Comcast Planning Gigabit Cable For Entire US In 2-3 Years

An anonymous reader writes: Robert Howald, Comcast's VP of network architecture, said the company is hoping to upgrade its entire cable network within the next two years. The upgraded DOCSIS 3.1 network can support maximum speeds of 10 Gpbs. "Our intent is to scale it through our footprint through 2016," Howald said. "We want to get it across the footprint very quickly... We're shooting for two years."

Comments

I would laugh but that's too much effort

[drinkypoo]

...to blow on comcast.

I predict this will be just like when Pac Bell said they were going to deploy DSL to all customers by 2000. Anyone else remember that shit? I'm in what used to be Pac Bell territory, and I still can't get DSL.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[MBGMorden]

The fastest DSL is slower than the worst cable connection Comcast or Charter can make

DSL is also available in some areas that cable markets won't serve. My parents' house 10-12 miles outside of the area served by any cable company, but they get DSL just fine, and trust me 3Mbps may be slow by today's standards but it sure as heck beats dial-up.

My brother lives just a little further out and even the DSL isn't available. His only options are dial-up (worthless these days), satellite and cellular. The latter two have bandwidth caps that make them very undesirable - particularly to his 7 year old who is used to streaming Netflix at her mom's house.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Anonymous Coward]

Alcatel-Lucent is deploying 100 Mbps DSL connections in Europe with vectoring. Using bonding it even goes up to 200 Mbps. (Source in Dutch: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/104517/kpn-brengt-100mbit-s-vdsl-naar-nog-eens-1-komma-5-miljoen-huishoudens.html)

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[postbigbang]

What kind of speedtest result do you get?

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[XxtraLarGe]

It's better and faster to get two teenage boys with semaphore flags and binoculars than to attempt DSL.

Depends. Do they know Wuthering Heights?

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[known_coward_69]

or like google hyping fiber but only deploying to a few profitable neighborhoods

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[The-Ixian]

I don't know. I have 1Gpbs G.fast DSL in my apartment.

Last I checked, I couldn't even get 100Mbps cable speed.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[drinkypoo]

You don't want DSL. The fastest DSL is slower than the worst cable connection Comcast or Charter can make.

I can't get cable, either, you insensitive clod! And if I could, it would be from Mediacom. Now, back when @home was a thing, they were the local cable internet company, and I would get 6-10 Mbps which at the time was impressive. They gave me a news account, too. But right now, I live within a bowshot (this is the country, remember?) of both cable and DSL yet I can get neither. So I have an account with Digital Path, a semi-local (Chico and environs) WISP which uses crappy cellular-based directional radio modems. I get 6 Mbps on a very good day, and not even that in the evenings, and pay $63 for the privilege. IIRC, the signal is bounced across four mountaintops (with associated hops and added ping time) because AT&T has a monopoly on fiber into my county and they're avoiding that.

The fastest DSL is faster than my crappy WISP. The slowest DSL is garbage, of course. But I don't even have the option to try.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Anonymous Coward]

did you look at their fscking prices? c. $400/m for 2Gbps, plus $1k install, plus undoubtedly they will be leasing you equipment at "reasonable"* rates.

meanwhile google charges what $750 for the install and $70/m for 1Gbps**

I'm still hoping that Google fiber shows up here, but as I surmised the recent fiber installations around here were probably comcraptic unfortunately. (Fibertech networks rolled through late spring/early summer stringing fiber ALL over the city, including residential side streets, so I knew that it wasn't just in case as that would be an expensive just in case to have just lying around dark OTOH they did it in a shitty way stringing it along utility poles which NONE of the utilities bother to maintain, well DTE did come by and trim their powerline part after a c. 20y interval... they came out pretty quick too when a branch of one tree in my neighbor's back yard kept brushing the primaries, smoking arcing... just think of that when utils and cable monopolies whine about the maintenance that they utterly phail to do until something breaks badly... then its balls to the wall...)

* reasonable as in 6m you could buy your own new, or a little longer buy something better

** OK, they vaguely mention c. $160/m for 3y, but we all know that the last thing that Comcraptic is is nice and reasonable, no their goal is to empty ALL of your bank accounts, equity, etc. into their own pockets as quickly as possible, while kicking you in the nuts

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Cro Magnon]

Speed isn't everything. Compared to TW cable, TW was clearly faster than DSL, but only when it was working. DSL actually worked most of the time.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Jon_S]

When I saw the headline saying "to the entire US" I was thinking that can't be right since they don't cover anywhere near the entire US right now. I'd love to have either DSL or cable at a not-so-remote area I own, but am out of luck with either.

I have had verizon DSL at home for about 10-15 years now, but am thinking of getting cable (just for internet, I use the antenna for TV). Verizon I think actually *wants* people to drop DSL - they use to advertise 7 Mbps to me, and now they say the best they can do is 1.5 even though I pay for "up to" 3 Mbps, and I live two blocks from the CO (yes, I know it is line distance that counts, but I am close on that as well). They don't want to do copper wire anymore.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[byornski]

Ditto BT in the UK with FTTC. Still (v)DSL(2+) up to 80mbit

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Dutch Gun]

In fairness, nowhere does Comcast actually say "entire US" exactly. They word it as their "whole US footprint", presumable meaning every region or market they currently service. That was the headline writer's wording.

Still, at $300 a month, I can't see too many people signing up for this. Even so, I think it's a good thing that they're investing in infrastructure. Today's premium products are tomorrow's commodities.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Bengie]

DOCSIS 3.1 requires node splits, because of its much reduced distance. It also requires new amps, filters, and cables. On top of all of that, it required redistributing frequency allocations because the block sizes have changed. It's about as simple as upgrading from 100Mb Copper Ethernet to 10Gb Copper Ethernet. They're both Ethernet. Drop in replacement, right?

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[WillAffleckUW]

In remote areas, the best solution is almost always internet via your power lines. If you don't have power lines, then satellite.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[zlives]

what ever the next hop cache server displays...

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Archangel Michael]

I know this story. Move about 1/2 mile towards Chico, and you'll be good. Baring that, where you live is your choice.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[drinkypoo]

I know this story. Move about 1/2 mile towards Chico, and you'll be good. Baring that, where you live is your choice.

And now we return to my prior comment, where all Pacific Bell customers (I live in former Pac Bell territory) were supposed to have access to DSL by 2000. In fact, though, the copper running through my area is so bad that AT&T couldn't even maintain POTS service to my residence.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Darinbob]

DSL has the advantage that it's NOT cable. And DSL is far better than many people have access too, is good enough for many, and is cheaper.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Archangel Michael]

Off Garner?

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[postbigbang]

Oh... so your local DSLAM is GB and the backhaul is huge. Much data is against you, but I am always surprised by exceptions, in all of the qualities you purport.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Darinbob]

You don't need much. 1.5 MBPS is enough to get good internet, it's vastly better than dial up when dial up is your only option. You go from a painful web viewing experience to one that is usable. A page loads in a couple of seconds instead of a couple of minutes. Add some ad block and the page loads in less than a second. Now you can finally browse the web.

DSL is cheaper than cable, slower than cable but faster than dialup, and good enough for most people who are just browsing facebook to see what the grandkids are up to.

Then there's VDSL which can give you usable video streaming services like Netflix, but more expensive than DSL while only slightly cheaper than cable. But when you can't get cable or refuse to touch anything from Comcast then it's a good choice.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[postbigbang]

This is Internet Lite. Can't stream even a minnow at that speed, sadly. Better than ISDN or a dial-up, but not as good as even a sad dish.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[sethstorm]

Today's premium products are tomorrow's commodities.

Except that the commodities are lower quality.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: I am a Comcast Employee, directly involved with network operations

That's not even close to true. In heavy markets, alot of nodes are heavily combined on the CMTS, usually at 4 to 1 sometimes 8 to 1 (ie, for every connected on the CMTS, that feeds 4 or 8 or whatever in the field). Making one gig available to all customers means those combinings have to go away. We are actively trying to decombine all nodes and get everything down to 1 to 1, which is why were deploying entirely new CMTS's that can handle that capacity. The CMTS is also becoming a centralized platform. Not only will internet run through it, but VIdeo on Demand service and linear video will also be running through the CMTS. Presently, all of these services have their own individual edge devices, which makes space and power in most hubs and headends a bitch to manage. So we're upgrading what we can, then we'll centralize, then we'll be able to deploy more CMTS's with the space and power the centralization frees up.

