April 3rd, 2008
Comcast offers really-broad band
Comcast is rolling out high-speed Internet in the Twin Cities. High-speed as in 50Mbps downstream, but only 5Mbps upstream. And they say it can be turned up as high as 160Mbps downstream. Cost is $150 per month and they expect to deploy in 20 percent of markets by the end of the year. For more details,
see the extensive news coverage.
The end of the year is also the time frame for Comcast to switch to a new kinder, gentler form of network management.
But with those speeds, can they just give up on network management? Well, no. For one thing, it’s still only offering 5Mbps upstream – and upstream is what the throttling was all about.
For another, George Ou argued last month, even in Japan where 100Mbps is practically the standard, they have P2P issues. But I’m wondering how much upstream bandwidth they have in Japan?
In any case, a Comcast spokesman says:
“We’re committed to changing our network-management processes from what they are today by the end of the year, and we just need time to work that all out,” Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas said. “We’re going to work not just with BitTorrent, but a lot of other P2P companies, the Internet Engineering Task Force, academics and others to get together and come up with a better way to manage the network.”
As Charles King at Pund-IT told me, as much as Comcast wants the BitTorrent fiasco to go away, “the company’s actions will be closely watched by supporters and opponents alike for a long time to come.”
