50Mbps Cable Launched on Long Island 291
the-dark-kangaroo writes "Cable Vision have teamed up with Narad Networks to provide a new 50Mbps broadband service in the New York metropolitan area. The current deployment has a capability of 100Mbps (the connections are symmetric) with future developments allowing up to 10Gbps connections. The system utilises current cabling systems allowing enterprise level connections to homes and businesses."
In other news (Score:5, Informative)
Cable Vision? No thanks. (Score:4, Informative)
not only 100 Mbit, GIGAbit. (Score:3, Informative)
And also, IIRC, those gigabit connections were available in Japan/Korea before in Sweden, don't have any link to use as confirmation though.
Re:They can't even handle 10mbit/1mbit (Score:1, Informative)
Re:They can't even handle 10mbit/1mbit (Score:2, Informative)
I have some relatives up in the New Jersey area. They generally run Bit Torrent all night, at a full 100Kbps (On non-standard ports). The one time they upload some pictures to one of my servers via FTP on port 20, they get capped. I'm agreeing with the Anonymous Coward here, OOL's capping system seems to be designed for preventing users from running servers.
I will give OOL this though, uncapping is a painless procedure.
Hope they can afford to finish this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In other news (Score:3, Informative)
TCP/IP class 101 in session (Score:3, Informative)
When my cable went to 4Mbit, they increased the upstream to 512Kbit. When I'm downloading at a full 4Mbit via http, I'm almost completely saturating the 512Kbit upstream. So they didn't increase my upstream because they were just feeling nice, they did it because they had to, so the downstream would scale upwards.
If it were really 50Mbit downstream, they'd need to give something like 8Mbit up, or at the very least 4. Unless, of course, it's just a marketing gimmick and they're using the lack of upstream to effectively cap the downstream where they want it.
Re:As much as Long Island sucks... (Score:3, Informative)
Since it's apparent that you don't understand how it works, I'll let you know that blocks that aren't requested don't propagate and are eventually dropped. I can run a freenet node fully content in the knowlege that unless the billion people in China are suddenly all pedophiles, the Chinese blocks are statistically more likely to exist than the child porn blocks.
So, what Chinese Blog [freenet-china.org] have you hosted recently? What's that? You're not doing your part to clean freenet of child porn?
MMMMhmmmm...
Re:Cablevision service nightmare (Score:3, Informative)
I live in south queens and we have Time Warner cable at one home and Verizon 3.0/768 DSL at another. No complaints with either service (except the RR cable is much faster and more responsive then the DSL). I know a few people with RR cable from TW and they also never have a complaints.
Verizon is deploying FIOS in the metro area too but they left out NYC. It always appears that NYC and other major cities are left for last with Broadband. Its probably too costly to beploy fibre in densely populated areas. I personally would like to get Fios since Verizon is also gearing up to deploy Digital TV services over Fios. Hopefully it will be as good or better then Time warner cable (it simply rocks).
Verizon's FiOS is competition (Score:5, Informative)
Their pricing plan is pretty good:
Down/Up
Up to 5 Mbps/2 Mbps $39.95
Up to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps $49.95
Up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps 199.95
The number direct to the FiOS center is: 908-474-9728
Verizon doesn't publicize it yet, but the people who answer do have access to a database telling them which switches are going live and when. Today when I called, I told asked if I was going to have service in my small town.. when he said no, I told him the local switch which served us (obtainable via Local Exchange Routing Guide). He acted very surprised and said that indeed we would have FiOS activated very soon now.
Of course this was obvious as Verizon has spent $$$ wiring fiber everywhere which should be the next big thing(tm). They even replace the normal copper wires going to your house with fiber (doesn't work in a power outage though! I hope nobody gets upset about 911
Re:They can't even handle 10mbit/1mbit (Score:2, Informative)
What did fix the issue was moving. When I came to my present residence I found a faster and more reliable network waiting. I've had zero problems, even though I'm using the exact same setup as before.
The point is, OO's network seems to be hit and miss depending on the neighborhood.
Not a subscriber-level service (Score:5, Informative)
This is not a subscriber level service.
Cable companies essentially have the same topology in HFC (hybrid fiber-coax) networks. They have their data center, with their connection to the backbone, and have fiber to several hubs, which are essentially the "regional" or "metropolitan" branch sites. From the hubs, served by fiber, coax is run to the individual nodes, which subscriber services are branched off from. What this is all about is the connection between hubs and nodes - there's more overhead bandwidth available farther downstream - but not yet to the customer premise. The four coax lines sent from the hub to the node can now support 100mbps symmetrical.
This enhances the inter-nodal communications, the junctions between the fiber backbone most major cable companies have deployed and the coax they use to push their various signals out to consumer premises. In essence, they're getting 100mbps over coax for the four coax "pipes" used to support the node itself. While it's a big deal insomuch as it means they have a lot more ceiling with regards to bandwidth and deployment of available services, it's not the point that they've got fiber past the hubs to the individual nodes... yet. It does mean, however, that there's less need to deploy more nodes (read: capital expense) so they can spend that money on R&D and getting "faster" to go "farther." Ultimately, it'll end up with fiber to the pole, then finally fiber to the house.
What it WILL mean? You should see an increase in upload caps sooner than you thought... and cable companies are getting ready for a lot, lot more HD and HD-on-demand services. Remember, their focus is still video - data is just an added bonus.
Symmetric - Business Services - $$ (Score:3, Informative)
The interesting issues are going to be pricing, average throughput (e.g. how many people are you sharing your upstream with), and policies about port blocking (they're presumably going to allow web servers, because that's the kind of application that needs 50 Mbps upstreams.
For a business, besides price, the technically cool thing about high-speed cable modem service is that it's not using the same wiring from your office to the telco POP that almost everything else users, so you get some protection from street construction crews and Bubba the Backhoe driver that you'd otherwise only be able to get by buying a higher-end fiber ring service from the telco or using a short-haul wireless connection to a nearby wireless provider. So depending on your price and reliability needs, you can either use this for cheap fast unreliable service, or for cheap reliability improvement to your existing more expensive service, as well as for cheap speed improvements to your regular service. After all, if what you really need is 5-10 Mbps, then getting a 50 Mbps service that's oversubscribed a bit too heavily and priced like a T1 line is almost always a big win.
Repair Speed is the main business problem with cable modem services - the economics of providing $30/month service depend on piggybacking on consumer cable TV service, which means you've got enough technicians and repair trucks to go fix it if it breaks, but if it's Friday night in a bad snowstorm, and your customer's TV service goes out, they can just watch videos or play with their kids or read books until Monday when the snowplows have finished clearing the streets. Low-end "business" cable may mean you get better help-desk service, and maybe the truck goes to your building a bit earlier, but it doesn't put any more trucks on the street. This service may be priced high enough to pay for better service than that.
Commuting on Long Island I used to have a project in Syosset that required me to commute there from central New Jersey for a month. Took about 1.5 hours each way, unless traffic was worse than usual, like the days that it was faster to walk across Staten Island than to drive. Hard drugs would have made driving too difficult, but a Grateful Dead concert tape is about the length of a round-trip, which was at least a good substitute. I tried taking the train one time when it was going to snow heavily - about 2.5 hours to get from Jersey to NYC to the LIRR to whatever the nearest station was, get a taxi to the office, and find out that they were closing because of snow (:-), and the LIRR was far noisier and bouncier than the New Jersey trains so it wasn't possible to do any real work while riding them.
Re:They can't even handle 10mbit/1mbit (Score:1, Informative)