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Comcast to Verizon FIOS: Suck it.
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/01/08/ces.comcast.ap/index.html
DOCSIS specsRoberts is expected to demonstrate a technology that delivers up to 160 megabits of data per second: It will allow him to download a high-definition copy of "Batman Begins" in four minutes. The technology, DOCSIS 3.0, will start rolling out this year. "If it's as successful as we hope, in 2009 and beyond we will have it available in millions of homes," he said.
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Then, of course comcast will roll out packet shaping 2.0 for fucking with any normal person attempting to utilize these speeds. It's a vicious cycle.
Company B: Hm, well. Regular humans can already buy our solution, so...
Result: Company B wins.
Wake me up when Comcast is rolling this out.
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Saying that their service compares well to FiOS is kind of silly considering that current BPON rates support 622Mbps per segment to split between customer data services and VoD/IPTV services. FiOS also has around 870MHz of QAM bandwidth for their regular television content as well. With GPON upgrades FiOS will have 2.4Gbps of data bandwidth per segment. This ridiculous amount of bandwidth is why the government gave telcos 200 billion dollars to roll out fiber networks all over the US.
Then again, I work for AT&T so I may just be getting the hype train.
XBL: QuazarX
U-Verse doesn't hold a candle to either FiOS or DOCSIS 3.0 cable service. As of right now a majority of their U-verse installations are FTTN and then a VDSL (~25Mbps) to the premises. With 6Mbps reserved for a customer's data line that leaves just 19Mbps to carry video. AT&T uses MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 encoding for their video content which can fit SD content into 2-3Mbps streams and HD content into 6-8Mbps streams. For 1080i HD content you really should have about 10Mbps, 6-8Mbps will only cut it for 720p content. Quite a few people on the interwebs complain about U-verse's HD picture quality compared to QAM or over the air ATSC. Even their FTTP service (if it ever gets widely deployed) is based on a similar IP multicast model where the fiber to the house simply replaces the copper VDSL line from the DSLAM.
Contrast this model to FiOS an 870MHz RF signal is modulated onto the 1550nm wavelength. At the premises the signal is converted back to RF and pumped into the coax cabling. Because it is simply a remodulated RF signal it can carry analog and digital (QAM) channels like an all-coax system would. FiOS still has a 633Mbit downstream data line to split among the 32 subscribers (20Mbit/subscriber) on the segment. With GPON upgrades that will be a 2.4Gbit line (75Mbit/subscriber). With GPON upgrades FiOS will have enough downstream data bandwidth to offer 30Mbit customer connections and still have room for IPTV (VoD, PPV, etc.) for every subscriber.
At this point Verizon wins hands down with respect to bandwidth. They also have a compatibility advantage, the in-wall coax in many peoples' homes will continue to serve up the same QAM signal they get from the cable company. DVRs and HDTVs with QAM tuners, not to mention capture cards for PCs will work like they always have. AT&T is offering a smaller data pipe into the home and requiring that you adopt all of their rented equipment since it's an incompatible IPTV rollout. I think overall FiOS wins this round.
So who cares if DOCSIS 3.0 provides for a greater speed when I'm not using the full available speed of DOCSIS 2.0. I get no benefit.
http://www.cablemodem.com/primer/
Provides a good, very brief, overview of features, but 3.0, while providing a good theoretical increase in my upper limit, still provides for capping my speed by the provider. So will we really see a benefit, specifically in the upload side? Questionable. Marketing hype is my opinion.
With DOCSIS 3.0 up to four data channels can be bonded creating a virtual channel 24MHz wide. This offers customers on that segment a pool of 160Mbps to use. Not only can current customer bandwidth offerings be met but the cable companies can sell higher bandwidth packages and give a reasonable expectation of performance. That being said higher speed lines will likely be oversold as they are today but at least it will take longer and customers will have more bandwidth on any given segment. If cable companies combine DOCSIS 3.0 migration with actual HFC plant build-out they might actually be able to provide every household with the advertised amount of bandwidth.
While tons of bandwidth is an awesome possibility I think everyone ought to be very concerned about how telcos are allowing their bandwidth to be used. Available bandwidth is increasing in the US but it is being increasingly locked down as well. FiOS AUP doesn't allow you to run a server at home. You can get 20Mbps upstream and they forbid you from running your blog or a game server. Obviously they're not shutting down everyone doing such a thing but in order to be allowed to operate servers you have to pay for "business" class service which costs three times as much as home service. This breaks the peering nature of the internet. Unlike broadcast media the internet wasn't designed to ferry information in only one direction. It's been designed from the outset to be a two-way street. </rant>
Comcast for high prices and decent bandwidth
Dial-up
You can guess which one I have. Until Verizon actually PROVIDES FIOS to my door (or more reasonably, the side of my house), they're service capabilities and speed are useless to me. They couldn't be bothered to bring DSL to me, and I don't think they'll care about bringing FIOS to me either. So Comcast is my go-to company right now for any internet speed faster than a snail.
What I'm afraid of is that they will either offer this speed increase at increased prices with a tier system, or they just plain up the prices like they have been the past few years anyway and just use the increased bandwidth to offer more people the same speed they offer now.
