability of the box is really Verizon's problem, not mine.

Re:but they rip out your copper

[jandrese]

Bah, hit submit too early, forgot about the second half of my post:

Anyway, I only have 2 complaints with FiOS:

1. No IPv6 support, at least for home users. IPv6 is not going anywhere until people's ISPs support it.
2. It still uses PPPoE. PPPoE is such a nasty hack and it seems so unnecessary in this case.

Re:but they rip out your copper

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the FSC for Fios tech support. PPPoE was used very early on. Very few customers still have PPPoE. DHCP is available for you most likely, but since you data circuit calls for PPPoE that is what you have. If you want to switch to DHCP you have to have your data disconnected and then reconnected. This will give you a new circuit and all new circuits are DHCP.

Re:but they rip out your copper

[VAG-Man]

BS. Come to my house and see the 12 pairs of copper still in place right next to the FIOS. The installers were perfectly happy to mount the ONT inside for me, and the battery is a totally standard item and trivial to replace. 15/2 with 5 static IPs for $95/month. It's been 100% reliable in the 16 months I've had it, never a noticeable slow-down. I dearly wish I could get it at my office, where I pay Comcast $95/month for 8/1 which works kinda sorta most of the time.

Re:but they rip out your copper

[jandrese]

How hard would it be for them to do that? Does it require a tech to come out or is it something I can just call and have done in 15 minutes? I really wouldn't mind dumping PPPoE. I guess this is what I get for being an early adopter. On the other hand, I get to use my own (BSD based) firewall instead of the appliance because I have the separate box for the FiOS TV stuff, so I guess I gotta take the good with the bad.

Re:but they rip out your copper

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a simple process. Just need to have service disconnected on your data account and the a new order for data service. How that will affect any prices and what not I'm not sure, they don't train us on billing issues. One hurdle will be explaining why you want it to a non-technical billing rep, but it shouldn't be that difficult.

Re:but they rip out your copper

[ivan256]

FUD pure and simple.

They *don't* rip your copper out if you ask them not to, and there's a 50/50 chance they won't rip it out even if you don't ask.

Re:but they rip out your copper

[ivan256]

As for your two complaints:

1: Business lines are the same price or cheaper than the residential lines (unless you want statics).
2: No it doesn't.

Inconsistent speeds

[DragonHawk]

This sub-thread cracks me up. Wow, different people get different results.

News flash: Internet not really one giant network, but a bunch of little ones connected together. Performance varies by source, destination, intermediate route, and concurrent demand. This discovery expected to cause imminent death of the 'net.

(Consider the obligatory "series of tube" joke already made.)

Re:Verizon FiOS won't cover all of Verizon territo

[DaFallus]

I live in Houston TX, which is the 4th most populated city in the country. We don't have Verizon FiOS, and we never will. Instead we have AT&T and their shitty U-Verse, or Comcast. Also, I think that some shitty shared 50 Mbps residential cable internet by 2010 is pathetic. Especially when millions of people in other countries have had faster and cheaper internet for years.

Re:Time for Municipal Fiber to the Home.

[Anonymous Coward]

Louisiana? Isn't that interesting, twitter is also from there.

FIOS vs Comcast vs ATT

[jaredmauch]

The interesting thing will be finding out what "the other" iLEC is gonna do. ATT is not gonna keep cranking high speed out of their old copper infrastructure. They're delaying the inevitable IMHO and this will have a very interesting result with the dynamics of the internet over the next two years.

That's not my experience.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the 8Mbps from Comcast, and using Newsbin, I get solid 8.1Mbps 24hours a day regardless of which news server I use. When I had an unlimited server in a colo with an OC/3 pipe, I got the same sustained xfer rates.

Not buying it.

[__aahurc460]

To be honest, ill still take FiOS 15/15. Because what could you be downloading that needs a 50mb down line? The UPLOAD speeds that FiOS offers still beats the hell out of the stingy bastards at Comcast. May they die in a burning pit of old cable modems. Not to mention, FiOS is much cheaper.

Zzzz welcome to the past!

[Nihonkairitai]

Zzzz. So by 2010 America expects to get service that Japan had in 2003?! Not to mention Korea. Yawn. In 2004 Japan introduced 100mb connections. I loved and still miss my 24mb connection which to this day, here in California, I still can't get. We think we're #1! We think we're #1!

