Is Comcast Heading the Way of the Dinosaur? 340
CasualRepartee writes "Comcast has been one of the most successful cable companies in the world; in many parts of the U.S., Comcast sits pretty on huge user bases that don't have many viable high-speed internet alternatives. However, poor customer service, slow speeds and generally poor business practices could make the once-great internet giant another extinct dinosaur, no ice age required.
The fact of the matter is this: Comcast is no longer the biggest and the best. Cable is taking a distant back seat to Verizon's FiOS (fiber optic service), which delivers speeds up to 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds. Unlike Comcast, FiOS delivers the full range of bandwidth to each user, whereas Comcast users are forced to share bandwidth with other users on the same coaxial cable, causing speeds to fluctuate dramatically with usage."
You'll share a pipe somewhere (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere (Score:4, Informative)
DSL / Fios services do not share this issue. If congestion happens between the cable/DSL/Fios node and the Internet, operators need only increase the bandwidth available between those locations - which shouldn't be nearly as hard to do, since they'd be adding another connection alongside or better utilizing an existing fiber connection.
Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere (Score:5, Interesting)
So HFC is separating people on the same physical fiber/copper with frequencies and time slots, and FiOS is doing basically the same thing with light spectrum. With cable the drop from the pole to your house is not shared, with FiOS the fiber goes from your home to where? Probably a drop/splitter on a pole outside. If this is the case they are both "shared" even at the last mile.
Cable has exponential room to grow also. Currently there is about 1GHz available on your copper you are using about 8MHz (0.8%) of it for your cable modem. Even with the technology in place now it could offer much much more bandwidth per subscriber. DOCSIS 3.0 will add more bandwidth and channel bonding. Removing the analog channels will free up spectrum. There is a technology called "switched digital" that basically means broadcasting the channels people are watching instead of all the channels all the time. The technology in place today is not even being used to the full potential (it is cheaper not to especially where the bandwidth in place is not being used) and in theory instead of 8MHz there is nothing stopping DOCIS 5.0 or DOCSIS 6.0 from using 300 or 400 MHz. If end-user bandwidth requirements ever get that high the internet itself would be in jeopardy as the backbone fiber would not be able to sustain that much traffic.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Fios is looking at the future , and gig connections may well become the norm once places like youtube start serving hd content. Verizon has this nailed , they are planning on rolling out a service that will need minimal upgrades for the next 50 years , Comcast isn't.
I have comcast and they are plagued by they just dont care and take customers for granted , i have 0 options besides them because of trees and distance from the co. once Fios is here im gone.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
FIOS is a brand name for marketing services, not a networking technology. The underlying technology is BPON, which is an ATM-based passive optical network. A PON uses an optical splitter to combine the laser signals from many subscribers onto the same fiber at the same wavelength, exactly as a cable splitter combines RF frequencies on metal coax cable. They are both point-to-multipoint technologies, and thus
Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere (Score:5, Informative)
FIOS connections are shared between a max of 32 home or nodes. They are rolling out GPON which will allow gigabit to the home (though no home will likely have it any time soon)
currently most FIOS users are BPON and could get nearly 100MB bidirectional. As it is Verizon has maxed out currently at 50/20 plans for the home user, and yes you can get full speed 24/7. They have built out the back end to support high speed bidirectional traffic and this can be seen by the lack of complaints by users on sites such as dslreports.com and others. Also they are demonstrating they can migrate from 40 to 100Gbps links with relative ease.
Cable on the other hand will roll out DOCSIS 3.0 later next year....but
So sure do you share a node at some point but for FIOS users its at the CO and not 20 feet from your front door and not likely to be congested.
I know...i can dl from an internet service that cannot be spoken of...at 30mbps any time of day and i get 30mbps every time....
Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere (mod up parent) (Score:5, Informative)
A little bit of disinformation here.... (Score:3, Interesting)
FIOS is one of any number of schemes, and it requires, as does cable, surrendering the consumer possibility of third party provisioning over time. In ot
Re:Would somebody tell me why... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, mom's in the kitchen downloading a stream at HD RATES of her favorite show, Oprah 2.0.
