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Cablevision To Offer 101 Mbps Down, No Caps
nandemoari alerts us to news over at DSLReports that Cablevision will be offering subscribers 101-Mbps download service, a new US record. That's fast enough to download an HD movie in less than 10 minutes. The package, known as "Ultra," will launch on May 11 and will cost $99.95 a month. Upload speed is 15 Mbps and there are no monthly limits. Cablevision is also doubling the speed of its Wi-Fi service, which is available free to subscribers using hotspots across the Northeast. "...the company will be launching a new 'Ultra' tier on May 11. The new tier features speeds of 101Mbps downstream and 15Mbps upstream for $99.95 a month. That's an unprecedented amount of speed at an unprecedented price, suggesting that Cablevision just took the gloves off in their fight against Verizon FiOS. ... Cablevision spokesman Jim Maiella confirmed for me that the $99.95 price is unbundled, and the new tier does not come with any kind of a usage cap or overage fees."
Traffic shaping! It's fine if they do or don't do it, but will companies PLEASE start being up-front about it? Put as much spin on the damn thing as you want, just at least mention it if you're doing it.
Stuff.
(As always...) there you go, fixed that for you.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
The last Cablevision subscriber I saw was a friend who had a Windows machine plugged in directly into the small cable modem, with a world-routable IP address. The machine was idle and the modem was blinking constantly during the whole time I was there, without any one logged it. Needless to say, my friend complained his machine was "starting to get slow". Translation: the machine was pwnd.
I shudder at the thought of having botnets take hold of vulneratble machines sitting on 100 Mbit/s pipes.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Before you do, ask how much bandwidth Cablevision provisions to serve each neighborhood. A 100 Mbps last-mile connection isn't worth didly-squat if the CMTS head-end only has a 155 Mbps uplink. Even a gig uplink is only enough for about 80 customers, given typical 8:1 oversubscription. Many ISP's don't mind 100:1 oversubscription or worse!
"UP TO" means that they're advertising that speed, but their TOS will say that they don't guarantee that you'll actually get that. I have found with the various ISPs I've had that download is usually 75-90% what they advertise and upload is 40-60%, which is pretty galling, considering I would much more prefer a faster upload than download.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
They'd be smart to install intelligent caching boxes at local routing points to save themselves bandwidth. Proxy caches are a good thing for the Internet, and websites that don't work with them are both rare and broken.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)