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Comcast Launches Superfast Internet To Fight FiOS
jfruh writes "Comcast customers who dream of superfast download speeds drooled when they heard the company would be offering 305 Mbps service. There's only one catch: the high speeds are only available in markets where the cable giant is going head-to-head with Verizon's FiOS service. It seems that competition really does improve service quality when it comes to ISPs."
So you can hit your level cap even faster?
So you get 305 Mbps during the 15 minutes out of the day when they aren't throttling. What is it the rest of the time? Speeds should have to be reported as average access speed not peak potential.
Brought to you by: "Al"toids - the curiously weird mint.
Well duh. The issue of shitty speeds and service was never due to the bullshit they gave such as people 'abusing' their service by actually doing the things Comcast said you could do. The DoJ needs to step in about the lack of competition and rather obvious collusion not to intrude on each other's markets too much.
Competition not only improves quality, but it's the only reason this is being deployed at all. Providers' repeated claims that they should be allowed to merge because they'd innovate anyway is now demonstrated yet again to be utter bullshit.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
i'm at 10-15 now and going down to 5 once i cancel cable and go a la carte cable internet. 3-5 megabits is enough to stream netflix and amazon.
a lot cheaper to let steam update at night than to pay for super fast internet too
Can we get internet speeds in terms of Library of Congresses per second?
I don't think anyone doubted that competition between ISPs improves service. The question is more about whether there is *enough* competition, or even whether there could ever be enough.
Right now, in most places, there's a duopoly if you're lucky. Where I live, in NYC, I have no real choice. It's basically Time Warner Cable or dial-up. In order to have a robust market, I'd say you need at least 5 real ISPs going head-to-head, but you would never be able to get 5 different companies to lay down 5 different and independent infrastructures in my neighborhood.
So it makes sense that Comcast isn't even bothering to roll this out except where they're competing with FIOS. So, absent competition, what do we do?
Oh wait, we just get a bunch of advertising that promises some vague things that apparently we're supposed to be missing but which they don't identify.
Of course this is only available where it absolutely needs to be; where they're being hammered from competition. Meanwhile, other markets are left to be price-gouged as long as possible. This only proves that they have the ability to upgrade the network, they just won't until they're dragged kicking and screaming. Of course many businesses have that attitude, but it isn't often so obviously apparent as in this case.
How many sites can even deliver content that fast? 305 Mbps works out to a few tens of megabytes per second. I guess you can get an entire Linux CD ISO in around 20 seconds, but it seems like not very many servers will serve content that fast. Even if they could, they usually throttle each connection to something less than that rate.
And for loading web pages and stuff, same situation, plus you have the overhead of all the separate connections that get made per page.
In practice, does this kind of speed really matter? Will you really notice the difference over and above a 20 Mbps connection, which itself is more than capable of streaming high def video?
Amazing what a little competition can do. It was never about them being unable to bring people these speeds, or it being cost prohibitive...they just don't want to spend the fucking money until they're losing more customers than they're signing up in a given quarter. I've had techs from my ISP, Charter Communications, basically tell me that my local node is way oversaturated due to this being a very densely populated area, and that the main hardware is complete crap, but that corporate isn't going to upgrade until the amount they're spending on service calls exceeds the cost of upgrading the node. You know it's fucked up when the company's own fucking techs are exasperated enough to start telling customers shit like that...
Some of us do not live in markets that Verizon serves. And Verizon is not rolling out any new fiber (I could be wrong).
For example, here in Rochester, NY the local phone company (Frontier) is no longer pushing Time Warner Cable to have better service. Frontier isn't rolling out any fiber as far as I know. It would be nice to have some competition. The cable bill goes up, yet I get the same service.
So we can reach our bandwidth cap in, what, five minutes? Unless it is a Genuine Comcast Internet Content, of course - bandwidth doesn't seem to matter then.
Fastest to the finish line is useless when the finish line is five feet away from the starting line.
Munis should build the infrastructure and operate as non-profits. Shut the telecoms and cable conglomerates down - they are bringing the internet age to a grinding crawl. Internet isn't cable, and it should't be operated for a profit any more than the street system.
Sure, they'll claim to get that 305 mbps, but you'll only get it once in a blue moon, and for 5 seconds.
Anyone who's actually used comcast knows how crappy they are when it comes to actually delivering.
305Mb/s ... i doubt it.
I have 16/1 service (+tele +mobile phone) for 20€/mo and most of the time it maxes out at 12-15Mb/s and 800Kb/s.
