i pay 139 a month for 50Mbit / 20Mbit service... and its actually a bit faster then that as i max out DL's at about 11 MBYTE/s and starting january... GPon will be out in the wild.. which will provide up to 400mbit fiber connections... so um.. cable companys should just go back to supplying customers with pixelated "HD" channels... because the broadband game is f'n over for them

anon

Oh, and I realize that 2% doesn't sound huge (because it's not). At these prices, this is mostly marketing and "my dick is bigger than Verizon's dick."

Jim Thome's Self-Cleaning Oven

AEC007 - I'm not making this stuff up... the cable industry expects the extreme speed market to grow to 2% of cable customers eventually.

Fupjack - Nope... not the max bandwidth of the node or chunk of spectrum, extreme speed is for real, greater than 100megs downstream no problem. Also, the standard is already approved and multi-vendor. You can look it up, channel bonding is part of DOCSIS 3.0.

Jim Thome's Self-Cleaning Oven

In Vancouver BC, I pay about $90 per month for Shaw's 25Mbps service, and it's very, very nice.

topcatticus

That bandwidth number stated is probably the max bandwidth of the node or of that chunk of spectrum - the max for DOCSIS 2 was 40 Mbps, but you sure as heck aren't getting that.

Keep in mind that DOCSIS is a standard designed so that the cable companies can buy from multiple vendors (Cisco, Toshiba, Motorola, etc.) and have the equipment work together. Before the standard was designed, the company would be stuck with one vendor for everything.

fupjack

@ Jim Thome's....
Seriously, you you think the average Joe will pay $2,988.00 / year for internet access?

Get real... $49/month tops everyone's internet access fee.

aec007

Initially extreme speed will be 70 megs down by 5 megs up and will cost $199. Eventually (once the newer IOS that allows bonding of 3 and 4 channels is certified) speeds will go up to 150 meg by 10, and price will probably rise to $249.

Jim Thome's Self-Cleaning Oven

the thing is that cable is already everywhere. They dont need to lay fiber like VZ does. So once this hits, they can reach many more people.

I've got FIOS now...and for the average user it will be the same experience you had with a cable modem.

MrMaestr0

Also in the Dominican Republic you have to pay almost $120 a month for 1MBps download speed
So seriously even tho its a third world country we should all be happy that we dont have to pay that much

SneakerFiend

@demonwolf: Well first of all
[www.speedtest.net]
check your speed there. If you get less than 6MBPS or 6000KBPS take a screen shot and sue the cable company for false advertising.
@EMoShunz: And for you dude.
you dont need that much to download movies. I have 3MBPS and i do good. I frag any1 and i never lagg.
I havent changed to Cable because they dont offer tty machines for my mother who is hearing impared.
And I'm waiting for Fios to come into my neighborhood so i can switch we have already been offered fios discounts so i'm goin2 be happy and probably one of the first in my neighborhood to get Fios.

SneakerFiend

I welcome this 'competition', because it will pressure Verizon to open up the pipes a bit with the FiOS and burn ComCrap again....this time with 400Mbps and up (an no load degradation)! Cable is soooooo 90's! (just kidding....don't want to pour salt in the wounds of folks where the FiOS 'ice-cream' truck hasn't come into the neighborhood yet....

pharmboy

@aaj111: apparently 100 times that is coming...don't believe it;ll be any time soon, but thats what i heard on the giz.

EMoShunz

Get me one that can let me download at 1GIG a Second and I'd pay any price.

aaj111

@rustynails30: mmm, rusty nail
anyway, i pay $45 for a 7mbps service with bell in ontario. i had a 5 mbps service for the same price with rogers but they filtered everything, even my voip.
i'm trying to find a cheap legal way to d/l movies to use the speed i do have.

EMoShunz

I get charged the rough equivalent of $60US for 384kbps up/512kbps down.

Screw you guys.

DetergentDinners

BRING IT ON!

