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Comment by vault_ | Hacker News Reader

I didn't realize they were actually selling a 10 Gbps service tier as part of this branding. It's never been available in my market, so I assumed that they were advertising the uplink capability of the thing my modem was connected to! Happy to see this go, but I'm still shocked to learn that the name was _less_ misleading than I had thought.

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The article says it provides 10Gbps of service to 98% of customers upon request, which would be powered by fiber-to-the-home. I don't need 10Gbps, but I do want symmetric upload and download speeds. Does anyone know if it's possible to ask them to run fiber and have only an upload speed increase?

I think you're asking for something like their 10G service, but at a lower cost and speed?

> The Comcast "Gigabit Pro" fiber connection that provides 10Gbps speeds costs $299.95 a month plus a $19.95 modem lease fee. It also requires a $500 installation charge and a $500 activation charge

I'm not sure that the pricing for that service actually pays for their installation and equipment costs, so I don't think you'd get much of a discount if you only ran it at 1Gbps symmetric. I did know someone who got the service and didn't bother to make the rest of his equipment work at 10G, so was only using a 1G port. And it works fine, but still costs $320/month + any other taxes and the $1000 install.

I had gigabit pro for a few years, they gave me a half off promo that made it worth it at $150/mo, which is not much more than the close to $100 after miscellaneous fees that the regular gigabit down 35Meg up HFC cable plan costs, not to mention the fiber reliability is so much better - no brief outages and I even had Comcast business proactively reach out to replace gear when their monitoring noticed the fiber switch starting to fail.

I think they also discounted the install and activation to be $500 total.

I split it among around 8 housemates which included the upstairs unit of our house, so it ended up being very affordable and there was always extra bandwidth to go around. The main benefit I enjoyed being greater than 35Mbit upload speed.

> The article says it provides 10Gbps of service to 98% of customers upon request

This part is funny to me because I've tried to sign up for their FttH and they declined despite it being in the area, and the same thing happened to others I know. I'm not sure how they came to that percentage but I don't believe it.

+1. I've read in various forums they will only install it if the construction cost is less than a few thousand dollars. This means they will say it's "available" on the order page, but then decline to install it.

I suspect there's something like of the people who go through qualification and get an offer from Comcast 98% request to install it.

You probably didn't give them all the info unless you were ready to pay for it. And all the other people that get disqualified didn't count.

> provides 10Gbps of service to 98% of customers upon request

this sounds like PR doublespeak weasel words for burst vs sustained.

Oh it's on-request. I followed their marketing link and it only offered me 1G so I assumed it was unavailable. Their big advantage is they have good coverage and many municipalities will preserve that by preventing other telecom companies from putting their alternative technologies in (say FttH).

You should push to have fiber. Once you get 1gb symmetrical (in my fortunate case after moving), there is no going back.

Not-fond memories of getting through to Crapcast support to resolve outage (e.g. cable laid in 90s failed) and then being pitched a "a great deal just for you" of "upgrading" to get catv sh*t package, as I waited.

Damn though, Crapcast did get to IPv6 fast and that specifically was solid in my previous house.

Last I knew, they still needed to finish working with their counterpart monopoly on their collaborative new Xumo device and get all the systems lined up to use it.

Then they need to kick the little old grandma's still watching traditional cable off their network and set them up on a new Xumo streaming box instead. Then they drop the old video channels and use their frequencies to provide faster service on the same old copper wires.

Not sure this is right. DOCSIS4.0 (which I think is what you are referring to?) doesn't require TV channels to be moved off plus it can coexist with existing DOCSIS3.0/3.1 (I think the plan is to actually bond 3.0, 3.1 and 4.0 channels together - much like how most 3.1 rollouts actually are majority 3.0 channels for BC purposes).

DOCSIS4.0 does use higher frequencies though and this requires a lot of additional work to upgrade the infra to support this.

I think what Comcast is calling '10G' is the fact you can now order a totally new FTTH run which doesn't use coax instead.

Tbh it's a confused strategy. If you're going to offer XGS-PON to everyone, why bother with DOCSIS4.0? It doesn't really make sense to run fibre runs just to one customer, you could probably do a whole street in not much more time.

I don't know how coax internet works, or how the channel allocations work, but it seems to me if they can offer 2Gbps/200Mbps already why can't we opt for a channel reallocation and get like 1Gbps symmetrical, or at least 1Gbps/500Mbps or something?

I do understand the legacy channel allocations were designed for almost entirely download - but 2Gbps? That can't be...

The way those cable modem systems work is essentially laying a data channel (usually several) on top of the existing coaxial cable network, similar to DSL laying data on top of the existing telephone network. However this means the cards which transmit and receive are still very much analog beasts, pumping out some incredible signal levels to as far as possible. Similar to DSL, the download centric focus is built into the design. Also, your small modem can't scream nearly as loud as the downstream signal can so some signal loss is more likely, limiting the upload channels. Finally a cable modem network is usually quite shared, with something like 8 transmission lines feeding entire neighborhoods or cities. Depending on node congestion you may not even get your advertised speeds. At least with DSL your line is basically dedicated to you lol

> I don't know how coax internet works, or how the channel allocations work, but it seems to me if they can offer 2Gbps/200Mbps already why can't we opt for a channel reallocation and get like 1Gbps symmetrical, or at least 1Gbps/500Mbps or something?

Because they cannot actually offer it, it is all marketing bullshit.

Always assume coaxial upload bandwidth is slim to none. They probably just advertise a burst speed you get for 5 seconds. If it is not symmetrical, it is not real in my mind.

How do burst speeds work? What is happening when you get, like, 10X faster upstream speed - for an instant - and then it drops back to its normal crawl?

I assume they take it from the neighbors, which is why you never see coaxial cable internet providers advertise upload bandwidth. They only ever state download, and even then, those are also burst speeds, so you assume if you buy 100Mbps down from coaxial you only get 50Mbps or less sustained.

Because they are heavily oversubscribed and don’t want to invest in fiber infrastructure to increase capacity.

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