Comcast's New Broadband Service Is Twice As Fast As Google Fiber

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The two time winner of the "Worst Company in America" crown has launched a new broadband service twice as fast as Google Fiber. Hmmm, if it was priced right, how many of you would sign up?

Comcast has drawn a new battle line against Google Fiber by launching a 2Gbps fiber broadband service called Gigabit Pro. It arrives next month in Atlanta and will be available in 18 million homes across the US by the end of the year. The package will deliver symmetric uploads and downloads like Fiber does, but at twice its 1Gbps speed.
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While I'd love either, both those speeds seem rather pointless as very few sites can feed you at that rate; which is why I'm sure Comcast is doing it.
 
I'd probably volunteer my forehead as a rest-stop for the Comcast CEO's sweaty ballsack if I could get affordable gigabit internet without data caps and good upload speed, because fact is, I only have AT&T and Comcast in my neigborhood and they are both too expensive and so-so performance.
 
I'll believe it when I see it which will be never. Even though comcast has a gigabit competitor in my area and has a different one 2 hours south which is going to which is covering most of the central/southern part of the state.
 
While they might still have horrible customer service, I've always been happy with my actual Comcast internet service. Over the years my same plan has gone from 16/8, to 28/10, to 65/10, and now to 180/25 for the same $. My service has only gone down for a total of a single day over the course of 7 years, too. I have faith in the product - just not the service behind it.
I wonder what this is going to cost.
 
Wha'ts the point of speeds that fast when they have a 350gb/month limit?
 
While I don't have any serious issues with my Comcast service other than the price. I just wish we had some real competition here. Frontier is a joke and cant get DSL to my house if I wanted it. Plus its slow as hell at the places I have been that have it. That leaves Comcast to do pretty much anything that want pricing wise. Or the never ending threats of caps.
 
TwistedAegis said:
While I'd love either, both those speeds seem rather pointless as very few sites can feed you at that rate; which is why I'm sure Comcast is doing it.
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Few sites can feed you at that rate. But when i can download from steam at 10MB/s, while watching netflix, while my wife is watching netflix in the other room. star citizen is downloading at 1MB/s (limited by them of course). And I'm browsing the web. And playing Diablo. And thats just on 150mbps (non comcast). Few sites can feed you at 1gigabit. Few sites NEED too. There's more delay in javascript rendering than data transit these days. If you're forever alone, steam can keep up with it. If you have a family, you never have to worry about someone the next room over downloading too much porn slowing you down.

My concerns would be: price. they have a 505mbps option for 360$ (and i think that might be for businesses). And data caps.

Oh, and customer service.
 
2Gbps in theory but who wants to bet Netflix tests still show 3Mbps...

This will likely be in speed test only. I'd love to be wrong though.
 
I'm somewhat torn on this subject. I live in an area where I have to tether my cell for access. I would think that it would be an awesome idea except for the fact that at those speeds you would cross their bandwidth allocation in a week. I think they cap you after 150 GB of data used. So while I agree that the speed would phenomenal, how exactly could we really take advantage of it?
 
I'm just thankful I have an actual bucket truck and not the bucket van they show in that picture. Those things would be horrible to work out of!
 
Who's got a NIC in their box that supports 2Gbps and up anyway? A quick check on Amazon shows a 10Gbps card costs between $200-$500. I don't see Comcast supplying it's customers that...A capable router and cabling maybe, but not a nic. :confused:
 
I'm using comcast's 150mbps. At $129/month right now. I think the cap is 250GB/month. I only hit that cap once, but was told the cap was temporarly lifted so it didn't matter.

I'm willing to pay upto $175/month. Which would still be less than what my friends pay for premium channels/cable/internet. In regions without competition, I doubt it will be within that price range. If they offered any increase over what I get now for under $175, I'll get it.
 
I had a gigabit when I was in Seattle. It is kind of pointless to have Internet that fast because nothing feeds that fast. However, it was very comforting to know that every single network task was operating at the maximum possible speed. 250gb/s is more than enough imo though.
 
Even if it was the same price as Google Fiber I would still probably go with Google just because of all the years Comcast has screwed me over.
 
With comcast I always had connection drops which the company blamed on my own equipment. Funny, but my verizon dsl line always worked, and the fios has been up and running for the last five years I've had it.

Comcast blows. They even tried to charge me for the month after the disconnect. I hate that friggin company.

But I've heard horror stories about verizon too.

It's really a shame that these huge companies routinely screw over their customers. The gov't really has to stop all the mergers and create more competition for media providers. Because right now, the oligopoly problem remains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ilMx7k7mso
 
Tell me when it's twice as cheap, and maybe I'll care. I don't want more speed.....we don't max what we have already. I want a smaller bill.
 
Domingo said:
While they might still have horrible customer service, I've always been happy with my actual Comcast internet service. Over the years my same plan has gone from 16/8, to 28/10, to 65/10, and now to 180/25 for the same $. My service has only gone down for a total of a single day over the course of 7 years, too. I have faith in the product - just not the service behind it.
I wonder what this is going to cost.
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I had the same theory with ATT until my CC compromised and I had to call customer service to pay my bill. $200 a month for 2 lines for over 4 years and the phone rep wants to charge me a $10 service charge to talk to him because their voice rec software can't understand me? Switched to T-Mobile the next day and got faster internet (at the time), more data, and cut my bill to $60 for 2 lines.

