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Comcast Provides Uncapped 1 Gb Service To 1 Customer -- of 22.4 Million (myajc.com)
McGruber writes: A month after it suffered a nationwide outage, Comcast announced that a Dunwoody, Georgia resident is the first customer in the nation to get Comcast's new $80/month uncapped 1-gigabit service. The service will only be available in select Atlanta neighborhoods. The company would not say how many people would be chosen for the initial roll out of its 1-gigabit service, but admitted the numbers would be small to 'ensure seamless deployment,' a spokesman said. The company claims that the service will roll out more broadly later in the year. Comcast has 22.4 million broadband customers.
"Oh, it must be a Google Fiber city."
Bingo.
Remind me why competition among public utilities is bad again?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
256kbit for everyone! noone needs fibre to the home!
... is that the mysterious resident in Comcast's CEO.
http://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/data-usage-trials/
for the next 6 months or so.
they still are too big and therefore they suck!
http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/comcasts-gigabit-cable-has-a-data-cap-unless-you-sign-3-year-contract/
It's still DOCSIS, so you'll get 1Gbps at 3AM but continue to get 10mbps during peak hours (i.e. when you and all your neighbors are actually using it).
That has jack shit to do with it being DOCSIS. As long as the node is not oversubscribed, and the CMTS is not oversubscribed, you can all still get full speeds all day long.
And the fiber to the home that Google (and Verizon, etc.) are selling is NOT a dedicated fiber pair going all the way back to the provider's core. It also uses a "local loop" type of topology which is shared among you and your neighbors, and can suffer the exact same oversubscription issues if the provider doesn't keep the equipment upgraded to meet demand.
Business class. It's kind of a ripoff from a pure speed perspective, but it was really easy to get a /29 and they will set PTR records for you. None of the fiber options that I can get -- CenturyLink or US Internet have an equivalent service they will sell to residential addresses.
I did have a crazy idea, though -- run pfsense as a cloud VM, IPSec to my home network and present my public facing network via the cloud hosted pfsense static IP. It would crimp my style, but I could get by with 2 or maybe even 1 public IP address. Mostly what I access is fairly non-interactive like file syncs or email, so the added latency or reduced throughput of the IPSec session shouldn't be too burdensome.
I can make it work in a virtual lab setup (I wasn't sure if pfsense could port forward for IPSec tunnel remote networks, but it can).
I figure this way I could indulge in the goodness of gig Internet and enjoy the benefits of a static IP via the cloud.
My only complaints so far are that AWS has no pfesnse images except for a "rental" that's outrageously expensive and has other drawbacks (like no updating; the authors have to release an updated image). I found another host that supports FreeBSD and will let you boot your own ISO installers, but I'm skeptical they have the network that Amazon does and the pricing is less transparent than Amazon.
apart from 1 Gb what else are they doing SCTP in their modern Set Top Box's or IPv6 to bettter handle the contention and streaming ?
seriously PR stuff give us some details...
Can he get a BGP session with them?
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
However, I only use the service to check email and occasionally read the news. I transferred almost 300Mb of data last month. Typing this message seems a bit hefty on the old data usage but I can afford it now.
I was wondering who let the air out of the Intertubes.
That has jack shit to do with it being DOCSIS. As long as the node is not oversubscribed, and the CMTS is not oversubscribed, you can all still get full speeds all day long.
At 1gbit per modem how many people do you think can actually pull that rate at the same time on a node? 2? 3? 4? How many on the average node? 200? 400?
And the fiber to the home that Google (and Verizon, etc.) are selling is NOT a dedicated fiber pair going all the way back to the provider's core. It also uses
Google is doing GPON if I remember correctly which means passive optics and no contested access.
a "local loop" type of topology which is shared among you and your neighbors, and can suffer the exact same oversubscription issues if the provider doesn't keep the equipment upgraded to meet demand.
Comcast's coax offers a max frequency of 1ghz. Light pipes have a max frequency in the hundreds of thz range.
Well, first they had to provide tech support to one customer and put 22 million calls on hold.
Guess they will also start up-selling some gigabit routers!
Many of us don't have the luxury of a duopoly. AT&T doesn't offer DSL where I live, so it's either Comcast or Comcast.
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I hear they're only going to offer one initial patient a full body transplant when the tech becomes available. Scandalous!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
it's not 1 gigabit per second.. it's simply 1 gigabit (per $80).