Even with getting the node combining down to 1 to 1, some nodes are big enough that in order to get the capacity, they'll need to be physically split. In alot of cases, that means new fiber. If you're not familiar with how an HFC network is setup, it's not copper the entire way through, it's copper from the CMTS to the optical receivers and transmitters, then from there it's fiber to the node, and then from the node, it's copper from the node to the homes. So yes, some upgrades will be needed in the field to handle additional capacity.

Then there's the actual IP network itself. Most of the old CMTS's (which at this point are ciscok UBR10k's and Arris C4's), only have a pair of 10 gig uplinks to the upstream router. At current speeds, that's enough, but all the new CMTS's (Arris E6000 and Cisco cBR's) get at least 4 10 gigs to the upstream routers. Now with the CMTS's themselves getting capacity augments, that means the routers themselves also need capacity augments, which means turning up a whole bunch more inter-site circuits. This is why for the last two years we've been migrating our big routers away from the Cisco 7609 platform and onto ASR9k's, and Juniper MX and T series routers.

We've also been in the process of doing frequency changes, as the analog to digital conversion freed up alot of RF spectrum, so we're realigning our frequencies in preparation for the future while the rest of the infrastructure gets upgraded

This is not something they decided last week, we've been working on this for years already. The bosses haven't liked to talk about it in the past, because spending money makes Wall Street nervous, though apparently that's changed.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[KingMotley]

The fastest DSL currently is ~200Mbps, which is many times faster than most people's cable connection. It's just not widely deployed, so depends on your area. DSL should hit 1Gbps next year.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[godefroi]

I went from Comcast's 17mbps cable (at $74.00/mo) to CenturyLink's 40mbps DSL (at $32.00/mo). What was that you said again?

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[godefroi]

The "doesn't share bandwidth" part is bullshit. Whether you share it at the curb or share it at the DSLAM in the CO, you're still sharing bandwidth. The whole internet is one giant pile of shared bandwidth.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[postbigbang]

Good for you!

You're going to find a lot of cases where the in-situ DSL provider blows away the local cable company.

But not very often. We're still a third world country in the USA, as regards broadband deployed speeds. Where DSL uses twisted pairs, it's defeated by physics, compared to coax. Fiber is the ultimate solution, but requires telcos to invest, which they are loathe to do.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[400_guru]

Internet over power lines? Are there actually any of those working in the U.S.? Our power grid isn't so favorable to delivery that way. I live in a rural area with no cable or even DSL and our power provider tells me they looked into it and dismissed it completely.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[VisceralLogic]

You don't want DSL. The fastest DSL is slower than the worst cable connection Comcast or Charter can make. It's better and faster to get two teenage boys with semaphore flags and binoculars than to attempt DSL.

That's interesting, because in my area Frontier offers 25 Mbit DSL, and I'm getting 25 Mbit cable from Comcast.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[WillAffleckUW]

Yes, in my state for example.

I can't help it if you're not up on current standards. You probably don't realize we were formulating IPv6 back in the 1980s, for example.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[praxis]

Can't stream even a minnow at that speed, sadly.

One can stream 720p with 3Mb/s DSL no problem. 1.5Mb/s would be more than enough to stream SD content.

Re:I would laugh but that's too much effort

[400_guru]

I really don't care if there is a standard or not, if nobody is utilizing it then it's just fancy documents somewhere. If Internet over Power Lines was going to take off I would expect it to already have done so since the power lines have existed for a century and already extend to effectively every home that would want Internet service.

Our power provider services many of the most rural areas of the state which translates to 'areas that don't have high speed internet'. They have been reading meters over the power lines for 15 years so they know that data can traverse the lines but in investigating providing Internet they couldn't find a solution that would work and be cost effective enough for people to purchase it.

As various wireless technologies improve they are the best bet for rural areas to get reasonable speeds at reasonable prices.

I'm not quite sure how IPV6 makes a whit of difference in the equation. Do 128 bit addresses go faster than 32 bit addresses over Power Lines somehow?

Entire US...

[Anonymous Coward]

except for cities where they don't want to compete with Time Warner cable.

Re: Entire US...

[jd2112]

I suspect they will roll out one installation in each state they do business in and declare the project complete.

Re:Entire US...

[leonbev]

I would be pleasantly surprised if they had all of the Google Fiber cities that they compete in fully upgraded to Gigabit by 2018, let alone the entire network.

Re:Entire US...

[Drakonblayde]

Actually, they don't compete with Time Warner Cable and never did.

This is about holding GOOGLE at bay. So you can expect this everywhere that Google might open while the others will be mostly ignored.

Actually it's about holding AT&T at bay. Google is not a big enough player yet to be concerned about.

On the other hand, Comcast competes with AT&T pretty much everywhere, and AT&T has made a big deal about the billions they're sinking into their network. Their acquisition of DirectTV just makes them that much more of a competitor. They're the enemy, not Google, or TWC, or Cox, or Charter

Making promises for backdoor deals

[Anonymous Coward]

The odds of this happening in 2-3 years are 0%. They have no real competition, why would they?

Re:Making promises for backdoor deals

[Frobnicator]

The odds of this happening in 2-3 years are 0%. They have no real competition, why would they?

They DO have competition... in some cities. They are pushing to make it a headline as an attempt to keep people from moving to the competition.

Right now in my area Comcast has an ad campaign going. They take a sound bite of a competitor's ad offering 60Mbps with geographic restrictions, then say "With Comcast we don't have geographic restrictions, we guarantee 25Mbps everywhere in our network"... They make a big point of saying the speed is available to everyone on the network, never pointing out the speed is less than half of what is available elsewhere. Then I've got billboards for another service that is pushing out full gigabit to some residential areas and 100 gigabit for businesses in the city. They're growing slowly, but they seem to have faster adoption rates after every neighborhood they hit.

Lately there have been huge armies of comcast workers going door to door offering a slightly higher speed than their previous standard offering -- bumping from 20Mbps to 25Mbps -- that comes with a two year contract.

They keep coming by: "It is just a two year contract.", "If someone else comes along, you can sign up with them after two short years." "We're not asking you to stick around forever, we want to earn your business, this is just two short years."

Every time I ask them if they can meet my current vDSL speed of 80Mbps, and they say no, but they do have a great deal on 25Mbps cable. Then I ask about some of the fiber options going in, and again "we're installing fiber some neighborhoods, when it comes to your neighboord you can be the first to upgrade!"

Comcast has competition in some markets, and customers are leaving in droves. This type of marketing is an attempt to stop hemorrhaging customers in these regions.

Re:Making promises for backdoor deals

[cthulhu11]

And at what, $500/mo?

I smell bullshit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Net neutrality was supposed to crush the entire industry! How can they possibly afford to upgrade their system when they are in such dire straits? Or was their claims to Congress just bullshit? They wouldn't lie would they? Corporations never lie! This entire story can't possibly be true. Who is fact checking this garbage? Editors? Hello?

Re:I smell bullshit!

[tbttfox]

People lie. Companies protect their interests. It's Different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

They very well could do this..

[jafiwam]

As long as they are planning on having some OTHER company do it.

Re:Dear comcast: I dont want more speed

[willworkforbeer]

I would accept 100% of published speed and 100% less Comcast.

Here's to hoping

[WoodburyMan]

Here's to hoping they can do it. It would put some serious competition out there. Comcast is outpacing Charter right now. Charter in my area has yet to turn on multi channel upstream bonding. They have 8 channel downstream bonding, but not upstream. I have 60mbit down and a pathetic 4mbit upload. They offer 150mbit down / 7mbit upload, 7mbit is barley enough for TCP acknowledgement at 150mbit down. And the 150/7 service is a premium $100/mo+ over 60/4. On top of it, they charge $250 "Install fee". To install what, the operator couldn't answer, I have a DOCSIS 3.0 modem, lines fine, install what? It's a config file change. I was buckled down and was going to pay the extra $100 or whatever it was for the upgrade, but the $250 vague install fee I would not pay. Meanwhile, Comcast, in the town next to me offers 100mbit down, 20mbit upload STANDARD and offer 150 for $115/mo. Way cheaper than Charter. If Comcast ups their speed even more to 3.1 speeds, Charter would have to compete.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Ya know, if you wanna run a server, you can choose corporate rates instead of home rates.

