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Comcast Offers 50 Mbps Residential Speeds

Posted by kdawson on from the time-for-fios-leapfrog dept.

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?

6 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. WoW by Ariastis · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    Where do I send my 150$ again?

  2. How attractive compared to FIOs? by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  3. Burst vs Sustained Speed by ChuBie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Not very if there is a monthly throughput cap by Tsu-na-mi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    --
    I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
  5. 50Mbps untill... by downix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..."

    --
    Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
  6. Youtube + Profits. by soren100 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.