2011-04-15
Lots of news on the web today that Comca ...
Lots of news on the web today that Comcast in the US is offering a new cable Internet service with 105 megabit/second downstream speed. I first read it in Comcast Offers Smoking-Fast Broadband at Wallet-Burning Price - Wired. Also at Comcast bumps up speed for home-Internet users - USA Today.In the advertising they compare it to T-1 speeds (1.544 megabit/second symmetrical): this service is more than 60 times as fast. Well, it is in the downstream direction at least, I see no mention at all of the upstream speed.
But as I wrote in Usenet newsgroup comp.dcom.telecom aka the telecom digest in response, the monthly cap at comcast is still lower than the one on that business T-1.
Jim Bennett wrote in <20110415041510.GD32349.msgid.telecom.csail.mit.edu>: >> Jon Swartz, writing in USA TODAY [April 14, 2011] wrote: >> >> The service delivers data at 105 megabits per second - more than 60 >> times faster than a T-1 line, which most businesses rely on, Comcast says. >> > Comcast has been comparing their basic business package to T1 service in > their radio ads for a while now. I have always found it to be an > "apples to oranges" comparison, because most businesses that I know who > have a T1 use it for phone service - as it was intended. It (has been) a popular measure of bandwidth: I have seen cases where marketing types of european internet-related companies kept insisting an answer whether they had T1 or T3 connectivity (back when T1 was 'affordable' for a company and a T3 'expensive'). Having something else was incomprehensible. But there is one thing a (business-rate) T1 Internet connection offers[3] which comcast isn't even getting close to: you can fill it with IP traffic 24 hours per day for the entire month and the worst that could happen is a salesguy calling up if you might be interested in an upgrade. Back of the envelope calculation[1]: that's over 380 gigabyte/month in one direction. Current highest monthly cap for comcast services is 250 gigabyte/month[2]. [1] 150000 bytes/second * 3600 seconds * 24 hour * 30 days = 388800000000 bytes. [2] source: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/comcast_rolls_out_105mbps_internet_across_nation [3] based on http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1825