Digital Home Thoughts: Comcast Boosts Bandwidth in a Big Way

"Comcast high-speed Internet customers in parts of Oregon and Southwest Washington will have a much-faster option starting in December. The cable provider is rolling out its Extreme 50 service, which has download speeds of up to 50Mbps. Called "wideband" by Comcast, but officially known as DOCSIS 3.0, the high-speed service seems like a bandwidth hog's dream. That is, until you realize that Comcast's 250GB monthly download cap remains in place. Keep to the cap, however, and the benefits are obvious. Extreme 50 customers should be able to download a high-def movie (6GB) in about 16 minutes, Comcast says."

If you're willing to pay an eye-popping $139.95 USD per month, Comcast's Extreme 50 will give you 50 mbps downstream and an even more impressive 10 mbps upstream. Being in Canada this isn't a service I can take advantage of, but to get 10 mbps, I just might pay that much. I'm with Shaw, and paying for their Extreme service: 10 mbps downstream, and a pathetic 1 mbps upstream. I rarely complain about having to wait for downloads, but uploads take forever. The good news is that when I benchmark my connection (which I do on a regular basis, being the geek that I am), I routinely see speeds in the 22 mbps range...but never more than 1 mbps upstream. The hard truth? People running bittorent clients and leaving them on 24/7 make my ISP scared to give me more than 1 mbps upstream, because if they do, it would get abused by the torrentheads. A nice compromise would be 5 mbps upstream speeds for 60 minutes at a time, but I doubt that will happen either. At any rate, my hope is that Shaw will be releasing a DOCSIS 3.0 system and perhaps I'll be rocking 10 mbps upstream before long...