Comcast’s new 50MBPS “wideband”: great if your neighbors don’t subscribe

One of the least discussed properties of DOCSIS or cable broadband is that the more popular it is in you neighborhood, the less you can expect from it. With DOCSIS 3, this property is magnified. In comparison to a direct fiber connection it will only deliver consistently good performance if the take rate is low or if subscriber usage is limited.

Comcast is only bonding two channels down, one channel up for this service right now, which means they can offer 80 Mbps down and 30 up. But it’s not like that’s per-subscriber. That’s per neighborhood – to be shared among potentially 400 people (although at $150 a month, expect uptake to be substantially less than 100%).

But compare that to Verizon’s Fios, in which a maximum of 32 people share 622 Mbps downstream and 155 upstream. So when Comcast says their new offering is comparable to Fios in speed and price, that’s really bullhockey. On the upside stream we’re talking about hundreds of people sharing 30 Mbps up, compared to 32 people sharing 155. (ZDnet)

Cable has a dirty little secret. The faster speeds they are selling are a large scale shared resource. The sum of bandwidth as sold is exponentially larger than the amount of shared bandwidth available on their infrastructure. This is probably why most cable guys will attempt to throttle their customers sustained usage, and blame poor performance on “over usage” by “bandwidth hogs”. The cable guy needs to come clean. DOCSIS was designed to deliver stunning performance in an era of static content. If that is how the cable guy expects his customers will use his service then he should spell in out. If we had real competition, DOCSIS would soon find its proper place in the museum.