Comcast To Offer 50 Mbps Service
Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: Comcast, Broadband, Access
On the heels of announcing a 250GB download cap, Comcast has revealed that it is launching a 50 Mbps service.
Yesterday Comcast officially stated that the company has moved away from broadband and entered the realm of wideband with the launch of next-generation DOCSIS 3.0. The new services will infiltrate the homes of millions of New England residents in the next few weeks as well as areas of Philadelphia and New Jersey. Comcast will be doubling the speeds for the majority of its high-speed customers (at no additional cost), now offering up to 12 Mbps download speeds and 2 Mbps uploads speeds for the regular Performance tier. Customers subscribing to the Performance Plus package will see download speeds of 16 Mbps and upload speeds of 2 Mbps.
Comcast will also offer the Extreme 50 tier, its high-velocity service with speeds up to 50 Mbps downstream speed and up to 10 Mbps upstream speed, priced at a whopping $139.95 per month. The company gave an example of just how fast the Extreme 50 tier will be: a 6GB high-definition movie will download in about 16 minutes; a 2GB standard-definition movie will download around 5 minutes. Can’t afford the hefty price? Comcast will also offer the ultra package for $62.65 per month, offering up to 22 Mbps of downstream speed and up to 5 Mbps of upstream speed.
Business customers can sign up for the Deluxe 50 Mbps / 10 Mbps tier for $189.95/month. Existing business class customers will also see a speed increase; the Starter tier will be doubled to up to 12 Mbps / 2 Mbps and a new Premium Tier also will be introduced, offering speeds up to 22 Mbps / 5 Mbps for only $99.95/month.
“Wideband is a game-changer for the industry. With wideband running over our next-generation fiber-optic network, we can greatly enhance our customers’ online experience immediately. And these speeds are only a preview of what’s to come—wideband will provide the capability of delivering dramatically faster speeds in excess of 160 Mbps in the future,” said Mitch Bowling, SVP and General Manager, Comcast Online Services. “Today’s announcement reaffirms our commitment to offer more speed to more homes than any other U.S. Internet service provider.”
Despite the new internet speeds, Comcast implemented a 250GB per month download limit on October 1. As originally reported, the company claimed that the new limit is more than enough for its customers, and will more than likely never surpass the limit. But considering the consumers who purchases games and movies online, this restriction may feel more like a punishment than means to save money on behalf of the BSP. Time Warner is also currently testing broadband caps in Beaumont, Texas, its download limit ranging from 5GB to 40GB monthly.
With speeds up to 50 Gbps accompanied with a 250GB download cap, it seems that either customers will reach their limit quickly and have to shell out extra fees, or Comcast is simply evil. Comcast chief executive Brian Roberts spoke proudly during his CES keynote about the new wideband services. "Using DOCSIS 3.0, [the network can achieve] 100 megabits per second over the next year."
Thanks for the tease, buddy.
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If Comcast offered speeds of 50gbps they could be pure evil and I'd still subscribe to their service.
But seriously, people who download tons and tons of files..I would love to see how many people actually hit that 250GB cap.
p2p heaven xD
its awesome they will double the speeds of existing speeds.
I forgot what mine is but i have comcast
If I were so inclined, I could easily hit that cap just streaming movies from Netflix. IMO: Comcast hyping their increased speeds without raising the cap for those plans IS evil. Also, to correct what Kevin Parrish wrote here, Comcast has had the 250GB cap for a long time. All they did on October 1 is actually STATE that the cap was in place and what the limit was.
250GB cap with 50Mbps is a joke. The only thing you would need such a speed for is movies. Wow you could download 5 Blu-ray movies a month. Who cares, at the price of the service you could just buy the original movies. I'll stick with my unlimited download @ 16Mbs from charter, for 45 a month, and my news server for $15 a month.
Umm, verizon fios? http://www22.verizon.com/content/c [...] prices.htm No cap? It's been out for a while now. Check it out. I have their 20/5 service.
Most being closer to all then most when breaking the 250 gb per month for downloading movies are doing so illegally. Let those idiots pay the price then " o please be strictly enforced soon" let them deal with the record / movie company's.
250gb per month is ALOT.
Waits for the minority of legal downloaders that break the 250gb to speek up.
Downloading HiDef movies is the future whether or not the Mafia likes it or not. Hollywood is gonna have to get onboard soon. People wouldnt download free if there was a way to get it legally and fast.
People wouldnt download free if there was a way to get it legally and fast.
your an idiot, check your history on the subject.
Wow....so then it would take me a total of a little over 11 hours for me to hit the download cap for the month and not be able to use the internet anymore? NOOOOOOO wayy I would EVER switch to comcast! Never again! They are terrible! Why would anyone want their download cap restricted? 250gb is nothing! a half a day worth of downloading! crap! lol. Verizon fios is the way to go!
You are the idiot pal. They also tried to stop radio when it was invented. Guess what it didn't happen. Internet downloads are here to stay. If Hollywood wants to cash in, they better make it available, and affordable. And they better make it easier then the free stuff.
