Comcast to bring two-gigabit Internet service to Bay Area, boost existing tiers | Hacker News Reader

Comcast to bring two-gigabit Internet service to Bay Area, boost existing tiers

pcworld.com

44 pointsprostoalex65 comments

I wonder if this will still have the 250 GB (or is it 350 GB, now?) cap on data transfer? Either way you could blow through the cap in less then 25 minutes.

They should at least do what my provider does...cap in place but midnight to 8AM is exempted. That way the people that feel a need to download the entire internet can still do so...but in a way that doesn't affect anyone else & doesn't require additional capacity.

Obviously true uncapped would be ideal but it strikes me as a decent compromise. And 8 hours of gigabit ever day gets you pretty far if the aim is to move data...

True uncapped is only ideal if you download a lot. Personally based on my usage, I wish there was an option for fast, cheap, and metered service.

> but midnight to 8AM is exempted.

That reminds me of old times in Brazil. Phone calls where charged for a single pulse from midnight to 6am or 8am (can't remember). Dial-up was the only option available and we'd all go online between those times, usually sneaking to the computer so our parents wouldn't see us, because we had class the next day :)

Comcast doesn't have caps in The Bay Area (at least not according to what they say on their website) and where they do have caps, they are tiered like the speeds are tiered - higher speeds, bigger cap.

http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-u...

That's just the page for new plans. I've been told by comcast customers (I don't live their), that Comcast certainly has caps. Can anybody who is a Comcast customer confirm that?

No, they don't have caps at all in the Bay Area. I live here and I've confirmed it both theoretically (talking to Comcast reps) and practically (downloading over 1TB each month since I signed up).

That said, I remember hearing somewhere that they were waiting for the TWC merger to be resolved before moving ahead. Not sure how true that is.

My account page has a note stating that "Enforcement of the 250GB data consumption threshold is currently suspended". I am a Bay Area customer.

Huh, I'm in east bay and haven't seen anything like that. Where would I find it?

According to Comcast it should be available here: http://xfinity.com/mydatausage

Chicago Comcast subscriber. 250GB cap. Here's a screenshot of the Comcast site showing my usage:

https://i.imgur.com/oOEQMTt.png

It does say "Enforcement of the 250GB data consumption threshold is currently suspended" on the page.

Thanks - it sounds like California and Chicago both have Caps that aren't currently being enforced. Makes sense.

What I'd love to see in California is AT&T roll out G.Fast in all the U-Verse neighborhoods (It's already in a lot of places). A single DSLAM (over whatever they put in those little huts), can cover about 750 homes within 500m, and that gives you a 100 mbits/sec on a single pair of copper.

They don't have caps in the Bay Area. I've done at least 1TB of traffic each month since I've signed up with them. I live in East Bay.

There is no data cap on the new service: https://twitter.com/jlivingood/status/583576969188667392

Over here in Chattanooga, TN we have had 1Gb service for a while, but nearby Atlanta it was only when Google started talking about bringing fiber to the Atlanta area, that Comcast started talking about boosting speeds in Atlanta.

Is the gigabit service subject to the same data caps as their regular service?

I assume the Chattanooga 1Gb is the municipal network that runs ~ $70/mo.

Some say that this is all Google are really trying to achieve with Google Fiber...

Waiting for the twist...

Will it be that the word "customers" means two houses owned by Comcast executives?

Will the soon to be announced prices be 50x the Google fiber price and then used as a justification that "customers just don't want fast internets"?

Or, and I know this is shocking, will Comcast provide a quality service and support system?

You forgot to list 2Gbps down but 5Mbps up.

The article specifically said it would be symmetrical. I'll wait and see on the pricing though. Sonic does 1Gbps for $50 in Sebastopol. Pretty limited, but still.

Is Sonic fiber still limited to that stretch of Florence Ave? Wish they'd bring it to more residential areas (I'm in Santa Rosa), but I guess they're focusing on business customers.

It will all end in tiers. $200 a month for first world internet, $70 a month for the crap-tacular service that people can afford.

As much as I dislike Comcast, I pay $80/month for 105/10 Mbps and that's with no promotional pricing in a local monopoly.

I strongly dislike Comcast but their pricing isn't incredibly unfair.

Plus according to this article, they're about to bump my speeds by 50% without making me pay anything.

