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DOCSIS 3.1 gigabit class modem goes online in Philadelphia
- 0x0 11y agoSo now you can blast through your monthly bandwidth quota in mere minutes? :P
- msh 11y agoWhile I don't like quotas, I don't understand this kind of comment. Even people who don't use large amounts of bandwidth can't benefit from high speeds.
- ulfw 11y agoQuotas become more and more restrictive the higher the bandwidth is (e.g. a 1GB limit on a 2G mobile network is basically unlimited traffic due to how long it takes to fill it. The same 1GB limit on a 4G LTE+ network could be consumed in mere minutes). > Even people who don't use large amounts of bandwidth can't benefit from high speeds. What does that sentence mean? I don't understand this kind of comment.
- msh 11y agoSorry. There was a 't too much. It should be: Even people who don't use large amounts of bandwidth can benefit from high speeds. My point is, when I went from 50/10 cable to gigabit fiber there was no change in how much bandwidth I was using. The things I did just went faster.
- cptskippy 11y agoWell when someone can now use Netflix Super HD and don't know they need to go into their Netflix account and disable it, they'll suddenly be using a great deal more bandwidth than before.
- msh 11y agoyes, but unless they had so slow speeds that super HD would not work I dont see how it changes things.
- Gracana 11y agoThat's okay, you can just call up Comcast's customer service agents and they'll be super polite and friendly and make all sorts of wonderful promises while they fail to do anything useful at all.
- 5parks 11y agoI'm sure cable execs are kicking themselves for not implementing usage-based billing two decades ago. Nearly every other service is usage-based but no one complains, because they've always been usage-based.
- ju-st 11y agoCompetition existed in the past.
- 5parks 11y agoFrom who? Dial-up SLIP/PPP and ISDN could hardly be considered competitive with a DOCSIS product. The market is far more competitive now, with increased FTTP deployments and advanced wireless.
- nitrogen 11y agoBefore the frequencies were reallocated to mobile usage, Sprint ran a cable-modem-over-wireless product called Broadband Direct that was pretty nice for its time. The system had a 30+ mile range to the towers, so lots of area could be covered with few towers. The DSL/cable discrepancy also used to be smaller, and there were more, smaller cable providers.
- mhuffman 11y agoI think most other items are usage-based because when you use them they are gone. When you use electricity or water, more needs to be generated/cleaned. Not so with Internet. It is more like phone service. If I make a call, nothing needs to be rebuilt for another one. I believe it is obvious to people and that is why there is push-back.
- edude03 11y agoThe difference is that cable companies want it both ways. They charge you a minimum for a set amount of serivce AND they charge you if you use more than that AND you don't always get what you pay for (since it's "up to" xx mb/s) With water if I don't use it I pay zero. If I use xxxx gallons I pay for xxxx gallons and if I turn the tap and water doesn't come out I get a bill credit at the very least. With the internet I pay $50/ month whether I use it or not, if I pay for 100gb and I use 105gb then I pay $20 for the overage and if I have DOCSIS and everyone in my neighbourhood is using their internet then too bad for me that it doesn't work.
- RKearney 11y agoYou really have to appreciate how Comcast really tries to sound advanced with "World's First" in the headline. Assuming the upload will again be 1/5th the download speeds, you're looking at 1Gbps down / 200 Mbps up for a total bandwidth of 1.2 Gbps. That means in a 30 day month you can use up to 388,800 GB of bandwidth. Subtract your 300 GB "courtesy bandwidth" and you're at 388,500 GB over your courtesy limit. At $10 per 50GB you'll need 7,770 separate 50GB "packages" at $10 each totaling $77,700 per month in overages.
- 0x0 11y agoSo if someone were to ping-flood a Comcast user's home IP... that could get expensive quickly, and there is almost nothing the user could do about it. So weird, and quite unfair.
- rayiner 11y agoThat calculation really doesn't apply to 99% of what people use their internet connections for. It takes me 15 minutes to update Office over me 50 mbps connection. I'm not going to download twice as many updates because my net connection is twice as fast. I'm not going to buy twice as many iTunes movies or twice as many games on Steam.
- click170 11y agoPerhaps, but many people watch Netflix, and by default Netflix consumes as much bandwidth as it can in order to stream at the highest quality available. This is going to sting for those non-teksavvy Netflix users.
- pandaman 11y agoIf this had been true then Netflix should have been digitizing analog sources dynamically, which would be all over the news. So I doubt Netflix does that, they only can use as much bandwidth as there is in their sources.
- 5parks 11y agoThe majority of users already pull the top bitrate. The lower bitrates are only used by mobile clients and users on very bad connections.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoblast through your monthly bandwidth quota in mere minutes It would take 40 minutes of gigabit download to hit the typical Comcast monthly limit of 300 GB. And then I guess you sit around and cry for 29 days, 23 hours, and 20 minutes. Perhaps they'll throw in a few extra GB if you sign up for this.
- FanaHOVA 11y agoWonder if they activated at the Comcast Building too. Looking forward to test it out next time.
- ck2 11y agoThe problem in the USA is these announcements are more geared to train consumers to accept prices to go up even further on every tier level. However this announcement specifically says they don't have to make any infrastructure changes so it will be hard for them to explain price increases.
