Comcast's 50 Mbps service comes to OR, WA next month

Starting next month, subscribers of Comcast's cable Internet service in Oregon and southwestern Washington state will be getting their connections switched over to "wideband." The upgraded service, which was announced late last month doubles the speed of residential and business connections as well as offering two faster, more expensive plans that bring the maximum download speed to 22 and 50 Mbps respectively.

Wideband is currently available in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and parts of New England, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. According my press contact, Comcast plans to get it in "close to 10 million homes and businesses in the next couple of months," which is a good percentage given the company's overall customer base of 14.7 million subscribers.

The technology behind wideband, which is formally known as DOCSIS 3.0 brings with it the capability to hit speeds in excess of 300 Mbps, is six times faster than what Comcast is currently offering (or even capable of handling with its current network infrastructure). As mentioned before, this increase in download speed has not made a difference in Comcast's bandwidth use restriction, which requires users to stay within 250 GB of downloads per month or face a one-year suspension upon the second offense.

[ecotony]

So these guys can reach their 250GB limit 6 times faster, cool.

Does this mean they will compress the HD signals more to make room for the higher speed internet?

[Josh.Lowensohn]

I don't think there's a need to compress the signals any longer. It's using a different delivery system that gives you a higher limit in throughput overall.

[rcrusoe]

Compress the signal more? How? In my area Comcast "HD" is already inferior to the standard definition TV shows I download from iTunes. Which is the main reason I'm switching to satellite in January.

If they compress their TV signals any more they'll look like they were drawn in crayon.

[kswa1987]

i dont get the point of wideband (which you will probably pay an early adopter's fee for), that is if you are still limited to a paltry 250GB / month

[dylerl]

yes they are basically sending 4 different signals to you instead of the two now that they are sending, comes from the PAL system in Europe, but most likely it is going to cause lots of problems for comcast and slow down their entire infrastructures, I am hesitant to say if Comcast's infrastructure will be able to handle this.

[Zimm2]

Of note, Comcast recently reduced the upload speeds of its residential product offerings. 6 Mbps service has had its upload speed reduced from 1024 kbps to 368 kbps, and the 8 Mbps service has had its upload speed reduced from 2048 kbps to 768 kbps -- both slower than the typical DSL upload speeds (896 kbps). As you might imagine, the prices stayed the same. What was really strange was that the Comcast rep claimed that these had always been Comcast's offerings; however, I have printed marketing info that clearly states otherwise...

[inachu]

Dell support does the same thing with their hardware.
an older model delll pc could handle 1 gig of ram then I did a bios flash and now it only sees 256 megs of ram and then I call support and they say I was wrong but when I demanded to speak with a real hardware tech they confirmed the A01 supports 1 gig but the A05 supports only 256 megs of ram. So back to this article I think I will be switching to Verizon sooner than later.

[LockeL1]

You have it backwards there... The upload speeds used to be those 386 kbps for the 6Mbps service and was changed to 1024 and the upload for the 8Mbps service used to be 768 kbps but was upped to 2048 kbps. I would love for you to prove otherwise.

[Drazhna]

Comcast continues to place the connection speed 'carrot' in front of customers, while limiting the customer's services and increasing the cost of subscription. It's their way of saying thanks, to you, their valued customer.

[basraw]

Is a new cable modem needed?

I thought the ones we had were hardware capable of only 10 mbps.

it's a motoralo surf board? (sbxxxx???)