you dont know anything about cable.Cable was FIRST and the fastest internet service since 1997? and it will keep it like that.now we moving to docsis 3.0.in another 5 or 6 years we will be with docsis 4.0 and u`ll see a huge improvement Cables is FAST,SIMPLE and is EVERYWHERE!

Competition is good – don’t get me wrong. But I have to say I still think broadband connections are just way too high. Yes, sure they’re cheaper than they were years ago, but compared to areas like Asia and other overseas areas, the US is getting gouged.

Verizon’s current infrastructure can go up to 400 Mbps without borrowing from FiOs TV. They can offer 101 Mbps any time they want, its just a matter of pricing it and turning it on.

I have had FiOs for 3 years, it broke once (last week), and they had a tech onsite and the problem repaired in 3 hours from the time of my call. Turns out a circuit just needed to be rebuilt from the office as a change had been made.

Besides that, nothing has ever happened to my FiOs in 3 years, and the speed NEVER fluctuates.

I am tempted to switch to the 100 Mbps though, if for no other reason than on a cost per Mbps basis, its an amazing value – just $20 more than my 25/25 Mbps FiOs.

Verizon is doing much better with FiOs where it competes with Time Warner cable, which from what I understand, is simply abysmal, especially in Staten Island.

Cablevision is a completely different animal, they are an outstanding cable company with great prices, products, and service. Much better than TW or Comcast.

In the long run, we are all dead… In the slightly less long run, there’s nothing that limits DOCSIS bonding to only four channels. DOCSIS 3.0 specifies 8-channel bonding, and if memory serves, TI and Broadcom have both announced silicon supporting this, available to ship 3Q09, upping the total data bandwidth on DOCSIS 3.0 networks to 300 Mb/s. Subsequent standards can increase the number of bonded channels as necessary.

Cable HFC plant with DOCSIS 3.0 and subsequent standards, combined with total digitization and switched digital video to free up QAMs and some aggressive node splitting will provide pretty darn good capacities. No, it won’t match GPON or future PONs – physics is physics, and fiber has more raw capacity than coax – but it’ll be good enough, significantly cheaper, and require gradual capex spending rather than throwing $B at the network in a small number of years. An 8-channel bonded DOCSIS plant with 20:1 oversubscription, 125 HH per node, and 50% take rate gives average capacity of 93 Mb/s per user – on par with GPON with a 32-customer split. And the MSO will have a number of tools to increase the capacity – higher degree bonding, node splits, adjustment of oversubscription ratios, load balancing across colocated nodes, some of which require no capex.

Verizon has hundreds of employees in Cablevision territory. For less than they are spending on pr people to get their opinion out, they can set up a statistically valid sample and give us a report of what Cablevision actually is delivering. Evidence like that is far more believable than any press release, and I’d be happy to report it.

I’ve been watching this closely since they started rolling “100 megabit” service in France and Japan. It’s 160 megabits shared, so if heavily used would rarely come close. In practice, so few websites can serve even 10 meg that actual congestion is very rare. Users around the world report speed test results of 80-100 meg routinely (if their computer is set to handle it.) Realworld users get the thrill of that speed rarely, but the results when connected to something like a nearby Akamai server to download the latest Microsoft update do very well.

The performance will go down when the networks are more heavily loaded, but as you note the experience on 36 meg shared current generation cable has been amazingly good. One MIT professor wrote that he routinely gets 20 meg download. With the higher 160 meg capacity, the sharing should be even more successful.

I’m being cautious until we have loaded networks, and I say that 160 meg DOCSIS 3.0 is 50 meg 95+% of the time, which is darn good for most of us. I think the results will be closer to 50 meg 98% of the time and 100 meg a good majority of the time from deployment until 2015-2020, as Internet traffic grows. Fortunately, DOCSIS 3.0 is speced to a full gigabit shared, and chips are already announced that are twice as fast at 320 meg. There will be room to upgrade, especially with SDV freeing capacity.

In addition, DOCSIS 3.0 upstream is starting to deploy, and I reported from the Cable Show that Comcast intends to deploy millions of lines starting about 9 months from now. That’s 120 meg up, with some technical problems, but I believe will reach 50 for most people most of the time.

Verizon needs to get us evidence or look very foolish.
db

However, I am myself very much interested in your report. Hope Om will publish a link when it’s ready.

Everyone shares, and everyone has oversubscription ratios somewhere. “Dedicated” versus “shared” is a red herring – the questions are what is the overall capacity of the system (end to end), how is it engineered, and how competent is the network operator in managing the network capacity (as Josh Auerbach alludes to below). And how cost effective it is to deliver that capacity, as Luis Rodrigo points out below.

Verizon, like with the iPhone recent PR, is a bunch of PR globby-gue and sour grapes. I, for one, love to see the competition duke it out while I reap the rewards.
Brian