i love the writing here, seriously you all crack my shit up

"cost a whopping $150 a month. And no, it won't blow you."

150 bucks a month? Why? Say you get this for your illegal torrenting needs. Wouldn't that just be dumb? Like you couldn't just spend 50 bucks on internet and 100 bucks on actually buying movies and music. Same difference. I guess, I dunno.

Umm, why did you use an image of fiber for an article on cable, its direct competitor?

"And no, it won't blow you."
That is awesome, this is part of why I love this site.

This would be great though, I am hoping this kind of thing expands out more and drops in price...

...and is offered by someone besides Comcast.

Ha. I have normal cable from Comcast and that sucks already. Why would I want to pay more for faster internet if it's something new and will probably suck because it's Comcast? I'd rather go with Verizon since I've heard good things about them from my friends who have the service.

@icelight:

Isn't it obvious, Gizmodo is fiber fanboys! Let's shun them for liking something! Gahhhhh!!!

READ THE FINE PRINT... As always, it will say "you will get up too....". Plus, I'm sure there will be some bandwidth throttling for heavy usage.

wow. i've been using fiber optics on my school campus for 4 years and realized 1 thing. unless i'm getting files from people on campus, everything else downloads at pretty standard speeds since you're limited to other people's bandwidth. considering that i pay $18 for "technology fee" along with 40k for tuition, i dont mind the $150 per month. haha. but yea, regular comcast cable is fine with me whenever i go home.

i'm gonna miss the 30 mb/s download speed once i graduate though..... :[

@SBM_from_LA: I can see it now. Customers going over their usage limit in one day thanks to the new and improved speeds and a wealth of online streaming and whatnot. Should've read the fine print!

@icelight: Cause it's fiber-like speeds? And hello, fire. Besides, their backbone is running on fiber, as most cable companies are all too quick to tell you.

Thats baller status, I want.

I still don't have VZ high speed Internet, let alone FiOS. So, I am stuck with Comcast.

If the $150 50Mbps won't "blow me" the 160Mbps better. Think if 1/3 the full speed is $150 than that would mean the 160Mbps would cost around $450 per month! Only worth it for those extremely rich bastards who want to have every advantage they can while playing Halo.

One of the few advantages to living in Minnesota. Bittorrent here I come!

John Mayer here: I pity the fool who doesn't have 160Mbps downstream and an AI girlfriend named Alice... Oh crap, I'm getting my memes confused, aren't I....

Technology hotbed St. Paul, Minnesota gets all the breaks. If they would just give in to those tax incentives, google is ready to relocate there.

Ha, I love Korea. We've got 100Mbps for about $30 a month

woah, 150? no way, once they start offering japan speed broadband for $30-40 then i will join but until then, us broadband is pretty sad.

@Andrew_Cho: That does it ... what does it take to move to Korea ? Who do I talk to ?

i go to school in st. paul, and live very close, but i have a feeling i'll never get to experience this... WAY to expensive

Okay, first of all, the nerd in me is gasming all over the place...

However, whats the point?
It seems that if you use your internet anymore these days everyone accuses you of illegalness and ISP's filter/cap/shit on your internet connection.

So if i were to sign up, would i even be able to caress my new wide pipe? or would comcast be the mom waiting outside your bedroom door at the first sign of your using your new toy.

50Mbps? Heck, I have a 20Mbps pipe and I can't ever get data sent to me that fast. It's not the pipe's fault, the fault is the rest of the pipes and servers aren't going to keep up. My advice is to pay for what you can actually use: 5 - 10Mbps. That's about all you're going to actually get for now. Besides, isn't Comcast the company that throttles your connection back anyway? They'll have 50 pages of disclaimers telling you not to expect speeds of any sort because they won't be able to get them or they will simply block you.

@vastrightwing: Just as important as the raw bitrate of your 'pipe' are several other factors- including where that connection terminates, who else is aggregated into that pop, its upstream link utilization and queue depth, and partially based on this queue depth, the average bandwidth/delay product of your TCP connections. Since TCP uses a sliding window, if your aggregate connection latency is large, or your transfers are short, you will never see the connection scale up to close to line rate.

hell yeah more ddling of 30gb hd porn!!!!yeah!!!!

150 yen perhaps?

Gizmodo, get your act together... Fios gives you 50/20 ... not 50/5 like Comcast. That is a huge deal when you want to upload files... And it's way cheaper and constant. AND it's extremely close to being 50 down and 20 up! Yes, VZ's fine print also says "up to", but their numbers hold much truer than Comcast can thanks to the dedicated nature of FTTP.

But will it blow me? NO? Then unless it goes down to 50 bucks a month I say FUCK IT.

@daftrok: "But will it blow me? NO? Then unless it goes down to 50 bucks a month I say FUCK IT."

Sorry daftrok, it won't do that either.

I vote no. Not that I have the option for I'm already paying $50/mo for 1.5-3mbps cable, the only other option here is DSL and the phone lines around here are crap. But I can't see a single reason to pay that much for internet service.

This just in:
The internet is as fast as it's weakest link!

So having a DOCSIS 3.0 compliant fiber will not help to videoconference with your grampa's dial-up AOL phone line.

Sorry to burst your bubble boys and gals...

:)

Your new 50mb pipe will be awesome when they still cut you off at your 200gig "invisible" limit they have on downloads, providing you NO opportunity to get back on.

@Mandatory_Field: Dude, that was a pretty nifty comment. Very good, very good.

I doubt that price point is for "Joe Consumer". $150/month is cheap for that kind of bandwidth in the business world. I'd use it as a backup connection as well as letting the kids in the office go wild with their audio and video streams. Many businesses rely on their Internet connection, to not have redundancy in place through different peers is foolish.

