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Comcast Planning 2Gbps Service, Starting With Atlanta
joemite points out a PC Mag article which begins "There's been a lot of talk about Google's 1Gbps "gigabit" Internet service, but Comcast said today that it is planning a 2Gbps service, beginning in Atlanta," and writes: All of the ISPs seem to be "out-doing" each other in terms of offering faster and faster service, but why can't they compete on reasonable rates for "slower" speeds? My 5Mbit service from Comcast is currently costing me $50/month, about what it was 10 years ago. Seems that if they can push a 2 Gigs for a few hundred dollars, I could get at least get 50Mbit for what I'm paying now.
The FTTH NBN was supposed to address this, but then the Lib's decided that the old rotting copper is more than enough. I was lucky enough to get FTTH and while its pretty good its still only 100Mbps PPPoE so actual throughput is around 91Mbps and for some stupid reason outbound is capped at 40Mbps, doesn't make sense on fibre like it did on xDSL.
There are a few reasons for the outbound cap:
1) this allows them to separate consumer Internet from commercial hosting services Internet. You have to pay a bunch more to become a hosting service. This has nothing to do with network capability, and everything to do with marketing and sales.
2) AU has limited interconnects with the rest of the world. As such, it doesn't matter how fast the federal fibre network is, you're going to eventually hit the intercontinental cable and be competing with everyone else. This is why the Libs decided the rotting copper was more than enough -- totally ignoring the fact that a booming economy revolves around those *inside the country* having fast access to *each other* -- a blazing fast country-wide FTTH deployment with limited outside access would actually be optimal for growing the tech industry in AU. Kind of like Japan is doing.
Capitalism works. Competition works.
Monopolies are bad.
For some reason there are a lot of so-called "conservatives" that think that monopolies are "good" and "natural" and think that breaking them up is somehow bad. ISPs are monopolies in many areas. There /isn't/ any competition.
Monopolies aren't capitalism. They are rent-seeking.
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BMO
That is not true if you use Lenovo.
Lenovo doesn't want customers to be able to upgrade their laptops, so they implemented a list of approved mini-pci cards that can be used in them. It's called "bios whitelist".
Therefore if you have a Lenovo laptop you will have to change the whole laptop. Presumably to a different brand that doesn't pull this crap.
For those who do. Not.