Re:Here's to hoping

[WoodburyMan]

I could, however they still only offer a max of 150mbit down and 7mbit upload, and the same ridiculous prices. Unless I go Fiber, which is not feasible for home at $1,000+/mo. There's word Comcast is taking over from Charter in my area. I can hope that they do, then I can be paying the same amount for 100mbit / 20mbit service. All i want is reasonable upload speeds, 4mbit takes me 35+ minutes to upload a 1gb GoPro Video to youtube. Via Comcast with 20mbit it would be done in less than 7 minutes. I can also stream 1080p via my Plex, or my HDHome Run Prime as well since 4mbit doesn't let me do either.

Re:Here's to hoping

[Bengie]

My ISP just went the route of, all accounts are uncapped business accounts. $20 for 20/20, $35 for 70/70, $45 for 100/100, $100 for 250/250, $200 for 500/500, and $300 for 1Gb/1Gb. If you want an SLA with that, $3k, but if you feel you don't need an SLA, $300. Bandwidth is cheap, SLAs are not.

You also have to put up with random 30sec-1min downtime between 12am-2am a few times a month. If you don't need an SLA, you can save a lot of money and get the same quality service while the service is working.

This is how it will go

[dirk]

Assuming I believe them (which I do for places that have someone else offering gigabit but less so for other places), this is how it will go. If you are in a town with a competitor offering gigabit speeds, it will cost around $100 a month. If you are in a town without a competitor offering gigabit internet, they either will not offer gigabit speed (although they will probably add the infrastructure for when a competitor does) or they will charge $300 a month for it and it will have to be bundled with cable to get that price. Comcast has no real interest in offering better speeds and are being forced to because other companies are. That is the bottom line.

Re:This is how it will go

[CastrTroy]

Price is always my main issue with these super fast lines. Google Fiber even has it's problems with pricing. You can either pay $70 a month for Gigabit speeds, or pay $300 to start plus $25 a year for 5 mbit speeds. Why not have an option in the middle somewhere. 1 Gbps is way more than I need, but 5 Mbps is on the cusp of being too slow for my tastes. Why not have a $30-$40 a month option for 100 Mbps? My guess is that nobody would really pay for gigabit if given another cheaper option with reasonable speeds. By making the only options $70 a month or slow internet, you can get a lot more money out of people.

I get a lot of value out of my internet, but it seems that all the providers seem to gouge us by not offering pricing tiers that are beneficial to the end user, but offering the pricing tiers that will yield them the most money. Which is fine, I understand they are a businesses, and that's their duty, but I wish there was more competition, and less collusion among companies.

Re:This is how it will go

[Githaron]

Compared to everyone else, $70 a month is an amazing price for Gigabit speeds. I am paying that much just for a 75Mbps download, 75Mbps upload connection. Google Fiber is literally over 13 times faster than my speed for the same price. Besides, you are forgetting why Google started Google Fiber: market disruption and to show everyone the power of Gigabit speeds. You can't do that if everyone only has 100Mbps internet.

Re:This is how it will go

[Lothsahn]

It's actually 7 years, but yeah, it's a long time.

https://fiber.google.com/citie...
No contract
Includes service guaranteed at $0/mo for 7 years per address

Re:This is how it will go

[fnj]

In the real world in the US, $70/mo for 1 Gbps and $2.08/mo for 5 Mbps sounds like a super offering. I wish the heck I could get it. It costs around $50/mo for 25 Mbps from Comcast now. I believe 100 Mbps from Comcast costs north of $100/mo.

Maybe you could bond several of the 5 Mbps. But it might be that they will not effer you more than one 5 Gb; it sounds like a subsidized offer for the poor to me.

Re:This is how it will go

[CastrTroy]

You're right. Given the choice, I would rather spend $70 and get a gigabit connection than spend the same and get a 75 Mbps line for the same price. However, if the incumbent telco had an option for 30 mbit per second for $50 or less, then I would really hesitate to sign up for Google Fiber, because I'm not convinced it would make that much of a difference in my day to day life. Whereas the $240 saved for choosing the $50 option would make a more reasonable difference in my life. Currently I have internet at 30 Mbps, and I really don't see much of a reason to have faster internet at this point in time for my house. And that's with 3 kids who all like to watch different videos at the same time. 30 Mbps is pretty must fast enough for the content that's currently available.

Re:This is how it will go

[Kjella]

Why not have an option in the middle somewhere. 1 Gbps is way more than I need, but 5 Mbps is on the cusp of being too slow for my tastes. Why not have a $30-$40 a month option for 100 Mbps?

Probably because they're not going to install 100 Mbit ports or send out 100 Mbit cable modems, the fiber line and all the associated overhead with maintenance and repair, billing and support is the same and most people will just finish their downloads faster so their cost structure is almost flat, except for a few massive bandwidth hogs. I would strongly suggest that it's the other way around, those who offer many tiers use it to cripple capacity far beyond reason on the lowest levels to make the higher tiers seem more reasonable, like 30 Mbit / $40, 100 Mbit / $60, 300 Mbit / $80, 1000 Mbit / $100. Would that be better?

Don't forget the $300 + $25/year (wasn't that free?) is subsidized to get a foot in the door, it almost certainly doesn't reflect the actual cost. It's more like the companies throwing credit cards around hoping you'll start using them. Here they're just hoping that eventually people will want to watch high quality Netflix and YouTube becoming $70/month "real" customers. It's not really the bandwidth that costs, even though that's what people base their expectation of price on.

Re:This is how it will go

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, I misread that. It's $300 to start, or you can opt to pay $25 a month for 12 months, totaling $300. Then it's $0 every month thereafter.

Still, my point stands. 5 mbit isn't really fast enough, so your only other option is to pay $70 a month for gigabit speeds. I'd rather pay half that, even if I could only get 100 mbit (one tenth the speed, for half the price).

Re:This is how it will go

[CastrTroy]

That's my whole point. I think it would better. I'd much rather have the option of paying $40 for 30 Mbit than pay $70 for 1000 Mbit. Sure I'd be paying only a little less for a lot less speed, but I really don't see much advantage in having a faster connection past a certain point. I'd rather take the $30 a month ($360 a year), and spend it on something else I'd appreciate more.

Also, I misread the pricing on the cheaper option. The $25 a month isn't every month. It's $300 at sign up, or $25 a month for the first year. There is 0 monthly fee. You can choose to pay the $300 all at once, or in 12 monthly payments.

Re:This is how it will go

[Pumpkin Tuna]

Everything is relative. For three years until last week, Cable and AT&T refused to extend service to me. My only option was an average $100 a month ~3-5 Mbps from Verizon with a 10 GB monthly cap. And I was glad to have it.

Cable networks are shared bandwidth

[Kirgin]

So you have 10gigabit downstream and 1gigabit upstream for a 300 dwelling neighborhood. You could say that 10gigabit pie has to be cut into 300 pieces. In reality there will be a big fat teenager in eating 1/3 of it. Google Fiber and other dedicated bandwidth offerings give you that 1 gigabit all to yourself.

Re:Cable networks are shared bandwidth

[ledow]

Er... I don't think 300 dwellings is anywhere near real capacity.

In the UK, cable is delivered with DOCSIS (Actually EuroDOCSIS, same thing, slightly different frequencies), and it's by street, and our streets are much smaller than the typical US "block".

It might be 10Gb over, say, 30 dwellings, or one apartment block. But the bottleneck will ALWAYS be the uplink anyway. What would you need to put 10Gb from multiple clients back to the net? Are you honestly expecting some 1Pb connection at Comcast somewhere? Highly doubtful. Caching, proxying, and the fact that people consume in small bursts or little dribbles whatever they are doing (gaming, web browsing, emailing, downloading, etc.). That's why P2P is such a pain - nothing to do with the legality, entirely to do with the fact that you can max out the uplink connections with just a handful of users.

But that's the same wherever you are. Even on, say, a workplace or school network, your uplink probably isn't on a pair with your between-server connections, and certainly only an order of magnitude better than your client connections at best (e.g. 100Mbps to hundreds of clients, 1Gb actual upstream, or 1Gb/10Gb, etc.).

