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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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.

> 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.

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