1) Keep to their advertisements
2) Don't send me threatening fucking letters because I play games all day.
I am getting fios installed. I will be saving at least 50$ a month. A 200$ circuit city gift card is also really nice to sweeten the deal for a triple play install. I'll let you know how it goes. Also, they move quickly! 5 business days (7 days away) is pretty nice.
Seems they decided to help P2P but be a dick about open access on the 700mhz band.
700mhz lawsuit
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070913-verizon-unhappy-with-700mhz-open-access-requirements-sues-fcc.html
Peer to peer awesome.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/24/verizon_p4p_filesharing/
As far as the quality we experienced went - a layman's term review would be that while the download speeds were very nice, the response time of the TV menus and commands was very noticeable. I assume this has to do with the allocated bandwidth. Now that we have DishTV with AT&T, I definitely miss being able to record three shows at once while watching a 4th (wife likes to record random shows sometimes...). Can't exactly do that with the current Dish setup.
/$0.02
The fuck!? You're getting letters from Comcast because you're playing online a lot?
That hardly uses up any bandwidth, How the hell is that an issue?
Sandvine starts wreaking havoc in my halo 3 games because it sees it at p2p traffic too. Thats one of the driving reasons I'm doing it. I'm not getting anything close to advertised speeds and I have to admit, getting a 200$ giftcard and 15mpbs down and 15mbps up should be very sexy.
The idea that I can get HD content sped up by verizon themselves at 15mbps is very attractive. Or I could stick with comcast and their anti-p2p services.
Such a tough choice.
[/sarcasm]
Really? I have the exact same service at home and I can use bitTorrent just fine.
serach for them on consumerist
They are squeezing more and more channels in a limited space (3 hd channels which barely holds 2) so they are affecting quality for quantity.
That, and lessening the bandwidth crunch for the entire node is the real reason.. the consumer will never see these speeds to their house, but if comcast can provide the bandwidth for 1500 people+ without splitting and building out another node, then they made money.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
Your laggy box is because the box has the CPU of a gameboy.
When FIOS hit my town I called to switch that same day. I got all my HDTV channels back for a cheaper price, and I now have GODLY download & upload speeds.
Comcast is the one doing the proverbial sucking.
Edit: Several months after this announcement, they still don't have anything that can touch FIOS. Whatevah!
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I would be too, but I guess they've gotten tired of cable modems being too cheap and will force people to have a 3.0 modem anyway, just like with 2.0
*Central Alberta, Canada
This makes me laugh and cry at the same time. (Laughing mostly)
Which is fine, since the CPU doesn't do any video conversion or rendering.. there is a dedicated video chip for that.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
Correct. Dedicated decoding chips are what make the video, but that crappy little processor is responsible for the menus.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1008271
Comcast has lowered the bitrate on several HD stations, with more likely to follow.
Thats part of the reason I am dumping them. Two years ago they said they were boosting speed. The haven't.
The keep talking about this speed boost but I am getting 2mbps down and 768up (encripted so its likely less)
I will know tomorrow how much of a difference it is. Honestly, I'm excited. Everything has been smooth since ordering. No need to tear up my yard. Seems the fiber ran right up to our house. 5 business days from ordering tells me they want my business. I have to say, As long as this install doesn't get fucked up, I will be happy.
Any recommendations on a router alternative? I hear the actiontec one isn't so hot. I might have to get them to hook up the ethernet setup instead of the MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance)
They are giving me a 200$ giftcard to circut city so I'm reserving 100$ of that for a new keyboard and then 100$ towards a router of some kind.
That's a really expensive keyboard right there, I tell you what.
I want one of those fancy backlit ones. G15/G11 maybe a saitec Cyborg. Not sure really. It will likely be under 100$ leaving a bit more for a nice router.
Btw, the Mpeg chip on both comcast and verizon's DVR boxes are both CHEAP. I *believe* verizon suffers less image quality loss due to the fact that they don't have to compress it as much. Also, from what I hear, the verizon DVR software is clearly superior to the comcast DVR.
An mpeg2 decoder is an mpeg2 decoder.. if you compare mpeg2 vs mpeg4, you would see that 4 gives greater image quality and compression ..
Then there is how the feed is passed to the customer.. I hear ABC is sent as 720p, and it is untouched. Other channels are sent in various formats that are up / down converted at different points to deliver it as 720p / 1080i to you.
Which leads to bandwidth. Comcast has 38.8 Mbps Qams. At normal quality and compression, you need 19.4 Mbps for EACH HD channel you would like to send. Comcast doesn't have enough bandwidth to limit each QAM to just 2 channels.. so it started putting 3 channels on each, lowering quality to be able to fit.
The links above give great insight into what is happening, although its different for each market. The philly market is particularly bad since we have older QAMs that can't handle that much bandwidth, causing even greater quality loss and giving us less channels. We are set to get 5 out of 8 channels that the rest of the contry has had for a long time on April 3rd or so.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
When I first used the FiOS DVR, it sucked really badly. When I visited my parents recently I noticed that it had been totally upgraded. The device is much more responsive and the UI it much prettier, but the layout of the UI is still totally unintuitive. TiVo it ain't.