But, still, a 10Gbit connection will download files, reduce latency, browse the web 10 times faster than a 1Gbit. You won't be able to max it out 24/7, that's all. Nothing's changed in that respect in decades.

Hint: When you upgrade your home network from Gigabit to 10Gb, you will need to multiply everything above it by 10 too or you'll get worse performance than before. Please tell me where you're going to buy 1Tbps kit from (even as an ISP) that isn't so prohibitively expensive that you can only afford to do it on major links and not every 100 clients.

We've just about got 1Gbps as "mainstream". 10Gbps is still expensive but is commercially available to all. 100Gbps is a pipe-dream unless you're a datacentre or ISP or huge enterprise.

Re:Cable networks are shared bandwidth

[Overzeetop]

With any kind of load balancing, you're still going to get at least 1/300 of it. And 1/300 of 10Gbit is 33Mbps. Now, that's not the best speed in the world, but it's your *floor*. Based on the actual performance of my internal Gb network, I could have about 20 big fat teenagers all hammering the network and still be limited by my internal bandwidth.

Re:Cable networks are shared bandwidth

[Bengie]

A few hundred yards from your home, your bandwidth is aggregated with that of all your neighbors and carried over a single fiber from there on, just like the data from and to your cable segment is carried over fiber to your neighborhood hub.

Google Fiber gives each customer their own lambda of bandwidth. Each "single fiber from there on" has 32 1.25Gb/1.25Gb lambdas, giving each customer their own 1.25Gb/1.25Gb of bandwidth for a grand total of 40Gb/s shared among 32 customers, each with 1Gb provisioned. Wait, that's 8Gb/s of extra bandwidth. Oh yeah, Google Fiber is undersubscribed.

You are correct, at some point all the bandwidth is shared, the same way a company paying $1mil/month for 200Gb/s of bandwidth from your favorite backbone also shares bandwidth with the rest of the Internet.

I like to use the way my ISP defined "dedicated" to me. I should NEVER see congestion on their network or to their transit provider. If I do, call them up and they'll fix it. I only had to call twice. Once was because my ISP was under a DDOS and my pings were 20ms higher than normal, and another time was because they needed to upgrade their core router because there was much greater demand for their new fiber internet than expected and they maxed out their old core router much quicker than expected. Their new router can handle terabits of bandwidth, plenty for our small city of 30k people.

Being that Level 3 is their transit provider, they also have a "no congestion" policy. You should never see congestion within Level 3's network, and also rarely to their peers, but there are some exceptions because of peering disputes.

If I should never see congestion within my ISP or their transit provider, that's pretty much all I can expect. I don't need a point-to-point fully connected connected graph of fiber to every person in the world to have "dedicated".

Re:Cable networks are shared bandwidth

[Bengie]

What would you need to put 10Gb from multiple clients back to the net? Are you honestly expecting some 1Pb connection at Comcast somewhere?

Even if customers had infinitely fast Internet connections, there would still be a maximum usage. You could give all of your customers 10Gb/s of bandwidth and still never have congestion, all you need is a bit of statistics to find the peak bandwidth usage. As long as your peak bandwidth usage is less than 80% of your pipe, you're good.

Re:Cable networks are shared bandwidth

[tepples]

Caching, proxying

How does that work now that more and more sites are moving to HTTPS? Do ISPs require subscribers to install the root certificate of the ISP's HTTPS proxy? Or are they giving free colo space to CDNs?

Re:Australia take note...

[NotDrWho]

Comcast doesn't have any competition. They have monopolies in their cable internet markets. Verizon has basically stopped deploying FIOS. Google Fiber is deploying at such a glacial pace that it will be sometime next century before they pose any real threat. Municipal fiber is outlawed in most states. And AT&T's DSL service is weak tea even in comparison to Comcast's existing offerings.

Those Evil Cable Companies!

[BECoole]

n/t

Re:Dear comcast: I dont want more speed

[internerdj]

Having had Comcast before. Barring having both of those, the second is the preferable solution.

Google fiber fears?

[PPalmgren]

I live in Charlotte, and Google Fiber is on its way here as well as in nearby Raleigh. Lo and behold, I get a notice in the mail last month that TWC is increasing all our plans by 5x capacity, so I went from 20/1 to 100/5 at the same price.

Well, that's great, but...you'll only increase capacity once there's a threat? And its so cheap to do that you'll not increase prices and finish the roll-out less than 6 months from Google's announcement? Really inspires tons of customer loyalty there, Time Warner. Jackasses.

Which brings me to my point: If this rollout by Comcast is true, is someone finally getting out IN FRONT of Google Fiber, not just being a reactionary twit? Maybe, just maybe, someone is learning that customers are switching not only because of your product but because you treat your customers like crap?

I think I'm too idealistic. That would make way too much sense for the telcos to think of it.

Re:Google fiber fears?

[Anonymous Coward]

When google fiber came to my neighborhood i called TW to cancel.

They promised 10X the speed at 1/2 the price.

My response was "why didn't i already have that?? Go fuck yourself."

Buncha Johnny-come-latelys.

Re:Google fiber fears?

[jittles]

I live in Charlotte, and Google Fiber is on its way here as well as in nearby Raleigh. Lo and behold, I get a notice in the mail last month that TWC is increasing all our plans by 5x capacity, so I went from 20/1 to 100/5 at the same price.

Well, that's great, but...you'll only increase capacity once there's a threat? And its so cheap to do that you'll not increase prices and finish the roll-out less than 6 months from Google's announcement? Really inspires tons of customer loyalty there, Time Warner. Jackasses.

Which brings me to my point: If this rollout by Comcast is true, is someone finally getting out IN FRONT of Google Fiber, not just being a reactionary twit? Maybe, just maybe, someone is learning that customers are switching not only because of your product but because you treat your customers like crap?

I think I'm too idealistic. That would make way too much sense for the telcos to think of it.

There is no threat of Google Fiber or any other fiber service. Comcast and ATT are the only games in town. Comcast has doubled my speed twice in the last year without increasing my cost. I think I am getting 100/20 now, but I can't remember exactly. While I have no doubt that this is due to Google Fiber threats in other markets, it appears that Comcast has decided to up its game a little bit. We will see if they really start offering gigabit service outside of Google Fiber markets. I'll be surprised. But i am not complaining at the moment.

Re:Google fiber fears?

[superdude72]

Which brings me to my point: If this rollout by Comcast is true, is someone finally getting out IN FRONT of Google Fiber, not just being a reactionary twit?

VAPORWARE (n) - A product that does not yet exist, but is sure to blow any competing products out of the water. Promoted by market-dominating companies to forestall potential competitors.

Re:Google fiber fears?

[superdude72]

PS, It has long been my opinion that Google wants its customers to have gigabit fiber, but they would rather some other company provide it. The purpose of Google Fiber is to goad Comcast and TWC into doing it. Like any for-profit enterprise, Google doesn't want to be in the business of providing universal access to high quality Internet. That's providing a commodity, and Google wants high profit margins.

On the bright-side, they're well aware of TWC's and Comcast's vaporware ploys and are unlikely to be deterred by that.

Re:Google fiber fears?

[flappinbooger]

where i live a local ISP ran fiber to the door for basically the entire small city where I live in the midwest. I got it as soon as it was available and ditched the crap-tastic cable internet I had.

I got 6mb down 3mb up and it was something like $50 per month and I loved it. Never ever went down, never slowed, just pure light based bits all the time. That should tell you how terrible the cable service was. Their minimum was 1.5/1.5 or something like that so I was paying more for better service.

After a few years they changed their tiers and pricing, and sent everyone a letter. Their minimum was now 10 meg down 5 meg up. I was automatically bumped to 30 meg down and 15 meg up, since I had been paying more for better than minimum service. Same price.

So I called. I asked nicely why don't they please just put me on the minimum and charge me the minimum, thank you very much. So, with just a phone call, I STILL got a big speed boost and a ~ 30% lower bill. Win win.

It has NEVER EVER EVER gone down, slowed down, paused or complained. Ice storms, thunder storms, flooding, drought, wind, nothing.

Why? Because it's NEW. The DSL and much of the cable are using ANCIENT infrastructure. AT+T are never going to replace the countless miles of copper they have hanging all over the nation.

Re:Google fiber fears?

