Comcast’s new $150 service plan will provide web speeds of 50Mbps.
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?

4gb’s for a high def movie are about right. They all fit on to a 15gb disc for hd dvd. About 4gb’s are the movie with one audio track. You throw in multiple audio tracks and you can double that to 8 gb. Throw in all the other features, and you fill up that 15gb disc….
I wonder whether the servers feeding this high speed will keep up with the capacity being delivered to the customer. Having bandwidth without “pumping” capacity won’t buy the consumer very much. This is and end-to-end process, and I don’t see anyone offering buffering of bits in this scheme. Lots of marketing BS is all that we have here.
Good point about the file size. 4gb is likely representing a 720p resolution, MPeg4 (H.264) which would be about right. 1080i would definately be higher, and obviously 1080p would be huge.
You could roughly double the size if you were talking Mpeg2.
Since when is “download a 4GB high-def movie” a HD movie. All the movies that I’ve seen in the 4GB range are SD.
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Sayonara, set-top box? Or will it just take an energy-saving nap?
It’s hard to imagine life without remote controls, but it’s been a long, strange path to the modern incarnation we know and love today.
I have close to 50 SD movies on our server. They have all been stripped of everything except the movie and one sound track. Some of them have subtitles. None of them have been compressed durring the copy process.The range of file sizes are 3.3GB to about 6.8 GB.
Most SD movies are manufactured using dual layer (~8GB) disks.