Remember, this is Comcast we're talking about.
PON is shared.
Check your State's regulations. DSL is carried over the copper and, as such, it has different protection mechanisms built into the applicable laws. Contact your PUC for more information. For example, I can use any DSL service provider that is willing to service my area and there's not a damned thing the telephone company can do about it - at one point, I was getting my service from a company that doesn't even normally service anywhere near me but can - it's just that nobody seems to know about it. Fairpoint (owner of the lines and ISP) must provide access at just about break-even and must still maintain the lines with "best-effort" service.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
...30M down and whatever up.
It's COMCASTIC!
Given that this is Comcast, I wouldn't be surprised if it was all of the above.
"We quoted you 1Gb and we gave you 1Gb. Is it our fault you used it up in the first second? Don't worry, we'll be happy to sell you another. You do have a spare kidney, don't you?"
and GPON is like at most 64:1 I think most systems are 16:1 or 32:1 some are about 8:1.
which makes the reliability but lower speed of dsl
Reliability?
When I was a dsl Admin {for a big bell that shall remain nameless} one of the biggest problems we had was reliability of running dsl through ancient pots lines and it all boiled down to who was paying how much to replace those old lines, some communities would get new lines others wouldn't.
Translation, only to the very rich.... Fuck you poor people.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I can't find any documentation on the upstream speed.
One of our Princeton schools has 100Mbps cable modem service, with a paltry 20Mbps upstream. This is crap for many reasons.
When I asked about getting more upstream speed, they said for only $1000/month I could have 50Mbps upstream with their metro ethernet service.
Comcast sucks.
eh, that's normal for low end service to be asymmetric as it fits most consumers and there is good technical reason for it. You want a business grade symmetrical service, fine, you'll pay out big bucks. quit your whining
Cable has always had better speed
This is changing with DSL speeds getting faster and faster. Which is why the cable companies are upping their speeds.
My apt building has CentryLink fiber running to it and they use the existing telephone infrastructure and g.fast DSL to get the 1GB link to the units.
As a matter of fact, the cable provider in my building still uses DOCSIS 1.1 and has a 10Mb cap so, in my case, DSL is MUCH faster.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I live in Pennsylvania, and I also have internet choices of Comcast or 3G (not 4G, I'm too far outside Philadelphia for 4G) wireless. I have called every DSL provider I could find in the state, none provide service to my property.
On the other hand, I've had Comcast internet for fourteen years with three service outages total. My experience with Comcast, at least locally (north west of Philadelphia) is that if you walk into a branch office and ask for help, the people there and the service technicians will solve your problems. They can't get you lower prices, but they'll get billing and service problems fixed. The Comcast websites and especially their phone support come from the thirteenth level of hell, though.
Consumerist stories about Comcast.
One of the stories: Comcast: 2014 worst company in America.
6 Things Comcast Customers Can Try To Get Some Actual Customer Service
That doesn't sound that bad. My home is in Maine - I am not home currently. My mains electricity is actually my backup. (That's not a joke.) Fiber won't do me much good unless they put it in the ground - they won't. Comcast gets rated worst for customer service on a regular basis in the yearly poll thing that they do.
I'm kind of surprised that you can't get serviced from other ISPs on DSL? The laws (in my area and NC) mean that anyone can do it - and I've found quite a few that have. I have disparate connections and have had more than one ISP at a time. (I was proving a point to my current ISP as they irked me a bit.) At one point, I had a small provider who doesn't even have any physical presence in Maine and, as near as I know, only had a few customers in Maine at all. They had an existing relationship with the telephone company in NH so they were aware of the regulations and had no problem hooking me up. Then I want with Oxford Networks (GWI) and they don't even advertise in my area and all of our communication was done by email.
Every one of my switchovers have been seamless. The network goes out a few days after I get it set up and the outage lasts for about long enough to get a new IP address. That's it. I then double check and call to cancel the old service. As they all send out their own gear, I've never even unboxed some of it. Oddly, they've all sent out their own gear, even when i requested they not do so. I never, ever, use ISP provided gear - a mildly amusing topic for another day. Sometimes they don't even ask for it back. I buy upper-end business class gear or use my own routers, I refuse to use ISP provided gear. Yes, yes that does make them angry. I love DSL for the protections it offers me as a consumer.
