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

[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. ;)

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.

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

[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.

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:offtopic: the new design

[HockeyPuck]

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

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..."

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.