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Comcast Provides Uncapped 1 Gb Service To 1 Customer -- of 22.4 Million (myajc.com)

Posted by timothy on from the someone's-got-to-brave-it dept.

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.

5 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. First thought... by pushing-robot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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?
    1. Re:First thought... by LordSkippy · · Score: 5, Funny

      Remind me why competition among public utilities is bad again?

      Because big telecom will need to cut prices to be competitive. And you know what happens then? All the C-level executives will have to cut back and get just the large Jacuzzi instead of the extra large Jacuzzi! That's one less hooker you can fit in there, you know. We can't have that, now can we?

      --
      My karma is in a nose dive
    2. Re:First thought... by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 5, Informative

      I live near Tempe, Arizona, a city that Google had just legislatively cleared to officially make one of their Fiber cities. Just after that happened, Cox sued the city to prevent it from happening.

      Meanwhile, guess what's currently going on? Just about every neighborhood in that city has signs near it saying that Cox is beginning a fiber rollout. That city, and that city alone, and none of the surrounding ones. There were already a few deployments in the more affluent areas in neighboring towns, however in Tempe it seems every neighborhood is getting it.

      My guess is that this is one of Cox's cash cow markets and they dare not risk losing it, so they use the courts to make sure that they get ahead of the game.

  2. The one redeeming Comcast virtue by swb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Like their customer service... by Etherwalk · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, first they had to provide tech support to one customer and put 22 million calls on hold.