I guess, I might be getting fiber by the end of this coming fall. I'll add it but I'll be keeping DSL as my backup. Fiber won't stand up to the weather - we get dozens of trees on the line every year. Dozens... I've seen the copper lines on the ground and still had a pretty decent throughput when I got home. Fiber isn't going to stand up to that and they're not going to invest enough to sink it into the ground. Given how much the ground moves as the frost moves in and out, I'm not actually sure how well it would deal with that.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Google is selling dedicated 1Gb to core bandwidth. Each customer has a 1.25Gb/1.25Gb lamda of light in a shared fiber. That fiber has 32 lambdas and 32 customers for a total of 40Gb/40Gb. That is a single port in an 8 port line-card that has 640Gb/s of bandwidth into the back-plane. The backplane has something like 8 line-cards and a total backplane bandwidth of 5.2Tb and 8+ 400Gb uplinks that plug directly into the core.
Google Fiber actually says you plug "directly" into the core. They call their GPON fiber chassis a "fiber aggregator" because it's really just a mostly dumb Layer 2+ whose sole job is to connection the customer into the core with dedicated bandwidth.
My ISP does a similar thing. A senior network admin said they could literally handle 100% of customers fully saturating all of their connections without issue in their core. They do not over-provision at all in the last-mile or core. They only thing they need to worry about is the trunk, which has at least 3x 95th percentile and 6x if they load-balance to their failover, which they have done when under a DDOS.
Not all PON is shared. Google Fiber uses WDM-PON, which is dedicated per lambda. NG-PON2 will eventually share 25Tb/s of bandwidth down the one fiber. At what point do you stop caring that it's "shared"? When a single fiber has more than 10% of the entire Internet's bandwidth, I don't see the issue. PON typically has great scheduling. You can set guaranteed minimum bandwidth along with maximum ping, also independently of each other. There are PONs that can guarantee that your ping will never go above 0.5ms under any situation, even if you swing from 1Gb/s to 10Mb/s. Of course that's a scheduling guarantee, not a bufferbloat guarantee.
Of course the lower you guarantee the latency, the less efficient the scheduler is at maximizing overall bandwidth. You might only be able to reach 85% peak bandwidth with 0.5ms, but 95% with 2.5ms.
Our other school has a 300Mbps symmetric FIOS connection with static IP for $289/month. I could have 500Mbps if I wanted it for a couple hundred more a month, but we simply don't need that much bandwidth.
Why can't Comcast get anywhere near that for a similar price?
The reason is that, in many areas, Comcast is a monopoly and they see no reason to upgrade their plant. Lack of competition is hurting the advancement of broadband in this country.
That's awesome that you've been able to shop around for DSL options. if they're available in PA, I haven't been able to find them. I'll check again, having more options is always good. Thanks for mentioning it.
I checked, and the first DSL provider I contacted said I lived in an area rural enough that DSL didn't make sense. He could get me service, but nowhere near the Comcast rates in the area.
On the other hand, he said his employer is buying the fiber that Verizon has basically abandoned in the area and building it out themselves. So in a few years, it might be Comcast vs. Frontier in my area. Competition is good.
Nice! Thanks for following up with me. Just to make sure, so that I can relay this to others in the future and do so accurately, you too can get DSL from anyone who's willing to service your area - technically, at least? And, in your case, they opted to not provision service because of 'reasons?'
You said PA... I want to say that Fairpoint operates in PA. If they do AND if you're still interested - give Fairpoint a call. If they seem confused then, if I'm understanding you correctly, you can explain that they are able to provision service for you.
I'm also not sure why the price would be very different. That makes no sense to me. In both Maine and North Carolina the owners of the copper MUST allow access at "reasonable" rates which translates to pretty much "at-cost." I've never had to pay any extra to have my service provided by another company. For example; When I used GWI (I'm on Fairpoint's copper) I paid the standard GWI rates that they charged for any other customer in any other area.
Thanks for the follow-up. I'm curious as to how it plays out - if you go beyond this. You may find little tiny DSL providers who are willing to service you IF you want to look. They'll be reseller and there are a number of them out there - you just need to look and find them.
I did a quick search and came across this small list:
http://pennsylvania.theispguid...
However - there's often a whole bunch of small-time resellers that own neither the copper nor any large customer base. I've found that I get pretty good service with some of them as they're genuinely happy to have the custom. They do put a level between you and the actual copper provider but that doesn't have to be a bad thing.
Feel free to reply via email if you're interested in keeping this going.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."