Only one week after Comcast was talking with BitTorrent to change its webby ways, the ISP has announced super-fast speeds starting at 50Mbps.
Comcast says that the new service will allow customers to download a 4GB high-def movie in about 10 minutes. Don’t get too excited; Reuters says that kind of web power will cost you—$150 a month.
Using fiber-optic cable networks, DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications) technology promises up to 50Mbps on downloads and 5Mbps on uploads. Comcast says it plans to double the download speeds within the next two years, and more than triple it in the future.
“This announcement marks the beginning of the evolution from broadband to wideband,” said Mitch Bowling, senior VP and general manager of Comcast High-Speed Internet, Comcast Cable. “Wideband is the future and it’s coming fast. We believe wideband will usher-in a new era of speed and Internet innovation for today’s digital consumers.”
The Minneapolis and St. Paul markets are the first to be offered such service, starting today.
Existing customers in those areas will also get a bit of a service boost. Twin Cities customers will get triple the upload speed of its 6Mbps/384Kbps Performance tier to 6Mbps/1Mbps. There will also be more than double the upload speed of its 8Mbps/768Kbps Performance Plus tier to 8Mbps/2Mbps. Comcast’s PowerBoost customers will get 12Mbps for downloads and 2Mbps uploads on the Performance tier, and 16Mbps downloads on the Performance Plus tier for files like videos, games, music and digital photographs.
There’s no word on when those tweaks will trickle down to the rest of the country.
Everything sounds great, except the price. Would you pay for that much power?
Ed,
You are clueless. Any PC could handle 50Mbps easily.
I had 20Mpbs for a couple of glorious months in Chicago before I moved (RCN). It was sweet… can’t imagine the pure goodness of 50.
My standard Comcast service is hitting 12-15 mbps these days, so I am not ready for the 50 mbps thing yet, at least not at $150. But the high speed brings up the other stuff too.
Those speeds should be no problem for a modern computer with SATA drives. 12 mbps is only 1.5 MB/s which is nothing in the grand scheme of computers, and 50 mbps is only 6 MB/s which is also poking along when you think of hard disk speeds of 100 MB/s
Ed, could you elaborate please. are you saying that pcs have a limit of 10-12 Mbps, or that the pipe to the home is limited?
It is impossible for a home computer to download @50Mbps. You will max out somewhere between 10-12Mbps if you are lucky…..
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Rocky, Maybe I can suggest some glasses for you. Blu Ray will always look and… 
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As the CONSUMER, we paid for these high speeds in the first place, now the CONSUMER is being shafted. One day America, you will all wake up and see how badly you have been screwed. The I hope you will punish the MAN!