I pay $80 for gigabit, I might drop down to 100Mbit for $60 though.

I pay $65/mo for gigabit.

I live way out in the country so my gigabit is $99. :(

$80 for that speed is awful compared to many places in the world.

Oh I know it can be better, I'm just disagreeing with the hyperbole in the comment I was replying to. I also come from Australia where it's much worse so I'm not used to complaining this much.

They've already said it will be $400 (6x Google Fiber price). I don't know why so many articles don't mention this.

The question is, will Netflix still be throttled at those speeds? Will torrents? Because even now people supposedly have 50Mbps, which is more than enough for Netflix which only requires 3Mbps for HD streaming, yet somewhow when they play Netflix it often works under <1Mbps. Use a VPN and it magically starts working perfectly again. Strange, huh?

So yeah, before anyone gets too excited about this, let's wait and see how it actually works, and whether it will actually arrive soon, or it's just another "fiber to the press release" to keep people cheering for Comcast for the next 3 years until they actually start deploying it.

Can you provide a source?

Maybe there is no twist, because the Google Fiber has put enough pressure on them. Who other than communists would think that competition can work wonders?

Judging by the fibre I've witnessed AT&T laying in the area, I think the coverage is going to be more extensive than you suggest.

They may be trying to compete with AT&T rather than Google Fiber.

Don't forget that on the consumer side, anything above 1Gb is an entirely different kettle of fish. We can achieve 1Gb over the most common cat5/e cables (1000BASE-T) but they simply don't support carrying anything more, same goes for the NIC on most computers, it's just not common to get anything above 1Gb.

The main benefit that is reasonably achievable for most people would be that they could aggregate at over a Gb, so they could connect multiple devices and expect a full Gb for each. Even then you would have to ensure they either both connect to the router directly or you have > 1Gb towards any switches (either 10Gb or LAG).

Achieving more than 1Gb on a single device would require the use of both cat6e cable or fiber and having a 10Gb NIC on that device - this is assuming the Comcast router even has 10Gb ports! And even then I'm sure they're would be some other hardware/firmware/software issues to tackle...

An interesting problem though....as for delivery, it could be using GPON, most active point to point is either 1 or 10Gb whereas most existing GPON ports support up to 2.5Gb which seems to fit better.

I imagine it will be either 10GbE or Nx1GbE on the CPE (or maybe both). 2.5GbE & 5GbE will be out soon (already in new Atom CPUs) and will work over Cat5e/Cat6 up to 100m.

Newer 802.11ac devices can in theory do ~1.7Gbps, about 1Gbps in practice.

2.5Gbps = NBASE-T. http://www.nbaset.org/

5Gbps = MGBASE-T. http://www.mgbasetalliance.org/

My real world testing of 1.3Gbps 802.11ac only yields about 250Mbps of real throughput. Wifi is half duplex and has more overhead than Ethernet.

Good interview with Matthew Gast on 802.11ac

http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-enterprise-tech/135

I've tested my R7000 router and MacBook Pro up to ~900Mbps, which is just as good as Ethernet (within 10-15Mbps).

Both MG and N BaseT support 2.5G and 5G, not sure why there are 2...

I just want fiber for the improved latency. When I had Verizon FiOS in LA I was playing Quake Live with 4ms RTT to local servers! It was glorious.

The worst thing about cable is MoCA ("Multimedia over Coax"), because it seems to always add significant latency/jitter.

So much for net neutrality killing all investment in new infrastructure.

Curious, from a strategy stand point what's the reasoning behind Google not launching gigabit in the Bay Area? At this point they've likely learned and scaled, and Comcast doesn't want to seem like a laggard in a large market. But even if it was 1 month delay for Google, I'd still switch and kill our Comcast account.

Borg! (Not that I would rather have my Internet from Comcast)

Google Fiber prioritizes municipalities that make it easy to get things done. San Francisco makes it very, very difficult to get things done.

How is Comcast doing it? And is it in a particularly non-Google way?

They started the process 35 years ago.

When broadband internet became a thing, their cables were already in the ground, and they already had long-established underground and pole rights-of-way.

Born and lived most of my life in the Bay Area.

My Dad got us @Home cable Internet, which is the same infrastructure Comcast currently uses, in around 1997 when it first became available. It eventually became AT&T broadband Internet (attbi), and then Comcast bought it (IIRC, might be missing something).