Dad's upstairs doing an online improvement of his golf swing.
Junior's in his bed room watching porn, with four MURPGs going, a live video of the away game that the b-ball team is playing, and carrying on audio conversations with 11 people in the game in realtime.
Sis is in the living room, having a virtual pajama party with ten of her friends. Now that the price of gasoline is $91.099/gal, everything's virtual.
Bowser's getting an online MRI scan to see if the surgery went ok. The darn robot's been chasing him around the house, but the house downstairs computer located him by GIS and now his him in the clutches of the MRI machine. Darn dog, anyway.
While some of this is science fiction, so were cell phones, HDTV, MRI units, and multi-user role playing games just 20 years ago.
Your statement reminds me of Bill Gate's declaration that everyone will be fine in just 640K of DRAM. This same madness infects passive optical distribution systems, and one day, there'll be a digital backhoe that'll rip lots of this stuff out to be replaced by non-proprietary, head-in-the-sand, cheapskate infrastructure.
Hell, Corning wins either way.
Re:You'll share a pipe somewhere (Score:5, Informative)
DSL and FIOS are examples of star toplogy; you do not share your incoming line with anyone else at all. The bandwidth converges only at the local node where high bandwidth fiber is provided to the node.
Do you see why cable is at a disadvantage here?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I just pulled the spark plugs out of every car on my block. How much faster will my commute be?
Damn! (Score:3, Funny)
Strong work, sir. Carry on.
Re: (Score:2)
I hate Comcast (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I hate Comcast (Score:5, Interesting)
They seemed to promote the idiots to management and let go those that were valuable to the company. In other words I saw lots of people getting screwed, so I jumped ship. Because the screwing was so bad I could map out and see it was heading for me and my department.
The last straw for me was instead of hiring one of the guys in the department that knew the job and systems or a new manager position they hired a friend of one of the executives for it that did not know squat about the department, what we did, or even the business process. And this is a very common thing at comcast, hiring of managers based on the buddy system not capabilities and knowledge.
Posting anon as peole at Comcast that know me know my Slashdot ID.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I hate huge bureaucratic companies that take monopolistic stances, overprice their services, and give crappy customer service. Hopefully Comcast will die and we can all switch to a good company like... Verizon?
Seriously, this all seems pretty slanted. The submission reads more like Verizon astroturfing than a legitimate post. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of FIOS and hope it comes to my area soon and is cheap. However, I'm not a huge fan of Verizon and don't see how they're much better than
Re:I hate Comcast (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Surprisingly [msn.com] good. [adelphiare...turing.com]
Re: (Score:2)
A bit dated on the FiOS speeds... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Talk about choosing between two evils. (Score:4, Insightful)
Any body else have the dubious honor of having been with both of these companies?
censorship? (Score:2)
I realize the tagging is in beta, but why censorship?
Anyway, I'm interested in fiber optic internet too but it's not available in my area and no one seems to have any more information than that. Their price seems pretty competitive (at least against Comcast) and you'd think they'd be interested in rolling it out as widely and quickly as possible. What kind of infrastructure needs to be developed for this? I thought there was already a ton of fiber in the ground that no one was using.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I never said it did. What I said was that some people think anti-piracy throttling is censorship, about which they're wrong. Please read what I said again - at no point did I make any such suggestion. Both of the people who've replied, and I presume the person who modded me troll, have made that same mistake.
Sometimes I wonder why it is that when I make fun of pirates, so many people go "bittorrent isn't about pirac
Re: (Score:2)
"Because Comcast throttles BitTorrent, and the pirate kiddies can't tell the difference between the right to free speech and the ability to steal. It's pretty sad."
To which I replied "You were probably modded a troll because BitTorrent does not necessarily equate to piracy.".