[Cro Magnon]

While I have no doubt that this is due to Google Fiber threats in other markets, it appears that Comcast has decided to up its game a little bit.

It's about time. Their customers have been saying "Up Yours" to Comcast for years.

Re:Google fiber fears?

[Pumpkin Tuna]

As someone who lives 30 minutes outside Charlotte and is subsisting on 3Mbps AT&T UVerse, let me express my good-natured envy and hatred of you.

Re:Google fiber fears?

[DaMattster]

I keep hoping for Google Fibre out my way. Man would it really hurt XFinity and FiOS.

Re:Google fiber fears?

[PPalmgren]

One of the main reasons I decided to buy my home in Charlotte and not one of the surrounding towns was lack of good infrastructure. While it may have higher taxes, I'm not interested in the whole utility mess that tends to come prepackaged with SC residency.

Re:Customer service upgrades?

[postbigbang]

This is all an attempt to get an uptick in revenues by charging more $$$ for the onslaught of 4K Netflix, and other traffic that will constipate their cable in unbelievable ways.

Re:300gig cap on fiber?

[Fire_Wraith]

It makes it so much easier for customers to blow through their monthly cap, and rack up massive overage charges. A perfect situation... at least from Comcast's perspective. After all, one of their execs even admitted that the caps have nothing to do with network management, and are just about money.
Citation: http://arstechnica.com/busines...

Yeah, nice, but

[Trailer Trash]

How about losing the cap? Gigabit means I can get to the cap in a couple of hours now.

Re:Yeah, nice, but

[Overzeetop]

The cap will grow when more people start hitting it. It may seem like a revenue center, but it's a management tool. They'll set the bar somewhere in the top 1-5% of customers usage to keep those with voracious appetites down. They know there would be backlash if all of a sudden many of their customers started getting overage charges. Now that may change if more and more people get used to such a thing, but I expect those caps will rise with the overall usage patterns - again, just to make sure that everybody on the network (who doesn't have to call CS*) stays happy with their speeds.

I still haven't had a single note from Comcast, and last month I uploaded about 2TB of data (Crashplan decided to re-sync my entire server after a version upgrade, even though the server had just uploaded that same chunk 4 months ago).

*There is no such thing as a happy customer that has to deal with Comcast CS, so the more people they can keep from calling, the better off they are.

Re:Yeah, nice, but

[swb]

I also wonder if speed increases aren't also due to more coax capacity being available for data due to stuff like switched digital video and fewer TV customers generally.

Re:Yeah, nice, but

[electrosoccertux]

How about losing the cap? Gigabit means I can get to the cap in a couple of hours now.

this is part of their business plan. they're helping you reach your cap faster so that they can save money by shutting you off the remainder of the month!!!

or sell you more data.

wait. that actually might be what's going on

Fine print..

[Lumpy]

Your cable will will be $150 per month and "gigabit" is based on a corporate definition. All rights reserved, speeds may vary by up to 400%, we reserve the right to have random outages.

A tech will be there between the hours of 8am tuesday and 9pm saturday.

By the year 2000?

[Overzeetop]

If I could have had DSL in 2000, that would have been awesome. When I called the local telco in 2000 about they're "new, high-speed internet" options, I was cheerfully informed that they had just upgraded their entire infrastructure to 56kB modems!

Gigabit network with a 200GB cap

[bigdady92]

is pointless. No wait, it's GENIUS!

Customer: We want faster Internets!
Comcast: Well we will give you the fastest Gigabits!
Customer: MOAR NETFLIXZ! <downloads 4k movies>, XBOX LIVEZ! <plays games hosted at 1080p>, F-U LIVE TV! <steams HBO 1080p movies in 3 rooms>
[end of the Month]
Customer: $400 bill?!?!? WTF!!!!111!
Comcast: Well now you see you had a 200GB limit on data and you went clear over it.
Customer: But you said it was GIGABITS FAST!
Comcast: Yes...yes it is...<Maniacal Cackling on a mountain of gold>

A gigabit would be awesome

[tkrotchko]

That means I can get to the 250GB Comcast monthly data limit in just 4 1/2 hours!

Re:A gigabit would be awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

250 GBytes * 8bit/byte = 2000 Gigabits / (1Gbit/Sec) = 2000Secs

2000 Secs / (60 Sec/min) = 33.33 Minutes.

33 Minutes 4.5 hours = 270 minutes

Re:Australia take note...

[Stewie241]

It is likely true that they don't currently have any competition. But Google Fiber is making some inroads, and perhaps they realize that if they don't make any improvements and don't do anything, they are making it easier for disruptive players to enter the market (in whatever form that may take).

Additionally, with the increase of higher bandwidth usage like 4k Netflix as was mentioned or whatever it happens to be, they potentially realized that they were going to have to do something to increase capacity in their backend network if they want to maintain service. People live with traffic volume caps now but as demand for higher caps increases there are going to be more and more complaints, again, opening the field for disruption. Thus they have to beef up their backbone network (my terminology is probably weak as I don't have much knowledge of how ISP networks are constructed and how peering arrangements and such work). You can't really sell an improved backbone network to customers, but if you couple that with last mile upgrades, which are probably going to have to happen eventually anyway, you can drive interest as you prepare for the future.

People are generally willing to pay a little bit more for a service that just works most of the time and is as fast as the other guy. Upgrading their network means that disruptive players have to prove themselves based on something other than speed.

NOT the "Entire US"

[sribe]

Their entire network is not the same thing.

They are even taking installation appointment

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Just called them when it would be available. They said the cable man would show up sometime between May 2017 and Sep 2020. Asked me to stay at home. They said they could not narrow down the window more.

Comcast lies

[QuietLagoon]

They recently said they would be deploying 2Gbit, and that has failed to materialize.

.
Comcast is trying to look like a leading-edge ISP with these press releases about vapor-speeds, speeds that never seem to materialize.

.
If you want to see the real Comcast, look at areas where Comcast has little or no competition. US$50 per month for speeds that are DSL-like (about 6mbit/sec).

Re:Australia take note...

[Anonymous Coward]

U-Verse is DSL. More complex form than before thanks to improved technology. I ended up getting a bonded pair connection, because each phone line (have two in the house) are so old and out of shape a single line produces considerable errors.

If you go into the modem settings, it says DSL signal strength right in there.

I've always pushed for DSL over cable. I had Bellsouth before they were bought by AT&T, then moved up to U-Verse. I pushed because cable always seemed to be more unstable. I haven't heard as much negative news about the service compared to their customer service. AT&T still has issues with their billing and such, so I don't know if that is worse than Comcast. If Comcast has addressed their stability issues by improving their capacity, then they may end up going back to those issues if they plan to deal out this plan in earnest.

Re:Comcast Planning Gigabit Cable For Entire US In

[Adriax]

Plus with service that fast you'll blow through your bandwidth cap in 40 seconds.

how about reliability first?

[flappinbooger]

Why don't they focus on the reliability of their service first?

Why not focus on customer support, as a whole, first? They have a well deserved reputation for being one of the worst companies to work with.

Comcast is not any where near 100% reliable, I'd say more like 90%.

They have (or had, for a long time) crap modems that were only part of the problem.

People, businesses and government offices are putting all their eggs in this basket with internet, phone and TV, all coming in on one fat pipe.

When it goes down, they are massively screwed.

And it happens all too often, far more often than DSL. DSL might be slow and crappy but it is more reliable than cable.

Don't get me wrong - Comcast know what they are doing when it comes to slinging massive amounts of data great distances at high speed. They really do, and their internet is amazingly fast.

But why try to go faster when there are too many times it's going nowhere?

This, not to mention their hidden data cap. If they offer this massive bandwidth do they leave the data cap where it is? HMMM???

Re:how about reliability first?

[MitchDev]

Nothing wrong with his post, a lot better than run-on sentences that never end with no spacing.

Re:how about reliability first?

[fnj]

I second that. The AC was a twit. OP did use paragraphs, and if column width on this site was appropriate for easy reading - like a newspaper - the paragraphs would "look" more appropriate. That's the biggest failing of the internet as a whole. Column width.

Re:how about reliability first?

[Cro Magnon]

And it happens all too often, far more often than DSL. DSL might be slow and crappy but it is more reliable than cable.

Yup! Years ago, I switched from Time Wartner to DSL. DSL was significantly slower, but it was nearly always up. I think TW was working about 50% of the time.