My older brother heard about Napster right when it came out and I remember getting very impressive download speeds (I think I saw it get to 600 KB/s or 1 MB/s at some point). We were also part of the batch of people that got banned for uploading Metallica mp3s. After that I found GNUtella (although I had no clue what GNU was at the time, just heard about it as an alternative service) and Kazaa. I also moved on to mIRC to get mainly anime and music videos. All in the late 90s, early 2000s. The infrastructure has served us very well!

I don't really know about the laws, but I assume the issue in municipalities is laying down new infrastructure, even though you'd think Comcast monopoly is more of an issue.

Interesting, thanks for the answer!

Is it a local policy? Could there a be a proposition at the local level to change or overturn this?

San Jose is on their larger list 30 or so of cities.

As much as it pains me to say it, if you want good cable modem service, get Comcast Biz class. You'll spend more--obviously--but you'll get faster speeds, no download cap whatsoever, and far better support. You're generally at the front of the line for all things support-related. For a remote worker like me, it's the best way to go. That said, if I move to a Google Fiber town, I will drop them like a rock.

Curious, are there sites or (single) torrents where people are maxing out their download capacity at these rates? Don't content providers throttle now? I have WebPass (100MB) and I'm never able to pull down more than 3-4MBytes/sec, even from Apple (e.g. Xcode). SpeedTest shows the connection is indeed 100MB.

I'm on Webpass (100/100) and can hit 11MB/s fairly consistently on torrents and downloads, so it's certainly possible. This was enough of a problem that I had to connect my media center directly via cables instead of wifi as the wifi was slower than the connection.

Getting that speed consistently would really depend on the capacity of the backing server and other various details (i.e. many small downloads will result in limited throughput due to connection overheads).

* P.S. I think you meant to note 100Mbps vs 100MB

yes sorry 100Mb not 100MB

Downloading from one-click hosters such as uploaded or keep2share is easily possible with speeds exceeding 50 MB/s. When using a download manager (i.e. multiple concurrent downloads, with, say, 6 connections), I can max out a Gigabit (i.e. 117 MB/s) from these hosters.

The same holds for Debian and Fedora mirror servers.

For torrents, the ramp-up typically takes too long, i.e. at the time when you got enough peers to max out your line, the file is already downloaded :).

Pretty much only Linux mirrors and repos :-D

Everyone else is limiting speeds (including Google Drive and OneDrive but interestingly, not all the time, and they were not capping last year), but you can download more files at the same time to saturate your connection.

It's why I never got Gigabit even though I have the option. I see no point in it, I use wireless everywhere and am not about to invest several hundred $$ for some routers just to be able to stream 10 HD movies at the same time or something :-)

2Gbit looks like a publicity stunt to me. Customers won't see an actual speed increase from a 1GBit service unless they're willing to give up the convenience of wireless.

AC wireless can be pretty fast.

I wonder if they use 10GBase-T, NBase-T, or something else.

That's my question. This has to be 10GbaseT.

It's fiber directly to the home above 1Gb/s. At or below 1Gb/s, its Docis 3.1 over the cable last mile (with fiber to the neighborhood node/cabinet).

http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/imagine-where-2-...

I am talking about the uplink to the router.

I'd assume a custom Comcast provided router, with individual ports at 1Gb and wireless at 802.11ac. Very few, if any, consumer devices out there with 10GigE hardware, and an even smaller amount of sites out there that will let you saturate a 1Gb link directly (torrents perhaps).

To what end? Obviously faster is better, but right now anything above 500 faces a serious diminishing returns problem let alone 1 gig vs 2 gig.

Oh no... please do not discourage providers from offering higher speeds.

I understand that that individual devices might not be able to take advantage of of such speeds. But remember that any household could have a number of devices using the internet at the same time.

I get that, and I don't want to discourage anyone from offering higher speeds. I don't think you quite understand the scale though.

As you say multiple devices...a 1 gigabit line means about a 100 people can sit at your house and stream 1080p youtube. Now unless you've got a very big family upgrading that to 200 people (2 gigabit) will not make any real difference.

Perhaps when 8K+ video shows up then it might make a difference, but for now few things need 1 gigabit, let alone 2.

It's still Comcast though.

Are the speed increases also coming in May?

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