Unless you are a BitTorrent-loving downloading machine, Comcast’s broadband service is good enough. Today it got a little better and much faster. Comcast has doubled the speeds of its top tier high-speed Internet service to 16 Mbps. This is a free upgrade and the new tier is called BLAST, and will roll out on February 22 and it will be available for those of you who currently have 8 Mbps. This is available in the Bay Area only. Comcast has promised speeds of 100 Mbps using DOCSIS 3.0 technology over next two years.
Comcast Boosts Broadband Speeds in Bay Area to 16 Mbps —
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10 comments so far
7:28 AM PT
Increasing the download speed is pointless without infrastructure upgrades elsewhere. I have 20Mbs FIOS and only one server out of a hundred will send me data at 20Mbs. It’s not a Verizon problem, I get 20Mbs out of most test servers including ones in Japan and Europe. This is a great move for marketing with no real cost attached.
7:58 AM PT
@ Jon,
You are spot on. I have tried to make this point many times before but always lose the “big speed” argument.
10:42 AM PT
Comcrap promising any kind of speed is laughable. I’ll believe it when I see it. Both my home and work connections are through Comcast (in the Seattle area), and my speeds have been abysmal. Mind you, I don’t use a lot of bandwidth either.
1:03 PM PT
Hmmm, does this mean either FIOS or AT&T Uverse are coming to the Bay Area in the short term? It would seem the only reason they might offer higher speeds, but will one really see the difference given their infrastructure?
2:31 PM PT
iDavid
I have heard that U-Verse is going to become widely available in Bay Area over next few months. Some parts of Northern California are getting the U-Verse upgrades.
Verizon doesn’t offer FiOS in the Bay Area.
7:23 PM PT
Comcast uses Sandvine and kills all torrents dead when seeding
Arstechnica had a good writeup about it
I hate comcast and wish I had stayed w/ my old dsl company
10:05 PM PT
You fell for Comcrap PR stock and barrel — I thought you’d be better than that. Download speeds are not the bottleneck: have you ever tried a videoconferencing your kids with your grandma with a 1,000,000,000 Meg downstream / 384 k upstream? Or backing up your 9 Gig of family pictures through the same connection?
You should start tracking upstream speeds: that’s where more is needed and makes a huge difference.
7:38 AM PT
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12:55 PM PT
Funny, because I’ve been getting 23 Mbps download (1.5 upload) from my comcast connection in the bay area, for over a month now. Previously I was getting around 3-4 Mbps, but I had a very old cable modem, so I bought a new DOCSIS 2 cable modem about a month ago, and I’m happily surfing at 23 Mbps. Note that is the absolute peek speed I get when testing against the san francisco speakeasy server late at night. At other times, it’s usually only about 20 Mbps, and even half that during the busiest evening hours. Also the speed is lower when I test against remote servers servers such as on the east coast, although it’s still close to 20 Mbps for the midwest.
So comcast is comcastic in my book !
10:12 PM PT
Thank you Om for the video. The speed looks really great. But as many wonder that what would one do with such high speeds, and without the infrastructure upgrades etc etc….but, just think of the market 10 years ago and the bubble boom.
So I guess only time can tell the future applications of this “big-speed” and also the comcast CEO said:
“what consumers do with this speed is upto the imagination of the entreprenurs of tomorrow”
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