Re:how about reliability first?

[Tablizer]

It's in their blood. Now they can suck faster.

Re:how about reliability first?

[MitchDev]

LOL

Re:Australia take note...

[45mm]

They may not have any competition within their municipally-granted franchise authority - but I can virtually guarantee that their monopolies are in jeopardy when the neighboring cities get gigabit from Google, Cox, Verizon, CenturyLink, et.al. Local franchise authorities are well aware of the technology that's available, and are applying pressure to get it. They're also aware that their cities grow when the infrastructure is there.

And if you're a household in one of those communities, I suggest you contact the local franchise authority and complain. Squeaky wheels get the grease.

Comcast is slow and shitty and definitely won't hit their "goal" - but they're not completely stupid either. They're just following trends.

All competition

[swb]

Century Link recently had a utility crew in my residential neighborhood in Minneapolis stringing fiber optic cable on the poles. I don't think we've gotten any SUBSCRIBE NOW! fliers in the mail from them, but I would wager that Comcast has lost a lot of TV subscribers and more and more people are just hanging onto a TV subscription (often lower-end, like me) just because they're the only high speed Internet game available.

Once you get someone offering gigabit in your area for prices on par with Comcast, even more people will think WTF, why pay for even the few channels I get but don't watch just for Internet?

Serious Internet competition has to scare Comcast because it eliminates both a TV customer and an Internet customer.

Re:All competition

[The-Ixian]

Yep, I am now a happy CenturyLink fiber subscriber.

It is DSL from the street to my apartment, but my modem shows 1000Mbps connection speed.

speedtest.net only gives me ~600Mpbs down and ~900Mbps up but that beats the crap out of the other cable and VDSL options.

As a matter of fact, the cable provider in my area (Minneapolis, MN) only offers a max of 20Mbps. VDSL offers up to 60Mbps. So, at least around here, DSL is the way to go until CenturyLink starts offering more fiber to the curb.

Re:All competition

[swb]

Do you actually live within the Minneapolis city limits?

The utility crews were here early in the spring and I only knew it was fiber because they took a couple of days to do my immediate area and on a dog walk I saw the cable spool on the side of the road. I talked to the guys on the lift truck and they said it was Century Link.

And I thought Comcast offered faster speeds in Minneapolis -- the Strib just had an article today in the paper about how they're doubling the speeds of all their consumer tiers, and the existing Tiers I think went to 100 Mbps. I have business class, which seems exempt from these free speed upgrades but other than toe-tapping during multi-gig downloads the ~20Mbps down I get is good enough for pretty much everything I do and I love my static IPs, so I haven't been tempted to change anything.

Once competitive gigabit is actually available to my specific house (either the CL fiber or US Internet extending their footprint), I might decide the static IP game isn't necessary and start looking at shifting my home server crap to a hosted setup. I'm not convinced the economics will work in my favor, but the price for static IPs and gigabit fiber from USI is expensive.

No, it really isn't

[Sycraft-fu]

Comcast are real dicks about their cap in many locations. My boss got charged $10 for going over his 300GB cap. That is a stupidly low cap and a stupid high charge (only gets you 50GB more). On my Cox connection, which is a similar speed, I get a 2TB cap (and no overages charges if I exceed it).

While data caps are needed to keep people playing nice, since all network resources are shared at some point, Comcast are real jerks about it and keep the caps very low, and charge a stupid amount for overages.

If it was about limiting use thy'd do it like Cox. With Cox, when you exceed the cap nothing happens, it is a soft cap. Depending on how much and how often, they may call you and yell at you. Particularly if you have a lower tier service they'll call and encourage you to move up to a higher tier one (which has a larger cap). They reserve the right to cancel your service if it becomes a problem, but I am not aware of this happening in any cases.

Just strategy

[sjbe]

Well, that's great, but...you'll only increase capacity once there's a threat?

This should not surprise you at all. If there is no competition prices will be monopoly prices. Anyone who thinks they would charge less is being very naive.

Which brings me to my point: If this rollout by Comcast is true, is someone finally getting out IN FRONT of Google Fiber, not just being a reactionary twit?

It's still just a defensive play really. I don't think Google really wants to be in the ISP business but faster internet is very valuable to them so if they can, ahem... encourage Comcast to bump their speeds by being a credible threat then Google wins without having to build a nationwide network. Companies that use a franchise model do something like this. They have a smallish number of stores that are company owned which limits the power of the franchise owners.

Maybe, just maybe, someone is learning that customers are switching not only because of your product but because you treat your customers like crap?

Very doubtful. I'd be shocked if it was anything other than a strategic response to a competitive threat.

Don't forget...

[MitchDev]

..to look for the skyrocketing cable/internet costs with Xfinity long before this actually rolls out to "pay for it"

awesome

[CimmerianX]

Soon Comcast customers will blow through their data caps is 1/10th the time.

Re:2 years?

[Jayfar]

They certainly don't work for the government!

In Soviet Philadelphia, the government works for Comcast. Seriously. That's how we avoided having that pesky RCN build a competing system here.

40 minutes

[tepples]

Plus with service that fast you'll blow through your bandwidth cap in 40 seconds.

I did the math, and it was 40 minutes, not 40 seconds. 300 GB/mo is 2400 gigabits per month, and 2400 gigabits per month divided by 1 gigabit per second is 2400 seconds per month, or 40 minutes per month.

Re:40 minutes

[Guru2Newbie]

Tepples, I noticed that you are using the standard 8-bit bytes in your calculations.

Did telcos/ISPs actually do away with the 10-bit bytes (1 start bit + 8 bits data +1 stop bit) when dial-up modem went away?

On a side note, are ISPs that display GB (and really mean GigaBIT, instead of using "Gb") trying to trick us so we think GigaBYTE and believe their service is 8-10x faster than it really is?

Re:40 minutes

[tepples]

They did away with the 25% overhead of 8N1 framing when they switched to ATM framing, but some ISPs still count ATM framing, IP header, TCP header, and TCP retransmits against the user's cap.

Re:40 minutes

[Drakonblayde]

Network speeds aren't measured in bytes, not on the network gear anyway. You can safely assume that the speeds ISP's offer are in bits per second, not bytes per second

Re:40 minutes

[strikethree]

I did the math, and it was 40 minutes, not 40 seconds.

It is bad when dramatic hyperbole is only one order of magnitude (seconds to minutes) away from reality. *sigh*

100% serious question

[netsavior]

What would you do with a gigabit connection to a company that sells out pirates every chance they get? I mean what in the world do you do that is not piracy that is better on a gigabit connection than a 100mbit connection? And don't say "counterstrike ping" because that will not be any better.

Re:100% serious question

[fnj]

I mean what in the world do you do that is not piracy that is better on a gigabit connection than a 100mbit connection?

For one example, downloading a linux distro ISO, especially while watching Amazon streaming. Do I have to explain this stuff?

Re:100% serious question

[GrandCow]

Off the top of my head:

-Steam games at 40-60gb a pop or full computer backup/restores faster than we can do now.
-On demand games for future game consoles, no more even having to wait an hour to cache the game files on your consoles hard drive... just a giant set of RAM and the system loads game engines, worlds, textures, and media in real time after a short buffering session to get the basic framework loaded when the game first starts up.
-4k streaming for multiple devices in the house
-360 degree HD video streaming. How about a camera on the roof of your house that films in 360 so multiple people can view different directions at once,and lets you zoom in on a deer in the woods a mile away.
-Gigabit download means better upload as well... so HD/4k video conferencing as well as easier backups for large photo and video projects to a cloud based storage.

And then the last one: WHO FUCKING KNOWS? The technology always comes first, then people find ways to use it. If your mind can only think of using higher bandwidth for pirating, then you're not really thinking about the possibilities.

Re:2 years?

[RandomFactor]

"Do something about it" You mean 'vote' - yeah, that's been working great of late. Oh wait, is that not what you meant?

Re:When regulations deter competition

[BVis]

Yes. It's off topic. If the topic were how government was impeding Comcast's efforts to do this, then that would be on-topic. But it's not.

Re:2 years?