Now your reply to mine:
"I never said it did. What I said was that some people think anti-piracy throttling is censorship, about which they're wrong. Please read what I said again - at no point did I make any su
Re: (Score:2)
I never said there weren't. The connection is hoary, I agree - that's why I seemed so put off by it. Nonetheless, what I'm answering is why the censorship tag comes up on a comcast article. I'm not making any commentary on the nature of BitTorrent; you're seeing things that aren't there. All I did was to point out something stupid that a specific group of people think.
Pirates think anti-piracy is censorship. Simple as that
Re: (Score:2)
So, throttling legitimate use does border on censorship ( but i agree, its not actually, as a private company really technically cant censor.. only governments can do that )
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because Comcast throttles BitTorrent, and the pirate kiddies can't tell the difference between the right to free speech and the ability to steal. It's pretty sad.
They block more than just p2p applications. I have 5 servers with sequential ip's for an open source project I run. Upon connecting to three of them via ssh in 2 minutes, I was disconnected. I couldn't even connect to the web server running on port 80. I could no longer communicate with the subnet at all, as a friend runs a web server on that subnet I was unable to reach.
I connected to a server on a different isp and I was able to ssh into the servers on the subnet that was unreachable to me. The tracerout
Where is FIOS? (Score:2)
The only thing I know is that it's not available here.
Re:Where is FIOS? (Score:5, Informative)
Two sources:
Re: (Score:2)
I live in a county were fios can transmit both internet and tv service, some have had it for more than a year, but I am still waiting for service. I've been checking every week, and looking out for every indication of Verizon work. Finally, it started work here a couple of weeks ago.
First they laid a tension cable on the poles, then a couple of weeks later another crew attached the fiber lines to it. A technician then seemed to do some 'extra' work, most just seemed to do some 'clean up'. Just this pa
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The point is -- NONE OF THAT MATTERS. For the same reason people are going to pay five, six or ten dollars a gallon for gas (because they need gas and there's only one source of it), people will continue using Comcast and other cable prov
Choice of evils (Score:2, Insightful)
So stop bitching (Score:3, Funny)
Oh wait... It's easier to sit back and complain.
Mistakes in reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
1. That FIOS is available for people. The actual availability is limited.
2. That, since you are really interested in the latest Comcast news about P2P, a majority or even a large minority must also be interested. They aren't.
That second one is a hard lesson for people to learn. Just because you care about something doesn't mean anyone else will care or should care. Don't mistake your wishes for reality.
Re:Mistakes in reasoning (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to be able to add FIOS to the list, because all of those suck except for DSL and conceivably wimax when it gets here.
As for number 2, I think the majority of people ought to be interested in this. I wouldn't have cared until they were allowed to buy out the local cable provider and turn the service from pretty good into completely unusable crap. The facts that they feel entitled to charge high prices for garbage service and have a propensity to buy out smaller companies is a good reason to be concerned. Just not necessarily people outside the US, but if we're going that route, there's a lot of news that shouldn't be posted here because it only applies to other countries.
Advertising an always on connection and being wholly unable to make it through a day without interruptions, let alone a week is pretty pathetic. The expectation that we would have to call them daily for a credit was completely absurd. I've never been treated that way by either Earthlink or Qwest.
In NY and CA maybe, but other places not so lucky (Score:2)
Re:In NY and CA maybe, but other places not so luc (Score:2)
I used to live in San Francisco, right in the middle, on the west side of Twin Peaks. Moved in in 1998. It took 3 years to get DSL to my house. I moved out in June (got tired of the Empire and moved to Canada) and when I left the FASTEST I could get out of my DSL was 384k. !!!! 384k !!!!
A friend of mine in the Haight only 2 km away had DSL and was getting 1.5m.
There I was: literally in the middle of The High Tech City of America, and I couldn't get b
Slashvertisement (Score:5, Insightful)
*sigh*
They don't even really try to hide it any more, do they? This "article" reads exactly like a DSL ad.
Anyway, no, Comcast isn't going anywhere. They have a monopoly in several markets like a lot of other cable companies and so they wouldn't be going anywhere regardless of their level of suck.