- brianwawok 11y agoHow could 10x the bandwidth not require backend changes? Would need at least 10 gb to each neighborhood which I doubt they have now.
- e28eta 11y agoYou're assuming they do something else. Isn't it enough to blame slowness on "congestion" and then use it to justify bandwidth caps? "The reason it's slow is your greedy neighbors - we'll charge them more money and then you'll get the speed we promised." Yes, I'm being overly cynical. I do not like Comcast.
- Zigurd 11y agoInfrastructure price-per-bit has been plummeting.
- mschuster91 11y ago> Would need at least 10 gb to each neighborhood which I doubt they have now The backend connectivity is just a matter of exchanging the coax-fibre gateway in the roadside boxes and at the fibre terminator. No need to dig up the streets for that, and in most cases, each roadside box is connected with multiple fibre pairs so additional capacity can be deployed with ease.
- brianwawok 11y agoSure no one said they need to dig up the street. But they do need to make CHANGES.
- Ecco 11y agoNumericable has been offering 800 Mbit cable in several cities in France for over a year now :-) Oh, and unmetered BTW :)
- quicksilver03 11y agoBut not IPv6, which is a shame. Can't wait for Free to get their act together and wire my apartment to a better fiber connection.
- cptskippy 11y agoIs not being IPv6 really a problem? 90% of the world isn't. Comcast has the largest IPv6 network but it's deployment is dual stack so most everyone is still using IPv4.
- edude03 11y agoI hate to be negative about progress but I wish companies would stop deploying DOCSIS and other time division multiple access strategies like that. Because DOCSIS is TDMA based its always going to have a problem with latency jitter and performance consistency and yet cable companies like to pretend it's the same as active Ethernet. Comparing 1gbit cable to 1gbit Ethernet is like comparing a dslr and a smartphone based on their megapixels.
- Dylan16807 11y agoBut how big is the jitter? A bit of searching suggests it's typically under a millisecond, and that's barely anything. Most modems I've seen have a baseline latency of something like 20 milliseconds.
- api 11y ago20ms baseline latency is pathetic. Ping from a data center in Los Angeles to one in San Francisco is typically a little over half what it apparently takes your modem to send a packet upstream. 20ms is like half way across the country. Why is latency at the last mile so awful? What is the latency typically like on stuff like Google Fiber?
- pixl97 11y agoThe DOCSIS 3.0 modems we use at our local provider have no where near that much latency. 5-8ms is typical.
- scandinavian 11y agoBaseline on my DOCSIS 3.0 modem is as low as 5 ms when I've tested it. That anyone should care about a 5-ish ms overhead is ridiculous imo.
- edude03 11y agoIt's great when it's that low, my problem with DOCSIS is that it's not consistent. When there is low utilization in your neighbourhood it's fine but when everyone is home for the holidays for example it becomes unbearable. For example, I usually get about 8ms to a server hosted in the same city as me (10ms to google) but on bad days it gets as high as 60-80ms. I regularly tether my LTE enabled phone where I get around 20ms but it's consistent.
- steanne 11y agoah, THAT explains why verizon finally rolled out fios to my section of philly in the last month or so.
- ksec 11y agoHas anyone experience DOCSIS services where you simply can not connect / renew IP for a few hours, and then after some reseting and messing around you will finally get your IP again. Another concern I had is how much more complexity DOCSIS 3.1 is adding. The chip to decode easily get overheat. While subsequent version of the chip controller and devices will improve, most cable provider will use the first generation for as long as possible. Where is G.Fast? The DSL equivalent of DOCSIS 3.1?
- toupeira 11y ago> Has anyone experience DOCSIS services where you simply can not connect / renew IP for a few hours, and then after some reseting and messing around you will finally get your IP again. Sounds like the ISP doing maintenance, had that every few weeks late at night when I was still on cable.
- mrbill 11y agoI've had Comcast "Business Class" service (50/10, five statics, no caps or blocked ports) for almost five years now, after I had to move my colo box home when the ISP it was hosted at changed owners (lost a sweet discount I was getting as an ex-employee/consultant). As someone who spent years in the ISP industry (at multiple companies) and does sysadmin/networking for a living, I never thought I would say "I'm happy with Comcast" - but I do. Then again, I pay $150/month, quite a bit more than their normal customers... but every time I've had any sort of issue (usually on their end) it's been resolved rather quickly, without having to jump through hoops or go through scripts. I was told that the Business Class techs here in Houston are the former 3rd-tier techs for Time Warner. It was nice, for example, when I called in to get some reverse DNS done for my static IPs, to be talking directly to the guy who was typing them in as I spoke to him. At one point about six months after I got everything set up, I wasn't getting the full upstream that I paid for - even to Comcast's own internal systems (which eliminates the "Internet congestion" factor). After a couple of phone calls, I woke up on a Saturday to a knock on my door. Three techs, two supervisors. "We're not leaving until this is fixed, and we brought a completely unlocked modem to see just what your line will handle.." They laughed and declined to "accidentally" leave that one for my account. :)
- pasbesoin 11y agoSo, if you want to buy your own (quality and/or to avoid their "shared/public" wifi/phone functionality), what are the current recommendations for this speed level? For residential? For business class? (Is it still the Motorola line?)