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We see this happening every day in Canada, since the CRTC mandated providing access to telco/cable copper for Third-Party ISPs. I finally managed to switch off

We see this happening every day in Canada, since the CRTC mandated providing access to telco/cable copper for Third-Party ISPs. I finally managed to switch off Rogers Cable in Southern Ontario but it took 5 phone calls, a forgotten disconnect, three offers of 15% off $132.99 as their "best offer" and a few callbacks, but I finally managed to switch to Start.ca for $94.99. With taxes, I'm saving $41 and getting the same speed, 150/10. (146/9.7 from speedtest.net but who's counting...) The best part? Rogers would lie on speed tests, using "SpeedBoost" tech they keep to themselves (a recent change) which would lie to me and show 300/10 speeds -- but instead, when downloading, 18MB/s or 150mbps, would be all I see. The best part though? Copper cable is capable of gigabit speeds and the big companies are simply lying if they say otherwise. They've plans to get things to 2gbps in a couple years and could fast track that if Google, or regulation, really kicks things off. But can you imagine how much they'd charge for such speeds? Rogers already wants $225.99 for a simple symmetric 250mbps. AT&T U-Verse will soon offer 300mbps for $199. And like Rogers, probably a modem rental fee on top of that. Oh -- see also http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-US-is-Creating-a-Massive-New-Cable-Broadband-Monopoly-124875 http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-US-is-Creating-a-Mass... http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/First-DOCSIS-31-Modems-to-Hit-45-Gbps-126359 http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/First-DOCSIS-31-Modems-to...

quink 13y ago
> Copper cable is capable of gigabit speeds Assuming you're not talking about HFC, POTS might be capable of shoving through signals into the dozens of Megahertz, yes. Maybe even into the low hundreds. That would give you a speed near enough 1 Gbps. But over a distance of, over your typical barely twisted 0.40mm copper wrapped in nothing put some PVC and PE, maybe three or four dozen metres. And that's with G.Fast which is not even seeing any large deployments quite yet. And if you're talking about HFC, that is a shared medium. So, sure it can do massive speeds. You can shove, over let's say the 800 Mhz you have, about 5 Gbps, sure, if there's no TV on it. But it's going to be contented across all the other users on the same circuit, which might be in the hundreds.
- lstamour 13y ago
  True. Let's call 5gbps over cable a last ditch attempt to offer fibre-expense plans to places cable companies have no intention of upgrading to fibre. They'll start by using fibre as a way of raising prices across the board, of course ... and that's what we really rebel against. It's not the bandwidth available as much as how there's a line in other countries (as shown in those graphs) of 100mbps speeds for under $40. We'll never see that for a good 10 years here... if ever. They do want to say that "today's speeds are good enough" -- read as: we're not dropping prices anytime soon for current speeds.

quink 13y ago

> Copper cable is capable of gigabit speeds Assuming you're not talking about HFC, POTS might be capable of shoving through signals into the dozens of Megahertz, yes. Maybe even into the low hundreds. That would give you a speed near enough 1 Gbps. But over a distance of, over your typical barely twisted 0.40mm copper wrapped in nothing put some PVC and PE, maybe three or four dozen metres. And that's with G.Fast which is not even seeing any large deployments quite yet. And if you're talking about HFC, that is a shared medium. So, sure it can do massive speeds. You can shove, over let's say the 800 Mhz you have, about 5 Gbps, sure, if there's no TV on it. But it's going to be contented across all the other users on the same circuit, which might be in the hundreds.

lstamour 13y ago
True. Let's call 5gbps over cable a last ditch attempt to offer fibre-expense plans to places cable companies have no intention of upgrading to fibre. They'll start by using fibre as a way of raising prices across the board, of course ... and that's what we really rebel against. It's not the bandwidth available as much as how there's a line in other countries (as shown in those graphs) of 100mbps speeds for under $40. We'll never see that for a good 10 years here... if ever. They do want to say that "today's speeds are good enough" -- read as: we're not dropping prices anytime soon for current speeds.