[Monoman]

And I took your comment as sarcasm because Comcast is probably just reacting to cities like Chattanooga implementing their own gigabit ISP.

http://chattanoogagig.com/

We don't WANT guns to our heads quickly, our money

[raymorris]

> Maybe you should do something about it i

No way. Government in the US is slow because it's SUPPOSED TO BE. It's supposed to be transparent, fair, accountable to the public, careful with what government imposes on people - all of this means slow.

If you refuse to pay your $100 Comcast bill or otherwise violate their terms of service, they worst they'll ever do is cut off your service and you'll switch to a competing competing, maybe even DSL.

If you refuse to pay your government bill, roughly 40% of your income, or violate their edicts, they'll force you to comply. If necessary, they'll send their armed enforcers to your house and point guns at you while they take your stuff and haul you off to prison. Any organization exercising that kind of power needs major decisions to be made carefully, cautiously, publicly, and in a way that's very accountable to the citizenry.

A private company can act quickly when the CEO says "do it, get it done right away" and those who report to him get to work right away, they don't hold public hearings and debates, they do what the CEO said to do, if the CEO wants it done immediately. You CAN have government like that, where the leader is the absolute authority and there is no debate, no public discussion, no accountability to the public, so things get done quickly. North Korea has such a system I don't want that.

I WANT our government to have public hearings before they spend $10 billion of OUR money. If Comcast wants to spend $10 billion of THEIR money, they can just do it, immediately. If they waste THEIR money, so be it. If the chief executive of Comcast wants to change their IT policies, he can do that today. No skin off my nose. If the chief executive of the government wants to change public policy, making something else illegal, meaning people will be sent to prison for doing _____, I WANT that to be implemented slowly, cautiously, carefully. US government is SUPPOSED to be slow, cautious, fair, and accountable, not fast.

Gigabit isn't everything...

[darkain]

Gigabit isn't everything... My locally owned ISP is considering the same thing with DOCSIS. The problem? It is only Gigabit DOWNLOAD, with still shitty upload. Why is this an issue? Remote storage backups and generally uploading large content (like videos) to the internet. Sure, the slower upload "works for most uses", but so does the slower downloads. The whole point of more bandwidth is to open up the availability to more types of applications. We already have the download bandwidth to stream 1080p content and possibly 4k content on the connection I have with my current ISP. The only advantage I'd get with the faster download at this point is quicker downloads of massive content that isn't streamed (Linux ISOs and packages for example). So unless they give us that sweet glorious Gigabit UPLOAD like Google has, this really isn't doing that much to change end-user experience.

$300 a month?

[peter303]

Not as cheap as google fiber. Comcast currently charges $150 for 150 mbs in my town. The sweet spot, most bits per dolar is 50 mbs.

Uh huh. Data caps? Price?

[Chas]

We're delivering gigabit cable! And you get a 300GB data cap, plus it costs $500/month!

SUCH A DEAL right?

Project Pronto

[TheHawke]

Yeah, they were pumping like 25 million to place DSLAMS at every SLC, enabling everyone to connect and surf at the (then) astounding 1Mbps.

Sadly they realized their infrastructure was not up to snuff to handle the increased traffic.

Soo, they tried to wrangle permits and easements to get the new wiring or fiber laid. Sadly, the NIMBY's and politicals pretty much screwed things over for them so most of the money got sank into permits and (maybe) bribes just to get to 15% of the roll out goals.

Soo, the project got flipped to lightspeed, which was fiber to pole, then U-Verse.

Hardware requirements

[nehumanuscrede]

While Gigabit speeds are nice I guess a few questions came to mind:

1) Will we be forced to utilize their hardware to support these speeds or can I use my own ? ( You KNOW they will charge monthly for hardware rental )
2) Is the service symmetrical or is it something ludicrous like 1000 down / 10 up ?
3) I have absolutely zero need for Gigabit Ethernet outside the home. Can I get 100 / 100 for a decent price ? I would be thrilled with that.
4) Can I get it by itself without having to bundle some silly cable package ( that I don't want or need ) with it ?
5) Is there a minimum contract involved ? Eg: Two years

If they're actually trying to get ahead of Google on this instead of just coming up with creative ways to charge more, then maybe I'll start looking at the hardware required to route / switch it.

Re:Hardware requirements

[WillAffleckUW]

You can buy the routers for around $150 at Costco. I recommend that. You can also buy them online.

Re:Hardware requirements

[DaMattster]

While Gigabit speeds are nice I guess a few questions came to mind:

1) Will we be forced to utilize their hardware to support these speeds or can I use my own ? ( You KNOW they will charge monthly for hardware rental ) 2) Is the service symmetrical or is it something ludicrous like 1000 down / 10 up ? 3) I have absolutely zero need for Gigabit Ethernet outside the home. Can I get 100 / 100 for a decent price ? I would be thrilled with that. 4) Can I get it by itself without having to bundle some silly cable package ( that I don't want or need ) with it ? 5) Is there a minimum contract involved ? Eg: Two years

If they're actually trying to get ahead of Google on this instead of just coming up with creative ways to charge more, then maybe I'll start looking at the hardware required to route / switch it.

Shit, I'd be happy with 10 up and down and have a static IP or two.

This new term of "countrywide coverage"

[nitehawk214]

One installation in NYC and one in LA does not equal "covers the entire US".

There is exactly no possibility of this happening. They couldn't even connect all major cities, let alone the entire country.

Make it symmetric and I'll consider it

[alispguru]

I live in a blessed neighborhood that has both FIOS and Comcast, so I can credibly threaten to switch. I almost went for Comcast recently; they offered me

105 Mb down + basic cable + phone

for the same price as Verizon's

50 Mb down + basic cable + phone

The deal-breaker was Comcast's up speed is 10 or 20 Mb, and Verizon's is 50 Mb. Not in this age of video calling and torrenting, thankyouverymuch.

Comcast's infrastructure is still apparently fundamentally biased toward broadcast. Verizon at least understands communication should be two-way.

What blazing speed!

[chilenexus]

Why, that's got to be almost 10% of what my cable provider upgraded me to for free 6 months ago. I feel sorry for the people using Comcast's network that hasn't been upgraded yet. But really, why upgrade their equipment at all to 10 mbps? If you're replacing equipment, why not upgrade to something that costs a little bit more, but won't need to be replaced in 1/4 the time to stay competitive?

LOL Yeah Right

[EmagGeek]

2-3 years? It would take them that long just to get a court case to attempt (futilely) to overturn all of the State-mandated monopolies and franchise deals in South Carolina, let alone to roll out the actual infrastructure.

Re:Australia take note...

[Bengie]

100/100 dedicated fiber for $45/m, no cap, get your full speed 24/7 to nearly every datacenter in the world. I can reach all of Midwest USA in 7-20ms, East coast in 30ms, all of Southern in 45ms, and West coast in 60ms. Less than 1ms jitter to all of the USA and under 5ms of jitter to the entire world. I queued up several terabytes of download and let it run over peak hours and my average download rate was 99.5Mb/s +- 0.25Mb/s, ping to my ISP stayed at a flat 1ms the entire time. 0 packets lost over the period of a week is the norm. Over the period of a month, I do get upwards of 10 packets lost, typically in a burst during the middle of the night on Sunday.

Better do it fast

[WillAffleckUW]

CenturyLink has rolled out Gigabit internet over half of Seattle, and it's much cheaper.

Meanwhile, all the top research universities have 100 Gbps ports and 40 Gbps campus wide.

You snooze, you lose.

Cable Vs Fiber

[BeemanIT]

I was working for Time Warner Cable Tier 3 Helpdesk getting the free internet TWC had for being an employee. I'm finding that having fiber is much simpler even with multi-mode fiber as well as cleaner signal. The Coax Cable TWC uses for their MAXX speeds runs over 16 Freq for download and about 4-8 Freq for upload. That being said, if any of those Freq have issues on them, you can't get the full speed. Another issue we kept running into with the faster speeds was equipment. Modems not processing the speeds, gig NICs with driver issues on the PCs, poor ethernet cables.....etc. Also just because something is advertised as 10/100 does not necessarily mean you can get 100Mbps same goes for a gig card. Quality of the equipment does matter as well.

Re:We don't WANT guns to our heads quickly, our mo

[Rakarra]

If you refuse to pay your $100 Comcast bill or otherwise violate their terms of service, they worst they'll ever do is cut off your service and you'll switch to a competing competing, maybe even DSL.