Re:Zzzz welcome to the past!

[ulash]

Yup, was about to say. Here in Tokyo I have a 100 Mbps/100 Mbps connection for about $60/month (of ocurse uncapped). Nice to see US is starting to catch up albeit slowly. I remember when I was a student in the US I had to pay almost double of this and get a measly 3 Mbps.

comcast vs utopia

[bluefrogcs]

IN utah, we have Utopia .. the service provided by xmission is $55/mo for a 50mbit fiber connection with a 500gb/mo dl limit ...

Spell "ripoff". C-O-M-C-A-S-T!

[trolltalk.com]

$150/month is a ripoff. Move to Canada

50 mbps / $79.95

You'll actuall get that speed - they've been rolling out fibre like crazy to support video-on-demand. They can actually give you a 100mbps connection, but they're just playing the "wait until the competition almost catches up, then leapfrog them again ..."

Re:Spell "ripoff". C-O-M-C-A-S-T!

[Anonymous Coward]

And thats In Canadian dollars, but you missed the part where they explain the bandwidth cap is 50GB a month *combined* upload/download and $1.50 per GB over that.
Assuming you could actually use all of your shiny new 50mbps you would go over your cap in under 3 hours.

Re:Spell "ripoff". C-O-M-C-A-S-T!

[trolltalk.com]

And thats In Canadian dollars

No big diff nowadays ...

So you take their cheaper 10mbps plan, which used to be unlimited, but is now capped at 100 GB month ...

I'll still share linux isos ... I just won't leave them uploading for the whole month any more ...

"Promises" don't say much

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:
Comcast's announcement comes just a week after the company reversed its stance over hampering online file-sharing by its subscribers and, under pressure from federal regulators, promised to treat all types of Internet traffic equally.

Sure, they promised to treat all traffic equally. That's why I still have to encrypt all of my BitTorrent traffic for it to work properly at all.

Is there a rule?

[mapkinase]

I wonder if there a practical empirical rule like this:

"You will get 0.1 of the advertised max bandwidth most of the time with may be some extraordinary exceptions, like service outage because of some external calamities".

I would settle for $150 for 5Mbps donwload speed guaranteed by this rule.

So when does 10MPBS for $60 get cancelled?

[heroine]

The real news is that 10MBPS for $60 is going to be replaced by the 50MBPS for $150. Of course the 50MBPS only runs at 11MBPS and has a 50 megabit/month quota after which it's $15,000.

Re:So when does 10MPBS for $60 get cancelled?

[muellerr1]

But it goes to eleven.

Nothing new ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Videotron in Canada has already being offering a 50 Mbps plan for 79$ CAD since a few months.

Speed test suite?

[Brit_in_the_USA]

WE have all used those interactive web site to test our http speed but does anything more sophisticated + easy exist to check other popular protocols?

I'd love to see some easy to use client / server solution that would do a batch of tests; HTTP, HTTP for >10 seconds, FTP, bit torrent and report back if any are throttled. Perhaps the information could be anonymized and stored in a data base to allow even more stats to be generated such as if there is throttling based on time of day, problems with busy periods of the day, problems with certain localities.

At the very least, some laywers interested in some class action money could invest in providing this service.

Re:Speed test suite?

[vetman]

Not exactly what you are looking for in a speed test, but there is some very interesting data in this test.

Argonne National Lab Web100 based Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT)
http://miranda.ctd.anl.gov:7123/

Re:Speed test suite?

[ZerdZerd]

Actually there is a new project called Gemini Project, which tests if your torrents are beeing throttled.

What they advertise isn't what you get

[BanjoBob]

Comtrash advertised 6-Mbps here. They did all their comparisons to their 6-Mbps in their ads. They promoted 6-Mbps up one side and down the other.

Only one little problem... They only Delivered 1-Mbps!! After numerous complaints, I finally got a tech out here that told me they had reduced everybody's speed to make room for their TV, telephone and other products.

What about upload speed?

[fgb]

Will upload speed still be limited to 33.6k bps? ;-)

Priced to Prevent IPTV

[Kuma-chang]

The whole net neutrality debate ultimately boils down to the big ISPs trying to control the video market. It's too lucrative to let it go the way of VoIP and turn into open competition of services over IP.

