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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[Pharmboy]

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

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

[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]

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

[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.

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.

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?

[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

caps?

[Neil Watson]

And the monthly GB limits are?

Re:caps?

[calebt3]

42. Megabytes.

Re:caps?

[Fx.Dr]

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

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

[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.

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.

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

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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: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.

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.

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?

[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: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.

me thinks

[superwiz]

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

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.

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..."

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

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

No, why would they?

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

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?

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.

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.

Just dont use it

[nurb432]

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

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.

[Mikachu]

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

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.

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.)

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!

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.

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.

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.