They could also sue you. And get court judgements against you if you want to blow them off. And then comes the other things you mentioned if you still don't want to pay.

You CAN have government like that, where the leader is the absolute authority and there is no debate, no public discussion, no accountability to the public, so things get done quickly. North Korea has such a system I don't want that.

But this is the promise of a Donald Trump presidency, a CEO in the executive office who just does what he wants and everyone has to follow his commands.

Now we're really getting off topic. :-9

Re:Australia take note...

[Rakarra]

"Australia take note.... It's amazing what a bit of competition can do in this area."

First, Comcast has no competition. They are protected from it -- if you want Comcast in your area, you have to give them monopoly power. That's how they work. You're also assuming that Comcast has any intention of following through on this. They've made promises like this before, usually to secure funding. They take the money and run, rolling out networks that come nowhere close to the advertised speed while declaring success (and record profits).

Robert Cringely wrote about this eight years ago, discussing how the cable and telco companies received 200 billion dollars to roll out a bidirectional 45 Mbit network to the whole US back in the mid-90s. They didn't get pallets of cash, but they were allowed to put some surcharges on your monthly bill and received tax credits averaging $2000 / customer.

Eventually they claimed they only promised "broadband," and broadband was defined as Internet service with a download speed of 200 kbit/sec or more.

So when Comcast promises Gigabit cable for all, I'd love to know 1) What are the restrictions on the network, 2) Which neighborhoods -aren't- getting it, 3) What they're getting from the local municipalities in return (probably further banning of municipal broadband, and banning of competition to enforce Comcast's monopoly), and 4) What the funding source for this is. Somehow, I suspect that the funding for this isn't just being footed by Comcast. That's never been how they've operated in the past. They promise, they receive cash, they underdeliver, and they declare success despite the glaring failures around them.

Re:USA! USA! USA!

[ComputerGeek01]

Your car analogy falls to pieces when you compare the population densities of the US vs Switzerland. We may have many many more people, but in comparison we are drastically underpopulated. But I don't expect you to stop worshipping the Swiss just because of a silly thing like perspective, after all arbitrary measures of success on paper regardless of the circumstances are all that count right?

Regulation is a hurdle all right, but I would expect that a company like Comcast already has lobbyists in place so if they had any actual intention of doing this then it wouldn't be a problem for them.

Re:Khyber, YOU "eat your words"... apk

[barbariccow]

Maybe you could just do it right, and know you're doing it right, rather than flipping out with someone who disagrees? Not everybody agrees on everything, and there is no universal right or wrong.

Re:2 years?

[MagickalMyst]

Mod +1

Comcast Business

[tepples]

300GB cap on my top level plan

Xfinity (Comcast's home brand) applies a 300 GB/mo cap in some markets. I'm told the next step up for your home office is Comcast Business, which applies no cap.

Re:Australia take note...

[DMJC]

Actually the problem wasn't leftists, the problem was Right-wing fucktards who downgraded the network from FTTH to FTTN. Everyone I've ever met who got FTTH says the NBN is Fan-Fucking-Tastic.

Re: Comcast Planning Gigabit Cable For Entire US I

[EXrider]

No, they never offer to let you simply buy a cable modem outright, you "lease" it and pay $9/mo or something ridiculous like that, for the life of your service, which conveniently works out to way more than a cable modem costs in a little over a year. You can bring your own approved cable modem, but they will try to blame every line issue you ever have on your "unsupported" cable modem.

What policy against sole proprietorships?

[tepples]

They like to demand all sorts of "documentation" that you're running ... gasp ... a corporation

Does your cable company make this requirement for "documentation" and a list of acceptable "documentation" available to the public? I'd be interested to read the actual policy against use by, say, a sole proprietorship.

gigabit is great

[indy_Muad'Dib]

but what do you do with the other 2,629,743.5 seconds in the month after you blow through the 2.5 gig data cap?

Hrmmm

[DaMattster]

So, America's most hated company is going to rollout some horsepower in 2-3 years? Meh, nothing to see here move along. Most folks don't need Gigabit internet speeds. Shit, you can stream HD with a fraction of that bandwidth.

Re:Australia take note...

[_merlin]

Wut? No-one has 3Mbps DSL in Aus any more, 24Mbps is pretty much universal. NBN is 96Mbps, not 12Mbps. Your politics are way out, too.

Really? Without caps of any sort?

[sethstorm]

When they can figure out how to roll it all out on a no-cap model for the same prices, then I might be interested.

An existing conduit

[tepples]

And who the hell decided I should have to pay the employees who are digging the trench and laying the fiber?

Why should a fiber run require a whole new trench, not just blowing fiber through an existing conduit that the city buried last time it dug a trench?

The only thing holding back everyone else from competing is spending the billions of dollars to dig up everyone's lawns and streets

That and regulations requiring a newcomer to serve absolutely everyone from day one, rather than starting by laying infrastructure in the most profitable area and growing from there once that infrastructure has been paid for.

Re: Comcast Planning Gigabit Cable For Entire US I

[ChrisMaple]

Trump thinks that the problem with Obamacare is that it's being managed badly, not that it is fundamentally evil. The chance that he'd eliminate this horrid program is very small. If you want to understand Trump and his followers, watch the "Meet John Brain" episode of Pinky and the Brain.

Re:2 years?

[ChrisMaple]

Fight efforts to prevent election fraud. FTFY.

Re:Australia take note...

[ignavus]

Wut? No-one has 3Mbps DSL in Aus any more, 24Mbps is pretty much universal. NBN is 96Mbps, not 12Mbps. Your politics are way out, too.

What planet are you on? I live on the outskirts of Sydney - some people in my suburb can even see the harbour bridge in the distance from their houses. And the whole suburb is more than 4 KM from the nearest exchange. My DSL speeds are LESS than 3 Mbps. Many suburbs in the Port Hacking area are sitting on slow DSL speeds AND there are no NBN projects planned to assist any of these suburbs. And what's more, I live in a mobile blackspot - I can't get a mobile signal at my home computer, not even a reliable 3G signal from Telstra.

There are heaps of people in Australia on 3Mbps and worse - and quite a few of them live in metro areas.

If you don't believe me, just look at TPG's coverage maps (http://www.tpg.com.au/maps/) and click on exchanges like Miranda and Cronulla (southern end of Sydney). Any areas in purple - Gray's Point, Lilli Pilli, Port Hacking, Dolan's Bay, Maianbar, Bundeena - are all more than 4.5 KM from their exchange, and many people there are getting speeds of 3Mbps OR LESS. I am one of them, and I know plenty of people in my neighbourhood with worse speeds than me (I have a Telstra pillar right outside my house, so I get better speeds than some).

Thanks Google!

[sabbede]

If Comcast wasn't suddenly facing actual competition they'd still be dragging their feet.

Which they must have been doing if it will only take two years. The infrastructure must already be able to handle it in most areas.

Re:2 years?

[BVis]

GP asked a question. I answered it.

I think you're looking to attack the person, not the message.

Re:2 years?

[BVis]

Requiring additional documentation that has never needed to be provided before is pretty much the definition of "making it harder to vote". Election fraud is not the problem you think it is. The problem that Voter ID laws etc. is meant to solve is "too many brown people voting."

Re:Australia take note...

[_merlin]

You've gotta be kidding. My parents live in Coomoora, i.e. middle of nowhere in central Victoria, and they get 12Mbps service from Internode. I get 20Mbps in Flemington (Melbourne) and similar in Elizabeth Bay (Sydney). Is it really that bad everywhere I don't go?

Re:When regulations deter competition

[jbo5112]

I couldn't find a citation for Google having spent $28 billion so far. There was some sort of $20-28 billion cost projection for KC, but it was based on ignoring what Google said it costs to go with numbers closer to industry norms. Google said that building their own networking equipment isn't that difficult, and in return they get much better and cheaper equipment. I don't know of anyone else doing it, but then again, Google has a bigger customer facing network than anyone besides L3 (i.e. AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Verizon, etc.).

If you were rolling out a new service that you wanted to succeed, and had people bending over backwards to get your service, why would you start someplace difficult?

Re:Australia take note...

[Bengie]

Forgot to mention, 0ms down and 20ms up of bufferbloat on DSLReports with no traffic shaping on my part. Sadly, no. Small ISP.