Consequently, any time you see one of these ISPs offer enough bandwidth to support high quality streaming video it will be priced well above the same ISP's offer for video service + broadband. Compressed HD video will require a steady feed at 10-15 Mbps. For multiple streams (a must for a cable-TV-replacement service) you can double or triple that. This Comcast deal offers that sort of bandwidth, and, predictably, it is priced at about twice the price Comcast would charge for cable TV + basic broadband. At that level, even if someone purchased a cable-replacement over IP service (which doesn't yet exist because no one has the bandwidth to make it useful), Comcast would still be making far more from the arrangement than their video service competitor.

This is all fallout from having shut down competition via open access to the broadband loop for cable and DSL. The cable/phone duopoly will push their non-competitive advantages in last-mile physical access as far up the application stack as they can until regulators tell them to stop. And if no one tells them to stop, we can look forward to a non-competitive duopoly for every bandwidth-intensive service that ever becomes popular.

Re:Time for Municipal Fiber to the Home.

[DrgnDancer]

The Lafayette Utility System guys are out at my house right now painting little squiggly lines to lay in my fiber (I saw them when I went home to grab my lunch). I really hope this service is as good as they are hyping. Hell, I'd settle for half as good. We'll see.

Re:Time for Municipal Fiber to the Home.

[Z34107]

Louisiana has running water? I thought they got their municipal internet out of a well...

Re:Time for Municipal Fiber to the Home.

[DrgnDancer]

As a separate point though, I have to say that LUS' Fiber to the Home initiative is great even if it falls apart completely this afternoon. The local cable company (Cox) has seriously improved their offerings since it became obvious that they would have to compete with a viable opponent. I have 15/2 cable service at a reasonable price, and I've gotten close max throughput every time I've tested. Last time I downloaded Fedora I got a fairly sustained 1MBps and I was downloading to my laptop over a wireless "g" network. I'll probably switch to the municipal fiber when it comes out, but it's nice to know that there's a viably alternative.

(On the other hand LUS' online bill pay system sucks! It only works with IE, and then it's not reliable unless it's IE 6. So.. wait, I have to have Windows to pay my bill online, and preferably a really old Windows to boot? I keep a windows VM on my Mac purely to pay my electric bill and use Visio once in a while.)

The reason they did it:

[IdeaMan]

All those users that posted a signature that looked exactly like the reply to this line, linked to the logout function in /.

Yeah, the buttons are too tall.

Re:The reason they did it:

[zanybrainy941]

I agree they're too tall, but I think the issue is also visual prominence. I think you want the prominence in this order, from most to least.

1. The post title
2. The post comment text
3. The reply and other buttons
4. The post author name and date
5. Sig and links in sig

I would try cutting the size of the button, lightening the background, and maybe putting it within the same light gray background color as the author name and date.

Doubled for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay for 10Mbps here in San Jose. I used to get spikes up to about 25-30Mbps for 10 seconds ("TurboBoost") then it would settle to 10Mbps flat, all day long if desired. Then a few weeks ago I happened to notice that the initial rate was high for longer, then it settled on 20Mbps, all day long (upstream also increased from 1.5Mbps to 2.5). I was surprised that there was no fanfare about this and nothing mentioned in their ads. Perhaps it is related to this announcement.

(*rates are reported by Ubuntu System Monitor while connected to Usenet server. BitTorrent rates are lower :)

In Utah

[rjolley]

In Utah I can get 50Mbps U/D for $50/month (with a 500GB cap) I wonder how Comcast will try to charge for this service when they roll it out here.

I should probably note that 50Mbps is only available in cities that bothered to roll out fiber over the last 4 years which excludes Salt Lake City, but includes plenty of areas south and west of it.

If static IPs and no port blocking

[aaronmarks]

I'd sign up if you can get it with static IP addresses and no prot blocking. Otherwise I'd be forced to stay with my current Comcast business plan that I have at my house. I'm sure though that by the time Comcast can offer those speeds over residential in my area that they will also have comparable Commercial plans that offer what I need (8 statics at a minimum).

Comparing this to FiOS

[TheAngryIntern]

"How attractive will $150 for 50 Mbps be compared to Verizon's FiOS offerings?" You really can't compare the instance in this story to FiOS or talk of how this is going to affect Verizon and their business, because Verizon does not offer service in Minnesota so there most likely won't ever be FiOS there, so for now this doesn't matter to Verizon. Once a company in a FiOS serviced area upgrades to DOCSIS 3.0, then it will be interesting.