St. Paul, Minnesota? TFSU.

ooh...ooh...I'm from STP.MN....but then I hate comcast... All those stupid commercial (lay people think they're funny) drive me nuts....maybe this will drive their cost down though I doubt it...Comcast is evil....there...I said it....maybe once the ps3 is wide open or HD multimedia comes full circle, this will be worth it...150...that's all the bills I paid monthly...Internet...Cellphone...Car Insurance...House Phone...

I'd prob pay for it just to have such speed! Why do all these things always get rolled out in such random places though? SHOW SF THE LOVE!

I would totally agree with one of the posters that said 5-10mbps is more than enough speed (for now). Many of us have had access to 10mbps corporate LANs before either through work or University, but really, how much difference has that made?.

The quickest speeds I've ever experienced were 4,000 kbps downstream and that meant getting an entire movie in about 59 seconds.

As servers cannot generally deliver 50mbps to a single connection, I can't see the need for this just yet.

@legayce: nice speeds. I read an article a year ago (shoulda saved it) about someone in sweden who was able to download entire movies in 30 seconds. Anyone knw what I am talking about?

forget the speed they are advertising as download..whether or not it'll blow you..
what about the upload speeds?..when can we have uploads of 30Mbps?..
forget having 25,500Mbps download speed..it won't matter a shit when the guy your playing against in COD4 has 2Mbp upload..

How about 10/10 or 20/20 for gamers on XBOX LIVE and (laughs) PSN....and for other users(bittorrenting)..have something like 30/5..

@icelight: I do believe it is because the fiber is burning in the image, hense sending the message that it is Burning Fiber as competition?

I'd pay in a second - I just wish that rollout of these high-speed services would happen in Florida faster. NAP of the Americas and no super-high-speed anything here. Sure, Bellsouth/AT&T have been 'testing' their 24Mbps service for years, but not yet.... ;(

Down with franchises - up with competition.

@icelight: Comcast claims it delivers data over it's "State of the art fiber optic network". Just watch one of their commercials.

i'm using 10mbs right now, and it's fine. cept for the times when there are 10 - 20 people using it. in which case i'd definately pay the $150 and split the bill.

@lonnypaul: Shit... considering someone in Japan, Korea and/or China can get 100mbps for $33 roughly and 1GBPS (Korea and Japan) for some more and not have to worry about blocked ports or services (save China, of course) or shaping.... What's more tempting... Hmm.... Verizon and Concrap are both overpriced it would seem.

Here in San Fran, a lot of the SOMA condo buildings have service from a company called WebPass, which puts microwave transceivers on the tops of buildings and bounces the signal around the building tops around here. My building has it, I got it, and it's $30/month, 45MBPS Synchronous service. It's really about 30 MBPS in practice, but that down AND up. Sustained; not burst. For $30. A month. Love it. Can't imagine paying $150/month for residential, at any speed. $30/$40/month is the "pricepoint" for residential service, whatever the speed.

@GottaGo: But what's the latency? Multihop RF could really suck.

I'm paying $95 a month now for the Comcast commercial service with static IP, so if they did start offering this in Seattle, I might well spring for it, assuming it's a commercial-grade service. And I cannot imagine Seattle won't be high on the list, since FIOS is available in some of the area.

too bad las vegas has been monopolized. we'll never get this OR FiOS out here.

@PiNPOiNT: I live in the twin cities and I've gotten that stupid phone call before. If I wasn't worried about getting it again I would sign up for this service in a heartbeat. So fuck you Comcast, you just lost my extra hundred bucks.

@Tensor: The part he left out is that you'll be working for 200 bucks a month.

And no, it won't blow you.

I never pay more than $10 for that anyways. AND she love me long time.

@Geisrud: Of course, if your paying $10 or less you live with the knowledge that she'd love that leafless shrub on the corner next to the fire hydrant just as much.

screw you comcast. If that shit doesn't come down to 10 dollars per 10mbps starting at 30 you can count me out.

......and they still won't let you run a "server" on it. Why would I need that much bandwidth unless it's completely open to the Interent without firewall or bandwidth shaping?

Now if for that price they included all the channels I get from cable streamed - it's a deal. ;^)

The funny thing?

Docsis 3.0 works by bonding together four channels - each could otherwise be used for an analog TV broadcast - and allowing them to be used as one big data pipe. In regions where infrastructure is constrained, Comcast will make room for the expanded bandwidth by pulling back some analog channels and using sometimes controversial compression techniques on its other bundled services.

Right. So you lose a few analog channels and get more compression artifacts on your HD signals for the privilege of paying $150/mo for mostly unusable bandwidth (not to mention throttling and traffic shaping). Also, there's no mention of the current limitation on upspeeds with DOCSIS 3.0.

According to the Arstechnica article on the same topic:

There's something for the rest of Comcast's Twin Cities' subscribers as well. Those on the lowest, 6Mbps/384Kbps tier will see their upload speeds jump to 1Mbps. 8Mbps Performance Plus customers will see 1Mbps upload speeds double to 2Mbps. (Arstechnica)

This is of course in addition to the fact that Comcast still doesn't have the upstream bonding completely ready for rollout yet:

Comcast's first implementation of the standard will be downstream-only. According to Cable Digital News, that's not due to Comcast cutting corners-DOCSIS upstream channel bonding probably won't be available until late 2008-early 2009. (Arstechnica)

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here posting this message on a FiOS 20/20 symmetrical for $70/mo. As an added bonus, I've been able to actually use the full 20Mbps upstream: