Comments on: Comcast’s Brian Roberts, Broadband’s Tomorrow Man

By: Frommage

Frommage — Mon, 14 May 2007 19:29:08 +0000

What a bunch of whiners. Go back to your 56k dialup if ya don’t like the taste of progress. Ooohh. They bandwidth limit me while I steal videos, ouuwwee, it’s not really delivering the MAX, winewinewine, I wonder with the big price will be??? Whose got some cheese for the whiners? And try to get a little more fiber too :)

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 11 May 2007 01:21:03 +0000

PS – my monthly bill with Comcast is the same as it was for adelphia except I have half the speed.

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 11 May 2007 01:19:30 +0000

Who cares what a new Modem is capable of if Comcast won't enable it?

I had an 18M/2M cable connection until Comcast bought Adelphia. Now with Comcast I'm only able to order a 6M/768k connection using the same hardware.

Who cares about theoretical (or even practical) capacity if the company doesn't provision it that high.

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:39:39 +0000

Neal,

I think that ATT is saying this as often as possible to try and convince themselves that this is true ... it is not, they are in trouble with their xDSL approach. -p

By: Neal

Neal — Thu, 10 May 2007 19:07:18 +0000

Jesse’s on track. AT&T claimed that the real bottlenecks in their IPTV service are not in the access side of things but closer to the core of the network.

By: Jesse Kopelman

Jesse Kopelman — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:38:33 +0000

Om, the reason you can’t get consistent 6 Mbps second service has nothing to do with the limitations of DOCSIS (which can get over 10 Mbps easily) but with how oversubscribed Comcast’s network is. Who knows, all you late night geeks might be contending for a single 10 Mbps Internet connection? Issues such as this have very little to do with choice of last mile access technology. Every network is going to have bottlenecks and despite all the hype, rarely are they to be found on the last mile.

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 10 May 2007 17:07:12 +0000

Guys -

A couple of points.

DOCSIS 3.0 is defined to bond a minimum of four 6 MHz (8 in Europe) channels. The demo Brian showed was four.

A correction to a point Om made "...this so-called modem isn’t really coming to your home anytime soon." This is not correct. DOCSIS 3.0 modems will be deployed in volume Q1 2008. Now the question of when will DOCSIS 3.0 class services be offered will be a business decision based on many factors ... one of which is not the availability of the technology.

Where do the channels come from ... this is a good question. In the short term, there will be many internal discussions on what is the best usage of the spectrum. In the medium term (perhaps as early as 2008) we will begin to see many markets deploying switched digital technology which will free a great deal of spectrum for DOCSIS 3 bonding groups.

-p

By: Noah Juan

Noah Juan — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:54:41 +0000

Still confused: This says, "... DOCSIS 3.0 ... bonds together four cable lines ...".

But, this says, "Instead of using one TV channel to transmit data, it uses four."

Anyone know which it is because there is a big difference.

By: Noah Juan

Noah Juan — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:00:48 +0000

Am I missing something here? the articles I read mentioned four cables, not four channels. To me that means laying 3 new cables to every home in the territory. HUGE network upgrade.

By: Andrew Schmitt

Andrew Schmitt — Thu, 10 May 2007 12:40:55 +0000

Amen Om! No one has covered the physics behind this… just wait till 200 modems are all sharing the same media! They didn’t run that demo!

By: Mark Evans

Mark Evans — Thu, 10 May 2007 10:36:15 +0000

I wonder how much we’re going to pay for the privelege of a 150MB connection, and whether we’ll be able to use this huge pipe to access any and all the content we want.

By: five whys

five whys — Thu, 10 May 2007 07:39:01 +0000

well, if not fiber to the home, if not 150Mbps, you would are pretty likely to get VDSL at 10Mb+ via FTTn/FTTc in this decade from Telcos..

For cable, its not likely any time soon - not wide spread at-least.

By: Paul Stamatiou

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 10 May 2007 06:53:35 +0000

But do you think that by ~2012 there will be comparable ISP offerings other than this DOCSIS 3.0 technology? I doubt there will be much fiber penetration to the home by then.

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Thu, 10 May 2007 01:21:19 +0000

Paul even by his own admission it isn’t going to happen till 2009 – my bet 2012. These guys are all basically spread all this FUD.

By: Paul Stamatiou

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 10 May 2007 01:12:05 +0000

I can’t wait for this to hit residential areas in the next few years. I used to be all excited about FiOS but they are having a hell of a time laying fiber and by the time they get around to laying fiber around the US, everyone will have DOCSIS 3.0 service.