15mbit down/1.5mbit up

[Bananatree3]

I am very with my 15/1.5 FIOS service. It's $50 a month (internet only, no TV) and I can redline it all day, every day at 15mbit down without any annoying bandwidth throttling, Mystery Bandwidth ceilings where Comcast tell you to stop but they won't tell you what your cap is, etc. etc. etc.

50Mbit up/down in Utah

[nilbog]

I don't know why Slashdot didn't publish my submission about a Utah ISP offering 50Mbit Up/Down connections. It's faster than both comcast and FiOS, they undersell their bandwidth so I regularly peak over 50Mbit on uploads and downloads, and it only costs me $50/mo. But I guess it's news that Comcast is offering sub-par service for 3 times as much.

Videotron

[Dunge]

Videotron offers it for some time here in Quebec.... but have a limit of 50Gb download/upload per month so why have the speed when you can't use it?

Cable vs DSL

[matty619]

I have both Cox cable 15mb/s x 1mb/s and DSLExtreme DSL 6mb/s x 768kb/s. I'm currently running them both into a load balancing/failover box and have been doing so for a good 6 months now. This has given me plenty of time to compare the 2 back to back.

First of all, I'm about 5000' away from my CO, so I get just about 5.3 mb/s out of my DSL. With the Cox Cable, the speed is all over the place, and it actually gets down right slow in the evening. On speed tests, I have seen as high as 17mb/s

Cox is generally faster any time of day than the DSL, but I have yet to find a more drastic example than Xbox Live. When I download content from DSL, the traffic graph is a flat line, right at 5.3mb/s. However, when I use Cox, not only does the traffic graph look more like a mountain range, but the speeds are pathetic, around 1.5 mb/s.

I've always wondered if Cox intentionally throttles Xbox Live traffic, or if perhaps they're just oversold on that particular route, due to so many people on their network downloading massive live content?

I will probably drop one of these connections in the near future, and its probably going to be the cable. I think Cox is a great cable ISP, one of the best, but I think they're just oversold in my neighborhood (just outside downtown San Diego, so the housing density is quite high).

I think Cox has plans to move to DOCSIS 3 soon as well, and I will re-evaluate my options once that happens. Sure, I won't expect to get 50mb/s from everywhere every time, but as long as their back end can keep up with demand, I see DSL's days as being relegated to areas that don't have cable service.

Sweden rules.

[Anonymous Coward]

100 Mbps down, 100Mbps up. 98 SEK a month (about $16).

Admittedly, I'm getting a great deal here in Lund, sometimes called "a university with a town around it".. But most people in fairly large cities can get a 10Mbps/10Mbps connection for at most 400 SEK.

Comcast may suck for several reasons; not speed.

[moxley]

I have comcast now and while I hate their politics and their customer service and billing tactics, one place I cannot give them grief is speed.

They double their speds every so often. I have the premium (what was 8MB when I bought it) which is now a 16Mbit connection - they didn't charge me more (obviously they needed to do this cause if I had been able to get FIOS I would have) they didn; say a word..One day i wake up and it's BAM twice as fast.

I do a lot of binaries and I actually get real world consistent all of the time speeds of over 2MB/sec. When I first start a download on my desktop it spikes to almost 4MB/sec then drops after a few seconds to about 2400k/sec.

So while I dislike a lot of things about comcast and wish I couldhave a company I trusted to protect my privacy; at least they do (for me) deliver what I am paying for.

Oblig Bloodninja

[Anonymous Coward]

Say it! HAARRRRRR!!!!!

Why only 6 up?

[SwedishPenguin]

Why the low upstream cap? It doesn't appear to be a technical limitation, according to Wikipedia DOCSIS 3.0 should be able do up to 123 Mbps upstream.
And why the high price?

(My connection is 100/100 Mbps for about 30 Euro/month, speedtest.net says 73/52 to a server in Malmo about 600 km to the south)

OT: Why does the Euro sign never work on Slashdot? What charset is the server running, ASCII?

how pointless

[sgt scrub]

Thanks to the telco's taking their tax breaks and leaving everyone high and dry on fiber nobody else has 50M. So what if people in the burbs have 50M. Nobody but the biggest companies have 50M.

150$ ... thats a lot

[gullevek]

thats 15.376 Yen, and I pay 4.280, including VOIP service ...