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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 2 Gb is just an electrical connection speed. The delivery of actual information is FAR slower. It's a dishonest way of drawing attention away from the real issues.
Sweet. Now you can hit the data cap in your "Unlimited" plan in 15 minutes instead of 30!
Didn't Comcast get the memo that Title II regulations meant that they were suppose to stop all investments in broadband?
And internet access in the US is so slow compared with everywhere else....
It is slow. "planning 2 gig service" is very far from "Delivering 2 gig service."
Of course Comcast could make a profit selling you 50Mbps for $50, if you lived in a high population density area. But they won't because they can maximize profits by charging you more. The problem is a lack of competition. There is a lack of competition because Comcast controls the physical cables which take advantage of public right of way (much of which was granted for a different purpose altogether.... power lines). That's why cable companies should be treated as the utilities they are. They should be forced to share right-of-way (even better it they have to share the actual cables) with competitors. Then you would see real competition based on efficiency, quality of service, and PRICE.
It's amazing that the big American corporations like to talk about the virtues of free enterprise and capitalism.... but they don't seem so fond of the most important ingredient in free enterprise, which is competition.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
The Non-Evil Choice is to have Last Mile go into a COLO facility, where you can order service from any one of a number of providers, based on your needs and desires.
The problem is, and always will be, Last Mile. Until you solve that, by taking it out of the equation, then you'll be stuck with monopoly (franchise agreement) service. My solution removes Last Mile from the equation, doesn't require stupid (and misleading) legislation (Net Neutrality that isn't), and opens it up to full free market enterprises.
Don't like crappy Comcast, get TimeWarner. Don't like that, get Charter. Don't like that, get Netflix only .....
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
2Gbps over fiber is a speed I associate with GPON, which is a fiber loop that connects dozens of endpoints on a single fiber, just like the existing copper cable system. The 2Gbps figure is then derated for overhead, and finally split between all the users on that loop.
Google on the other hand is apparently doing home-run fiber from each house to a central location, where it can aggregate the bandwidth into ludicrously fast switches and hand it off to 100Gbps etc backhauls. That means that (with guessed but plausible numbers) instead of e.g. 50 houses sharing each 2Gbps for an average of 40Mbps with Comcast, you would have 1000 houses sharing 100Gbps for 100Mbps average with Google. Yeah, the "peak theoretical" is higher, but the actual effective available bandwidth is very different.
Then there's the fact that with a home-run fiber to each house, Google can easily upgrade their aggregation equipment and backhaul links in order to boost total shared bandwidth, without having to go out in trucks and mess with fibers again. Comcast OTOH would have to go around and split all their GPON loops in half and hope they can get those new sub-loops run back to their agg points. Heck, there's nothing stopping Google from upgrading the transceivers at each end of the fiber for a given house to make use of more advanced optical techniques, because the fiber isn't shared.
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