Shame on Comcast. I want higher speeds and no cap. I'm willing to pay a little bit more, but I'm not going to be spending $500 a month on my internet bill with overages. Maybe the 50 GB/s would be nice if it existed, and then I'd pay a high fee. But otherwise, no chance.
Of course, I'm not part of Comcast, so I'll watch as other companies adopt similar technology and give better service. I'm not going to be a guinea pig for these fools.
Here in my home I have enjoyed 50Mbps up and down for nearly a year. We have UTOPIA fiber. I do have a cap of 500GB which I have only hit once (never fall asleep while your torrents are running!) I download movies and games all the time mostly using steam and Netflix. It only costs $50 per month too...and I obviously love to brag about
The only people who should truly hit that cap are the torrenters, and not any of them but the ones with torrents on all the time.
Games don't use that much bandwidth, not even MMOs.
Also yobigd20, if you can use all that in just 11 hours then you are one of the people who should be paying 140 just for the normal speeds.
Whatever Comcast offers, it's still a terrible company. I had the displeasure of using their internet this summer, and the frequent outages were just awful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comca [...] tisfaction
Lower customer satisfaction than the IRS. I think that speaks for itself.
Everyone forgets, it's NOT 250GB PER PERSON. It's 250GB PER ACCOUNT. How many people live in your house? How many people use the internet? And do you have a wireless router that others use? Ahhh.....
Remember, at the current speed, 10mpbs x 60 seconds x 60 minutes =
3.6 GB per hour.
One day? 86 GB
So if the average bitrate of a youtube video is 750kbps and the average length was 3 minutes that makes for about a 17MB file. So with 250GB you could watch 14705 youtube videos, or 735 hours worth. Coincidently this is only 5 hours more than the average hours in a month. 250GB doesn't seem so arbitrary anymore aye? Doesn't really leave much time for myspace though lol.
Everyone forgets, it's NOT 250GB PER PERSON. It's 250GB PER ACCOUNT. How many people live in your house? How many people use the internet? And do you have a wireless routerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_gateway that others use? Ahhh.....Remember, at the current speed, 10mpbs x 60 seconds x 60 minutes =3.6 GB per hour.One day? 86 GB
Actually its 36Gbits per hour, or 4.5GB an hour.
108GB per day.
250GB per month seems pretty respectable to me.
That is 20+ game titles every month, I can't find 20 games worth downloading every month.
Movies? I would rather stream them but that would be about 30 movies per month, so download a new movie every day? Who has the time for that? 2 hours download another 1:45 to watch.
I am very happy to see they are increasing the bandwidth to the existing clients at no additional cost. USA is really behind most of the world when it comes to access speeds and this is certainly a step in the right direction. It probably is a just a matter if time before they raise the bandwidth cap. But in all fairness 250GB is a lot of data and I would guesstimate that only very, very few people will ever hit it. It is ment as an abuse blocker and it is a much better solutions then traffic shaping and other "solutions" that have popped up here and there.
IMHO the biggest advantage is the increased UPSTREAM bandwidth. A lot of new aplications such as offsite backups, video conferencing and others depend on it.
What I would really like to see is decreased latency. The specification is generally not published for consumer grade services, but latency guarantees are quite common for business clients. I would like to see something similar for the "Joe the Plummer"s.
With latency guarantees the operator has to make sure they have sufficient capacity.
Jonny jonny@cryptoheaven.com
250GB is 2000Gb guys, that's a god awful amount of data. Get your bits and bytes sorted, then start the bitching.
It's real simple to figure out, a gigabyte is 8 gigabits, or use google and enter "250 gigabytes to gigabits"
GB is gigabyte Gb or gb is gigabits, all internet bandwidth is measured in gigabits NOT gigabytes (like your harddrive and memory use). So if Comcast means GB for it's cap, you shouldn't worry.
250GB is not enough. All of the TV shows I watch are downloaded. All of the movies I watch are streamed or downloaded. All of the games I buy are through Steam. And I'm not the only person using my network connection. I alone often use 300+GB a month, with my roommate we probably are averaging over 450GB a month.
Mind you, my ISP has a 60GB download cap, but I've been downloading more than that every month for the past 5 years and I haven't heard anything from them about it.
Man, I can't even download at 10Mbps, let alone upload. 250GB is pretty sweet, but the price isn't
Everyone forgets, it's NOT 250GB PER PERSON. It's 250GB PER ACCOUNT. How many people live in your house? How many people use the internet? And do you have a wireless router that others use? Ahhh.....Remember, at the current speed, 10mpbs x 60 seconds x 60 minutes =3.6 GB per hour.One day? 86 GB
I think you forgot the conversion from Mb to GB. 10Mbps x 60sec. x 60min. = 36,000 gigabits (Gb) per hour, or 4.5 gigabytes (GB) per hour. 1 byte = 8 bits. At non-stop full blast, you can download 108GB in 24 hrs. So at 50Mbps, you can download 22.3GB in one hour, or 540GB per day.
@Michaelahess, no-one uses bits as a unit of data within that context. Hard drives are measured in bytes, ans so is almost everything else. Bits are usually used only in reference ti data transfer speed. So, 250GB is not comparatively that much anymore. It's still alot, but not as much as it once was.