Not only will you probably never be near 300Mb/s, you'll probably pay huge amounts/mo as well
:sad_panda:
Comcast competes with Verizon in my area and their prices are essentially identical.
When Verizon said they were going to come in to my area, the head honcho explicitly states they were not going to compete on price. And they haven't.
If Comcast really wants to compete with Verizon they would lower their prices while increasing their speeds. As we have seen on several articles here, the U.S. ranks at the top of the industrialized world for cost of broadband and almost at the bottom for speed of broadband.
You need at least 3 choices in a market to have real competition. As it stands now, the vast majority of the country has 2 choices and thus, higher prices, lower speeds. This addition won't do anything to resolve this.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Unless they do something about their sky-high prices, I'll stick with the telocos.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"It seems that competition really does improve service quality when it comes to ISPs."
The only thing that competition hurts is the incompetent. That's why liberals HATE it.
Maybe they'll actually provide service that's worth a damn, too. Can't believe I'm saying that about Verizon, the corporate successor to the "tough luck" telephone company GTE, but there it is.
Dog is my co-pilot.
If they charge the service the same way they charge my internet cable service it should cost around $1980.50 a month.
At this point, I feel that internet speed is more than fast enough for most of my purposes. My FIOS subscription was just upgraded from 15 Mbps to 75 Mbps without any additional cost, but I would have preferred to stay at 15 Mbps at a reduced price. Unfortunately, the sales person claims that they only offer speed upgrades for the same price, but there is no option for paying less. For those that want the extra speed, I think it's great that options like this are available (at least in limited markets), but for those who don't need the speed it would be nice to have a more reasonably priced option. It's funny how telecommunications seems to be the one sector where improvements in technology never result in cheaper prices. I guess that's what happens when companies are granted local monopolies.
TV competition has better tech and more HD
Comcast is still stuck with the 90's / 00's i guide with a poor roll out plan (plan is to swap out boxes even when they can run the new guide) it's like they can't re flash them to the new guide over the cable system.
They have cut down HBO, MAX, Starzs, Movie channel, and SHOW HD channels when others have been adding them.
Still no BIG TEN ALT HD or the rest of the team HD (NBA LP and MLS DK) and game HD (MLB EI and NHL CI) channels.
Still waiting for CLTV HD RCN has it as well BIG ALT HD and the HBO, MAX, Starzs, Movie channel, and SHOW HD channels.
This means that 3D porn for the masses is almost here! Woohoo!
plus of course if you have the pipe you can download a buncha stuff at the same time
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Verizon may not have the shiniest public image, but I'm pretty sure given the choice between the two people are either going to choose the cheaper (probably Verizon - even using real math) or the one they dislike least (probably Verizon).
Comcast shouldn't be competing directly with Verizon market for market. They should be be going after markets where they suspect Verizon is going to go next. And they should be doing it fast and hard. And then keep going into additional markets. Even with higher prices, the momentum will keep most of their customers with Comcast. Just like Verizon's momentum in the current markets will make it difficult for Comcast (even with ridiculously low introductory rates).
The only thing I can imagine they are thinking is that if Verizon is successful there, there is clearly a demand there, and so they should build there. But there's obviously demand all over (maybe not EVERYWHERE, but a little research and they'd know where...).
designspace is the good company in delhi
Improving offerings != Improving service quality
They could sell 1 Tbps service for $20 a month, and it wouldn't be quality with 250 GB caps and over-capacity nodes that slow to a halt at 5:31 every night. 305 Mbps might be great for bragging rights, but cheap 100 Mbps service with better network maintenance and more capacity would be an actual improvement in service quality. The more capacity they can get, the less they'll have to worry about caps and bandwidth hogs. They might lose a couple high-end customers shopping for speed, but it'd be hard to agrue against something like a reliable and consistent $30 (non-promo price) 100 Mbps service with no caps.
It seems that competition really does improve service quality when it comes to ISPs.
No, it just means that they spends wads of cash going for "look at me, look at me" meaningless specmanship games, which the consumer eventually pays for. Raw speed != quality.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
It seems that competition really does improve service quality when it comes to ISPs.
Connection speed and "service quality" are not the same thing.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The hand of God needs to smack down telecommunication monopolies, regardless if you call your god Apple or Google
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Most cable modems I've seen are regular 100Mbps ethernet. So are most home networks. So what good does >100Mbps do if you don't have a gigabit network? Please educate me.
Now we see why they fight so hard not to have to compete. Rolling out new equipment is hard, buying a cable monopoly from the local government is easy, and you can charge $40/month for the same crap service forever.