Re: (Score:2)
Until these companies offer stand-alone ("naked") DSL service, and stop trying to scam their customers ("variable speed" service, look up what that REALLY means) , I won't consider them a viable competitor to the likes of Comcast.
Bah! (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The eviction takes time. The judgement not as long.
Re: (Score:2)
And good luck searching for a new place that doesn't know how to query if you've ever had such a judgement!
Re: (Score:2)
Comcast will never change (Score:2)
However, if those two companies built (or bought) the infrastructure, then good luck getting that choice. Maybe some sort of (nonexistant) very fast and long range, not to mention secure, wireless access... but then SOMEONE has got to own the towers or satellites... and I am guess that th
Well, it's all about accessability... (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact of the matter is that I *can* get cable (well, not Comcast is this area but Charter instead) but I cannot get FiOS. I still find it hysterical that McLeod fiber runs less than 100 feet from my backdoor (nothing in between me and it) and I cannot get any Internet benefit from that cable.
Unlikely (Score:5, Informative)
B.) DOCSIS 3.0 roll-outs, which are already started in test areas and expected to hit 25%+ in competitive Comcast markets in 2008, allows 450+ Mbps download and 125+ Mbps upload per channel in a node. For those not in the know, a node is where bandwidth is shared, and can feature many channels. Comcast is already planning to roll out 50 Mbps speeds, followed by 100 Mbps as it becomes competitive.
Bandwidth will continue to be competition-based, and Comcast is far from down and out.
Re: (Score:2)
Never underestimate the power of incompetent management. It can take down even a company the size of microsoft.
Re: (Score:2)
Comcast emailed me back in August and asked for my feedback. I vented! One thing I said was FIOS was available to me so I wanted a price reduction on their service or a speed boost or I'll see ya later. Here is their response:
"We will also be offering 16/2 Mbps in your area early next year."
So I'll wait and see i
DISTANT backseat... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's odd... (Score:5, Funny)
I wouldn't bet on it (Score:3, Interesting)
Comcast is my cable provider. I don't like the way they operate, but I'm not switching and losing OnDemand TV and my local NBA team games as a result.
Comcast CEO sees 160Mbps internet in 2008 (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/30/comcast-ceo-sees-160mbps-internet-in-2008/ [engadget.com]
See also LightReading:
Comcast Closes In on 100 Mbit/s [lightreading.com]
Comcast may not be the fastest today, but they don't appear to be sitting around doing nothing either.
Re:Comcast CEO sees 160Mbps internet in 2008 (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems a bit jaded (Score:2)
To answer your question, no, I don't think Comcast is about to go under. I had DSL prior to cable and used to think it was superior. I was rocking along at 1.5 Mbit down/768 up. My buddy had comcast and I asked him what speeds he was getting -- he had used both and noted to me that cable was substantially faster and that he preferred it. This was of course in conflict with all the advertising that SBC had been putting out saying how much the shared network slowed things. So whe
"Comcast users are forced to share bandwidth..." (Score:2)
To quote Lex Luthor, "WRONG!"
In the Boston area market, the coax switches to fiber at the taps. In other words, outside the customer's house at the pole.
Here we go again. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Determine who is the market leader, or at least very large and strong
2) Declare them DEAD. EXTINCT. HISTORY.
3) ???
4) Profit!
How exactly is ComCast supposed to die? Everyone gets rabid about their service, and goes... where? FIOS is only in a tiny percentage of Verizon's US installed base. If you're not in a major metro area, you may never get it.
Cable has solved the last mile problem. DSL is pretty much everywhere, too, because POTS laid the last mile as well. Alternatives? Municipal wireless? Seems to be dying rapidly. Satellite? Very slow.
OK, that's enough. Back to the blind, knee-jerk, ill-fated shrieking of doom already in progress... ("Microsoft? DEAD. MPAA? EXTINCT. RIAA? DINOSAUR. Proprietary software? HISTORY.")