My "old" neighborhood isn't on the radar for FIOS install, so I use cable (currently at 15-20mbps down which is actually nice for typical internet stuff)... but I'd love some of that super bandwidth that my FIOS friends are getting :-)

huygir

I would gladly pay 1600/mo for 160mb/sec business connectivity.

keepr

Up here in Canada,I have Sasktel "Extreme" High Speed, which is 7 Mbps, actually runs at 6 Mbps and all for the low "extreme" price of 55 bucks a month. They do offer a business package of 10 Mbps for 110 bucks a month, I can imagine the prices if they had the speeds mentioned above, best thing to do is add a ZERO onto the end of the speed claim and that will be the price, 10Mbps=$100. 160Mbps=$1600 a month.

rustynails30

How come the title of this article says 100Mbps?

hughjass

interesting im getting a good connection right now 12mbps which is mostly consistant and if all i need to do is upgrade my modem and make sure im on the right plan im all for it.

demonwolf

My cable charges me $45 for "up to" 7Mbps, though I've never gotten it to go over 2.

So I figure they'll probably want in the neighborhood of $750 a month and it still won't go over 2 and you can't complain since they said "up to".

draconis2941

pft, ya right next year...i've been hearing next year on iptv for 3 years.
was that cynical, sorry.

EMoShunz

The question is how much are they gonna gouge us for these new modems and services?

Pegleg Joe

Cable is the ugly duckling of residential broadband. It works, but the dirty secret is it is horribly constrained by its very nature as a shared last-mile network.

Sure, DOCSIS 3.0 might provide 160Mbps downstream at the CMTS, but that has to be shared amongst hundreds (or even thousands) of customers sharing that headend. Cable broadband is heavily oversold.

DSL and Fiber are not oversold, because they are not on a shared network.

UnnDunn

sorry I have a question as a kid:
how do i figure out how much I get

takemetoyourtoaster

Unndunn - You don't know what you're talking about. Every provider oversells, even with DSL and fiber every customer ends up shipping packets over the same OC48 that's not big enough to handle the traffic if every sub decided to run at full speed at the same time. Luckily that doesn't happen, and the ISPs have a formula to figure out exactly how much bandwidth per sub they need.

With channel bonding you're really going to get 150 megs down. Not shared with your node, not dependent on what you're neighbor is doing... 150 megs down, period, just like if you had fiber or DSL at that speed.

Does cable have problems because of the shared nature of the product? Yes, but not in the way that you think. All the problems are on the upstream, hence the recent brouhaha over Comcast using Sandvine to block bitorrent. But DOCSIS 3 has some pretty cool fixes for the upstream constraints, too.

Cable is going to be competitive in the broadband market for a long, long time.

Jim Thome's Self-Cleaning Oven

My apologies for the geeky question .. But, why do we call it a 'cable modem'? As we all know, modems are modulating / demodulating devices, converting an analog signal into digital data. But, that does not seem to fit with a 'cable modem' at all since the signal coming in and out are both digital, right? If that is true, why do we continue to call it a 'modem'?

Wasted energy asking the question, I suppose, since there is no changing the name now.

Monty

If this does give a 150meg down per customer and its not shared it will provide nice competition.. or in my case, just provide a way for my cable company to offer the one product to all their customers, no matter what area they live in.

I cant see my particular cable company rushing to introduce this though, they only have to compete with 7mb really, and they can do that now, and would have no real incentive to push this technology on us.

But saying that, IF they did do it, they would get a stranglehold on my whole area, maybe up to 1 million people. So maybe they will...

I hope, and pray

prodigal_son

@DetergentDinners: I know what you mean, I was having charged $45US for a 128 kbps connection. That was about 4 years ago, now they charge the same for 1 Mbps, free upgrade huh. But yeah, it's SLOWLY getting better. This is Mexico btw.

ZonzoMaster

The signal on the copper is analog RF, not digital. So it is a modem.

Jim Thome's Self-Cleaning Oven

Since the bonding will be a maximum of 4 existing channels, you would expect to see a 4x improvement in your current speed for a comparable piece of the bandwidth pie on a bonded system. Downstream bonding will come first, then upstream later (maybe about a year). Hopefully, they won't charge more than 4x the cost of your existing service for 4x the data rate (good luck on that).

encyclia