0 1 - just my two bits
Since this is Comcast, this just means you'll be able to transfer more data between your sporadic internet connections.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Last I heard, Verizon was trying to get out of the business of anything with physical pipes - including "stabilizong" it's FIOS business. They'd rather go for the exorbitant profits of wireless.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/op-ed-verizon-willfully-driving-dsl-users-into-the-arms-of-cable/
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I have 100Mbps service with Charter and find that many (most?) sites cannot or do not deliver content at that speed. Some clearly do (like Steam), so I know I am getting 100Mbps service, but for the most part this speed doesn't "feel" much faster than the 40Mbps I had before.
65 Mbps up is pretty great too. I wonder why they don't do symmetric, because the upstream tech is probably symmetric, though maybe they use fewer fibre connections for the upload. It seems to be uncapped, so this would be pretty awesome if I could get it and if I could afford it. Some people should run Tor exit nodes (probably not allowed).
the new DTA are sd ONLY and they are loaded with SD and old HD boxes (DVI output) mpeg 2 ONLY ones.
Google launches its fiber service, $70 for bi-directional 1Gbps.
I read the announcement yesterday and that just isn't accurate. What they are doing is doubling the speeds of their top 3 internet tiers 25 to 50, 50 to 100, and 100 to 300. It will happen in every docsis 3 area they are just doing it in the northeast FIRST.
What legal purpose would 300 Mbps to the household serve for most people? I am a FIOS customer, but I have it provisioned at the minimum bandwidth for cost reasons. Nevertheless, I can work from home, my wife and kid can do Netflix (two different tvs) all at the same time, and I can torrent the latest version of CentOS in less time than it takes to hunt up a disc to burn it to. These monstrous bandwidths are, for an overwhelming percentage of the population (or even an overwhelming percentage of geeks) only for bragging rights. Not to actually use. It's just a faster way to slam up against Comcast throttling.
I was a charter customer of FIOS. What it buys me is (1) investing in a higher tech medium which I still believe is the wave of the future (fiber to the home) and (2) (this is important) I don't have to deal with Comcast customer support.
And... I have to add (3) it's fun to watch the Comcast monthly door-to-door salesperson go all wonky when we tell them we're sticking with FIOS. Although, I haven't seen him since I reported him for yelling at my wife the last time.
Ahh, Comcast. If any company deserved to by purchased and dismantled, it would be you.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The problem with talks about competition is this: in order to trigger the sort of competition that caused Comcast to make this move is that you need someone to make the massive infrastructure investment necessary to lay the fiber, build the system, etc. Even if you freed up a market, there are not a lot of investors who have the money and experience. Assuming you find an investor, there are probably only a limited number of markets that have the sufficient population density to make it a profitable venture. That's why Verizon FIOS did a limited rollout: the capital costs are so high that there are only a few markets where they could make this work. Even if you did something like force Verizon to allow competitors onto its fiber, that would serve to only further disincentivize them to aggressively expand their network. So unless you find an investor willing to take such a risk or unless a new, disruptive technology is deployed that can bypass the infrastructure costs, it doesn't solve the problem.
There was a live streaming event on YouTube about the release of Google Fiber gigabit Internet service and TV service today here in Kansas City. No other ISP will survive here against it. http://www.google.com/fiber
I haven't worked at Comcast for a few years, but this is my educated guess on how this happens: It's very simple at one level. The few people who get this service are given priority over their network and don't have to worry about conflicts with the rest of the traffic. For all I know, they are dedicating some spectrum on their cables for this tier.
But I've been out for a few years so take that with a grain of salt.
My understanding is that it's much more expensive than the high-end FIOS. It would seem that Comcast doesn't want to sell it, just be able to say that they have the fastest connection speeds.
Not naming names, so you can take this with an appropriately large grain (or nugget, or heap) of salt, but a reliable source has informed me that Comcast can't actually provide the bandwidths advertised in that area under any circumstances due to node congestion and that this entire project is a scam. If you buy in, don't expect to hit even half of the advertised speed. Of course, that's no different from any of their other tiers of service, which have only become slower and more expensive over time.
It's not worth it when you end up trying to switch when they jack up the price and your connection starts hemorrhaging packets after playing Modern Warfare for a little over an hour in a year. Then when you try to switch, they refuse to take payment, nor issue a receipt for returned equipment, and don't bother to send a follow up bill. Three to six months later, collections starts calling and kiss your credit rating goodbye. There is a reason why that lady in Virginia went ape-shit in one of their offices a few years ago.