Comcast Boosting Speeds for more than 20 Million Xfinity Internet Customers Across the Country

[cvaldes]

How do you do 1200 MBps on a 1000 Mbps port?

You don’t.

That’s the maximum throughput of the service. It could be shared between multiple devices.

Also some newer wireless standards deliver faster connections than Gigabit Ethernet.

It’s possible that Comcast will rent you a cable modem with 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports.

The press release quotes even higher speeds in the future so eventually consumer hardware will follow.

 

[hsew]

Nothing new here. USA residential broadband has trailed many countries for well over a decade. My guess is that half of Europe has faster average residential broadband than the USA. The top countries have traditionally been in southeast Asia (Korea, Japan, maybe Singapore) and some of the Scandinavian countries.

Residential broadband infrastructure is often subsidized by those governments as it is considered a necessity like a utility. The US federal government's opinion is far less proactive in ensuring high speed Internet access nationwide geographically and at all economic levels.

So it shows in average speeds and pricing.

And the common argument "well 'merikuh is much bigger than those places" isn't a good explanation. Sweden has a very similar population density to the USA. Their rural areas have similar densities to US rural areas and their metropolitan areas have similar densities to US metropolitan areas.

Are you seriously suggesting that America being literally 20 times the size of Sweden has NOTHING to do with infrastructure costs?

 

[R-T-B]

How do you do 1200 MBps on a 1000 Mbps port?

They use a 2.5gbps port.

 

[cvaldes]

Are you seriously suggesting that America being literally 20 times the size of Sweden has NOTHING to do with infrastructure costs?

No, I’m just saying that it’s not an excuse that can be casually tossed out there.

I bet someday average broadband Internet speeds in China will surpass those of the USA. Not tomorrow, not next month, but not in the too distant future.

Remember that I framed my comments referencing population density which is a metric that takes population and area differences into account. So even if the USA is 20x larger in area, it also has about 20x the population. That’s why I picked Sweden as a specific example.

If you look at inhabitants per area (square kilometer or square mile), the two countries are actually comparable, both in rural areas as well as metropolitan ones.

Countries like South Korea, Japan, and Singapore have much different population densities.

In the same manner, if you compared cumulative total COVID-19 deaths, it's easy to dismiss the USA's higher numbers compared to Japan (which has about 38% the population as the USA) and say, "well America has more COVID deaths because we have more people." However if you pick a metric like cumulative deaths per 100K people, you'll see that USA is 320 versus Japan's 37 -- an 8.6x difference.

Anyhow, a lot of other countries these days have faster wired broadband Internet service than the USA. Some have the advantage of higher population densities. Others do not.

And that's just residential wired broadband. The USA lags even worse concerning publicly accessible free wifi networks.

 

[R-T-B]

Are you seriously suggesting that America being literally 20 times the size of Sweden has NOTHING to do with infrastructure costs?

He's suggesting that density is similar so that argument falls flat.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

I've had the gigabit option for years now and for the last year or so they have been delivering 1200 Mbps. I don't know what this 900 > 1000 talk is about.

Those are actually realistic numbers for a 1 Gb service, as you usually get 900-something Mbps. The maximum average at Ookla for my VTel FTTH service, is 946 Mb for upload. Similar for download. For other places on the internet, more likely 700-900-something Mb. Even though my Steam download speeds are often excellent. Even when I don't expect Steam downloads to be faster than 930 Mbps.

But those limitations of the 1 Gb service, are nowhere near call-the-ISP-level-of-bad.

 

[AsRock]

I simlpy pointed out it was a technology limitation, no need to have a go at me.

Was not intended to sound like i was attacking you or any thing. I was all so just pointing it out too, seems like a system that's held up by controlling particular area's were others have a hard time getting too.

I guess Verizon cannot get were Comcast can and Camcast cannot compete with Verizon's pricing.

 

[JAB Creations]

Capitalism strikes again!

Ah, a marxist who promotes anti-capitalist cronyism crimes as capitalism. Never gets old.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Email came through today saying my speed was boosted! Reset of the modem and I ran speed test. I was getting 120/6, now I'm getting 230/6. So....yeah, I guess. Just wish the upload speed was bumped up, even if it was only to 10mbps.

 

[jillw]

I just received a text that said they meant to increase us from 100 mbps to 200 mbps but actually found out today that it's 400 mbps! I went to fast.com and my desktop reads 17, yes 17 mbps.