Too bad so many of us live in AT&T land (Score:5, Interesting)
The sad thing is that the measly 6M/1M "Elite" tier Internet service AT&T U-verse [uverseusers.com] offers is usually superior to Comcast and cheaper too. If they'd have been a little smarter they'd have skipped TV entirely (and those expensive settop boxes, TV channel fees, etc) and used all the bandwidth for Internet... assuming that they absolutely, positively won't run fiber like Verizon.
I have to disagree with the notion that we have to wait for the existing monopolies to correct their rectal-cranial inversion. It is possible for a new company to build FTTH. Having a separate company run fiber that various competing companies can plug into, as CANARIE [canarie.ca] describes, makes a lot of sense. Such a dark fiber net could be municipally run, or maybe the electric companies would like another revenue stream.
Time Warner. (Score:2)
Typical Slashdot sensationalism (Score:2)
- Comcast is still has strong growth
- People underestimate the strength of the Triple Play and how people are more likely to keep their service
- Comcast is working with Sprint to offer a "quadruple play" that includes cell phone service
- Comcast has been signing up telephone customers at a rate of something like 9 for every 1 cable customer that they l
Why I can't stand Comcast. (Score:4, Insightful)
But after that, I'm jumping ship as soon as I can, and never returning as long as I've got the choice.
I'm sick of having my internet go down without warning, with no indication as to how long it'll be before I can get back online to finish my homework.
I'm sick of Comcast taking channels for no reason - CSPAN2 and one of the leased access channels vanished a week ago, and the four city-run info channels are about to become digital-only at the end of the year I can't say I ever watched those channels for more than thirty seconds at a time, in passing, but they do have their uses and I know that there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Comcast is replacing them with new content - over the past year or so, I don't think we've gotten a single new channel, but others keep vanishing, one or two at a time.
I'm sick of the fact that, in a Big Ten college town with one of the nation's most successful and popular football teams, Comcast is not only refusing to carry the Big Ten Network (the only cable or satellite company here that doesn't - but is running a smear ad campaign against them. I'm sorry, but it's hard to sympathize with your cost argument doesn't hold much water when you make over five hundred million dollars in profit [msn.com]. And no, carrying ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 doesn't count as a response for showing football games - it counts as a basic cable package.
I'm even sick of their advertising. Nine times out of ten, the Comcast ads are so painfully bad that I'll actually stop what I'll doing so I don't have to sit through them. Whether it's the smiling, emotionless Botoxed spokeslady, the "Just Ask Zak" ads where a kid breaks into people's homes to tell them how much better Comcast could make their lives, the previously mentioned Big Ten network attack ads, or the new musical style ads about their phone service (which are so awful that I haven't been able to sit through one of them once), the ads are almost reason enough to jump ship in and of themselves.
We haven't gotten to a point yet where buying shows on demand from iTunes or where watching things online legally is quite a viable option - iTunes is still missing a lot of content I'd like to see and is too expensive to allow for following multiple programs, and the network-run streaming sites have some quality issues. Since other alternatives arenn't available, I'll just have to live with Comcast for now - I need high-speed internet for my engineering classes. But between the service issues and the fact that they seem to go out of their way to make me dislike them even more than I do now, I can't wait until the day when I can finally make sure that Comcast never sees a dime of my money again.
Thanks for another slashvertisement.. (Score:2)
In Northern Calif, we have AT&T and Comcast. I'm sure for 99% of the population even offering them 10Gb to the house would not get fully utilized. VOIP doesn't use that much bandwidth. Now of course this is
One HUGE Difference (Score:3, Insightful)
I would love to subscribe to FIOS. I was the first on my block to get cable internet from comcast 11 years ago. I was the first to switch to DSL with verizon when it became available (mostly for service issues. while my DSL connection has never gone down, cable routinely failed). Yet from the way things look my little neighborhood isn't going to see FIOS for a long time.
cable won't die. there is an advantage for them in that to win the franchises way back when they had to provide availability to everyone. verizon is building a demographically tiered system, for good or ill.
Verizon:Comcast::Eurasia:Eastasia (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't be so eager to welcome your new corporate overlords. Verizon's business model is based on overselling bandwidth just like Comcast (look at the price vs. bandwidth and that's obvious), and in the end that means they're still not willing to really let you use as much as they say they're selling you. If you look in the TOS [verizon.net] for that residential FIOS connection you might be eying you'll find that you're not allowed to operate a "server", or use too much bandwidth, which is, of course, never defined. To wit:
[emphasis mine]
Further, consider that P2P software could be considered a server, which would include the bittorrent client you use to download the latest Linux distro or the Skype software you use to make VIOP calls (something Verizon has reason not to like too much).
My point is simply that if you dislike Comcast because of its unstated caps, traffic shaping, QoS stuff etc. I don't see any reason to think Verizon will be any better in the long term. As for customer service, I've had Verizon as a phone provider and found the customer service poor. Perhaps their better as an ISP, but stories I've heard from others suggest that's not the case.
I've personally been using Speakeasy [speakeasy.net] for years. They seem to be much more honest in their dealings, allow you to run a server, and don't (apparently) block or degrade certain protocols, although their TOS still contain some "excessive usage" weasel words IIRC. The only problem is that it's DSL (and not even cheap DSL), so the bandwidth to price ratio isn't nearly what you'd get from Cable or FIOS. On the other hand, I can't stomach the idea of rewarding those other companies' practices.
Verizon FUD Much? (Score:3, Insightful)
This reads like spam from Verizon attacking a competitor with FUD. Guess what; I've had horrible customer service from Verizon:
So they screwed me twice for their mistake. I even took it to the Oregon Public Utilities Commission, and they still demanded that I pay their reconnection fee :-(
I am still on Verizon at that location because there is no alternative. As soon as there is an alternative, I am switching away from Verizon as fast as I can, to anyone, at any price, for any level of service. I will never use Verizon again for anything.
Meanwhile, at another location, I am using Comcast for broadband connectivity, and have had no issues with their customer service. I have even had some technical issues with them, and they have actually been kind-of helpful. The only thing I don't like about their service is blocking inbound port 25 because I like to run my own mail server, but I understand them wanting to reduce rampant spam relays.
So I think this whole story is just a bunch of Verizon-sponsored astro-turfing, trying to FUD against Comcast.
Article Contains a Faulty Premise (Score:3, Insightful)
Comcast customers. It isn't. While FiOS may be a superior product (for now) it doesn't matter much when few people have access to the product. In fact, much of the current Verizon user base is made up of people who don't have access to DSL or cable modems at all. Where they do compete with cable modems, they may compete with Time Warner, Comcast or insert-company-name-here cable company. Further more they are also in the DSL business. They'll even provide dry DSL to me here in Atlanta (more than once name the most wired city/metro-area in the U.S.) yet I can't get FiOS. The quality I've gotten from Comcast has been topnotch. The only problem I have with them, I can say of every utility company I've ever worked with: they are a pain in the ass to get out here on the very rare occasion that I need them. And I've only needed them once for repairs and really it amounted to an oversight where the previous owner of the house had their account at the house disconnected issueing a disconnect order where as we had already set up our account on the house.
Sorry, until I can actually use Verizon's product, I won't call Comcast or any other company a dinosaur. It just doesn't make sense.
Why all the Comcast hate? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got *plenty* of speed. I've had a *total* of maybe four hours of down time over the last year or more. I've had to deal with customer service four or five times in that timeframe and each time I received good service. To summarize: I'm quite happy.
Now, it's not perfect: I've never been able to run a web server (can't access it from anywhere but my house), and the Bittorent thing lately bugs me (although I'm an infrequent BT user, usually just to grab The IT Crowd episodes or the odd Linux distro), so that doesn't affect me a whole lot. The price could be a little better, but it's not awful. And while the speed is good, it could always be better (to be fair though, I've seen significant increases in speed over the past two years at no extra cost to me, both up and down speeds). And those hidden caps, while I've never been affected (and I have often downloaded what anyone would consider a lot some months) bug me that they even exist (that's probably my only big complaint with Comcast: just tell me what the magic number is, even though "unlimited" should mean *unlimited*, at least if you make the number public I can live with it, assuming it's high enough).
I don't know, I'm certainly what most would consider a power user, and I have no major complaints. By contrast, Verizon are a bunch of bitches AFAIC... they're selling something that is borderline bogus anyway (so what if I have fiber to my house... what difference does that make when I'm hitting bottlenecks after I get past their gateway anyway?), they make a mess of neighborhoods (have you actually seen the aftermath of a Verizon fiber run? *NOT* pretty) I just don't know what all the Comcast hate is all about. They may not be Mother Teresa, maybe not be perfection incarnate, but what's the big problem exactly, and where's the *clearly* better alternative?
Small Problem with Logic & Analysis (Score:3, Informative)
Verizon
Until you can understand that a one-off comparison of apples and oranges (the technical promise of Verizon's very small roll-out versus the customer service dissatisfaction with a major broadband offering out of Comcast) doesn't equate to a rigorous comparison of the two technologies OR the overall future of the two companies in their broadband offerings?
*yawn*
A tale of two cable companies (Score:3, Informative)
He was telling me that Comcast topedoes VPN connections to business entities that originate from residential accounts after four minutes of uptime. Cox does no such thing.
And the arrival of FIOS in RI forced Cox to upgrade their network and they now offer 20/2 net service. That's what I'm using now and its pretty good. Now if only I could find a wireless access point that didn't suck.
Of course I'll never go back into the arms of Verizon. I have such a blind hatred of that company it isn't funny.
This is ridiculous (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Note to Comcast: I am sorely tempted to switch back to Comcast, but there is no way I will until you quit screwing with traffic; believe it or not, I use torrents to get legit software (linux distros and some commercial software that *gasp* I have paid for), and I can't afford to have this kind of traffic disrupted.
Re: (Score:2)
Bit torrent traffic can have only legal purposes. you only share back the files you are receiving, or have received. Unlike kazaa where you share everything in a folder, Torrents you have to explicitly share stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What is Verizon's Provisioning for FIOS ? (Score:5, Informative)
Why, of course. If there's something you don't know about, it's got to be a media lie, right? Well, welcome to reality: cable is a shared backbone. It's an artifact of the design of cable television networks, and it's cable's biggest problem. This isn't "press puffery," it's a real problem for these people. Right now it doesn't come up much because the backbones can handle 5 megabit times 1500 customers. However, the big reason it took so long to deploy ADSL2 was because it required the phone companies to gut their infrastructure and lay down more capacity. DOCSIS 3 is going to do the same thing to the cable companies.
Please stop pretending to know things you don't actually know. Grandparent was quite correct - cable is a shared connection, and it's going to hurt the cable companies pretty badly in about two years. This is the nature of the technology. Read a book.
There's no such thing as a "FIOS back end". Fiber is a discrete network like ethernet. If you and your neighbor have FIOS, and you connect to your neighbor, it goes from you to your phone pole to their phone pole to them. It doesn't go to any "back end". Unlike DSL and cable, it never goes back to a central office, which I assume is what you mean by "back end", since that term does not come up in telecomms infrastructure. Namedropping doesn't make you clueful, even if the word sounds really convincing to you.
They don't. It's a brand new network. They won't be cutting bandwidth for at least five years. Also, please stop putting spaces before your question marks. It's obnoxious, it causes problems with line wrapping, and you look like a reject from third grade.
No.
It's a discrete network. Bandwidth sharing isn't possible. You probably mean network bandwidth arbitrage, which is very different. Do you go into your car mechanic and talk about Carnot cycles because you read about it in a slashdot article about engine efficiency? No? Then don't do that here, please, because the only difference is that, unlike the lucky greasemonkey, I am unable to laugh in your face to display for you just how much of an ass you're being. Just because you're used to calling your web server code deployments and your sql choices "back ends" doesn't mean that every time you've imagined yourself up the arbitrary need for some service provision that it's automatically called a backend, nor does it mean that the arbitrary service provision even exists.
Doesn't it bother you to get so high up on a soapbox about a network you know nothing about?
The only reason you believe that is that you know literally nothing about either technology. Doesn't it bother you to say "because I don't know jack, there is no way to differentiate between the two offers?" Verizon just dumped billions into a brand spanking new network. They hit this choke wall five years ago, because they were running on a much older general case network. Verizon is off of this hook for at least five years, and probably a decade. Comcast is just having the same set of problems that Verizon had in 2001, and the same set of problems that Verizon will have again in (checking crystal ball) approximately 2018.
Jesus H. Christ. NEITHER of these networks has anything even resembling an edge circuit. You have no idea what you're talking about. Why don't you just do us all a favor and stop pretending otherwise? The cable network is a trunk
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What is Verizon's Provisioning for FIOS ? (Score:4, Informative)
ummm...that seems unlikely.
I'm pretty sure that for a packet to go from me to my neighbor, it has to pass through a switch, most likely at the CO.
Re: (Score:2)
The theoretical maximum for a 15Mbps connection is 1.875MBps/sec, and I've come close enough to that number on enough occasions to safely conclude that Verizon's advertised speeds are indeed accurate. (No connection actually saturates itself to 100% due to TCP overhead, error-checking/correction, etc...)
If you'll rea
Re: (Score:2)
To me that implies that the bottleneck will be upstream of the local loop. As the previous poster said, it's highly unlikely that Verizon has 28mbs * number of subscribers worth of bandwidth to the general Internet.
A.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why censorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, given that you're insisting that something you believe is true, ignorant of reference work, I'm willing to bet you're a descriptivist, and that you have no idea what descriptivism is. Giant shock: the language doesn't change just because you're no good at it. You can, in fact, be wrong; just because a group of people misuses a word doesn't mean its meaning has changed.
If what you said about censorship was true, then American censorship law would make no sense whatsoever. How could the government say that censorship would never, ever happen in this country, if any random company could censor?From having a familiarity with a word borne of literature, legal context, or just knowing what they're talking about. Where do you get the idea otherwise? Your buddy Stan?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Er, yes, it does. What you're confused by is that the private individuals are editors, not censors. The reason what they're doing is called censorship is that they are following the rules set by government censors. You get a similar issue around ta
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, according to the OED, the word comes from the Latin censor, not the closely related word censura. If you're going to nitpick so much, you may as well be accurate. There were two censors at any given time, and they had control over the public register, and could choose to omit people from the register based on what they considered to be immoral conduct, among other things. (
Re: (Score:2)
Where do people get the idea that censorship is the sole domain of government? A business/school/church/organization/publication/etc. are all capable of censorship. I've never understood this idea where people come and say "it isn't the government doing it, so it can't be censorship".
People hear bits and pieces of things, but never bother to actually figure out exactly what they've heard. The more common misunderstanding of censorship is the notion that censorship is unconstitutional under the first amendment. The correction of this misunderstanding is "it's only unconstitutional if the government is engaging in censorship".
Interestingly enough, what we have here if a second degree of misunderstanding, a misinterpretation of the correction: someone thinking that if the government isn
Re: (Score:2)
You and I get along, and you
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The term came into modern usage during the 15th and 16th centuries when the printing press went into full swing and the Catholic church was doing its darnedest to suppress non-approved
Re: (Score:2)
...but which accounts for 100% of my bittorrent activity. I should be complacent and happy to be penalized for the misdeeds of others just because there are a lot of them? Does this philosophy of yours extend to the justice system--most arrested people are criminals, so they can all
Re: (Score:2)
Well, let's see. There are crosswalks because most people don't cross at the middle of the street well. You can't buy cocaine because most people who do it end up becoming violent thieves. You have to have car insurance because most people who couldn't afford to cover someone else's injuries won't stop driving until they've got savings.
Re: (Score:2)
Until you try to seed torrents, then they tie you down and use a strap-on on you.
Re: (Score:2)
They seem to be one step ahead of you because they only use GPON these days although they originally started off with BPON.