Comcast joins several other broadband carriers by launching a 100 Mbps broadband tier. But in Comcast’s version, the super fast tier is only available to business subscribers, not residential. The new offer is priced at $369.95 per month and is currently only offered in their Minneapolis/St. Paul market. It offers upstream bandwidth of 15 Mbps.
Comcast suggests that residential markets aren’t ready for 100 Mbps, despite numerous offers of it across the country. They may be right. The pricing alone for residential 100 Mbps tiers is usually north of $100/month, not to mention the debate of whether residential customers actually need that much speed. By targeting business customers, Comcast is offering a potentially compelling competitive offering to traditional telco T-carrier products.
The SMB segment is particularly attractive to companies like Comcast, and they’ve been aggressively pursuing it with some mixed success. The battle for the SMB segment sometimes gets lost in the pitched battle for residential triple play customers. But its competitive intensity is building significantly, and cable companies see the SMB market as a key area for growth. Cable companies like Cablevision, with their Optimum Lightpath division, are executing quite well there – expect others to follow.
you're right. 100 mbps for residential is simply marketing hype. i'd love to see the penetration numbers for the companies that offer it.
Sure most residential areas have no use for 100mbps but that's not why Comcast doesn't offer it. We all know that Comcast doesn't offer it because their rates are so laughable they can't afford for them to hit the front page. Since Comcast offers me 16mbps at $72/mo I can only assume their 100mbps will be well over $250/mo, with no SLA. Wouldn't that be some great advertising for them.
Comcast is the worst company I have ever dealt with and they repeatedly surprise me with their ultra-petty and thieving ways (yes, they have tried to actually steal $50 from me one month when they accidently disconnected my line instead of the neighbors — claiming I had to pay for the torubleshooting they did to fix my connection). Their only saving grace is that their HD cable can be easily stolen, which almost evens out their pathetic rates for HSI.
Why don't you just switch to a competitor, if they're that bad? Are they your only option?
Most Windows 2000 and older PCs aren't even optimized to access the internet at such high speed. With higher-than-LAN latency rates, adjustments need to be made to the TCP/IP stack. If you look at any in-depth SOHO router review, most don't hit the 100 Mbps of their FastEthernet interface. Also, the speed test sites aren't optimized for those speeds.
Businesses would benefit from multiplexed access, but residential subscribers need their expectations properly managed.
With our own 8 and 15 Mbps subscribers, we occasionally get a customer who is limited by their (older) TCP/IP stack or 802.11b-only Wi-Fi router. The good news is that Windows Vista and the latest service packs of Windows XP generally have a TCP/IP stack that auto-tunes for most situations.
More on this topic here:
http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/Latency.html
http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/tcptune/
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,115360…