I have Comcast now and can't stand their customer service but I have no other choice they are on contract with my Condo/apartment. I am supposed to have HBO but have zero interest with being on the phone for two hours while someone flips a switch and turns it on. Don't even get me started on my $19 a month internet that the turned off and the next day said the deal was no longer available if I wanted it turned back on it was $29 a month.
 
jophde said:
I had a gigabit when I was in Seattle. It is kind of pointless to have Internet that fast because nothing feeds that fast. However, it was very comforting to know that every single network task was operating at the maximum possible speed. 250gb/s is more than enough imo though.
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So...125x the speed comcast is boasting or 250x faster than google fiber?
 
I read an article on the Consumerist this morning about this. Some key things I noticed though.....

http://consumerist.com/2015/04/02/i...s-google-fiber-the-downside-its-from-comcast/

Comcast also specifies that the service will be available to “any home within close proximity of Comcast’s fiber network and will require an installation of professional-grade equipment.”

An exec for the company, VP of internet services Jason Livingood, also confirmed on Twitter that the Gigabit Pro service will not be subject to data caps.
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So no data caps, and I'd love to know what the cost for that "professional" equipment would be.

They've got no competition for that sort of speed in Atlanta, so the pricing will be ugly I bet until Google gets their fiber going which is a ways off still.
 
Limahl said:
So no data caps, and I'd love to know what the cost for that "professional" equipment would be.
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Would be awesome if they would just plug their fiber into my SFP+ transceiver.

Heck, I'd even rent an SFP+ transceiver from them :p

That is, if I trusted the service to be any good.

Knowing that it's Comcast, it's probably 2Gbit/s, as long as you don't cross our edge routers during prime time, cause then you get our purposefully gimped speeds.
 
I'd be satisfied if they'd just have 150mbps/50mbps speed here.. 105mbps/10mbps is a bit uneven.
 
TwistedAegis said:
While I'd love either, both those speeds seem rather pointless as very few sites can feed you at that rate; which is why I'm sure Comcast is doing it.
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At work, all of our servers have at least dual gigE (although one tcp connection isn't going to use both connections), some of them have dual 10Gig. If you're close enough to overcome slow start and our relatively small send buffers, and don't mind downloading the same smallish file over and over for no reason, you could probably hit 2gpbs :)
 
UrielDagda said:
I'd be satisfied if they'd just have 150mbps/50mbps speed here.. 105mbps/10mbps is a bit uneven.
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Yeah, to be honest, I am pretty happy with my 150/150 Verizon FiOS service (except for the fact that crossing the edge router at prime time results in horrid pings).

I'm not sure I'd pay for gigabit service if it were available.

I do wish the 150/150 service were cheaper here though.

I currently pay $154.99 per month for one step above basic cable, and 150/150 internet. They offer 300/300 here too, but it costs an additional $80, and I just don't think it's worth it.

I would drop TV all together, but my fiancee is into it. That and they have priced it to hurt cord cutters putting a ton of the value in the bundle. If I were to drop the TV and go with internet only, the internet service would cost $120 / month. :mad:

I could save $10 by going down to basic cable, and $60 by going down to 25/25, but then the bundle savings changes too, and I'd still be paying $84.99, and even in this configuration, if I were to drop the TV and keep the internet, the savings would be negligible due to how the bundle works.
 
Once they're done over-provisioning the 2GB pipe that supplies all these customers you'll probably get speeds closer to 300-400 Mbps.
 
Anytime I've had a massive download in the last few years since having Google Fiber, I get pretty fantastic speeds, sometimes even over 1 gbit. Origin has supplied me with 37 gigs of BF4 a handful of times. I think the best time on that was around 4 1/2 mins.
 
TwistedAegis said:
While I'd love either, both those speeds seem rather pointless as very few sites can feed you at that rate; which is why I'm sure Comcast is doing it.
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As you go up in networking speed it becomes more and more difficult to saturate a single fast link with one connection.

The really fat pipes are more for running multiple things at once.

Torrenting an - uh - "linux distro", while the kid watches Adventure Time on Netflix, and you are downloading Half-Life 3 from Steam, and the wife is watching cat videos, and sharing the 2000 pictures you took at 20MP at your friends wedding with said friend all without impacting your pings to your CS GO server :p

In amateur server forums, one of the biggest disappointments I often see are people getting 10gig ethernet, and only benching 3 gigabit over it, even though their RAID array locally reaches almost a gigabyte/s.

There are tricks around this (LSO/TSO, jumbo frames, etc. etc.) but the point is, the faster your connection gets, the more difficult it is to pin it with one connection.

You can definitely make use of it with multiple connections though.
 
Does Google's service have data caps? Probably not. Comcast will probably eventually implement data caps when more people roll on. They'll just spring it on us, just like they sprung the other stupid data caps.

Then Comcast hasn't drawn any kind of battle lines at all. They've offered a crappy product that looks good on the surface.


Data caps are such utter BS that it just seriously pisses me off. I wouldn't care if Google was 20 Mbps. I'd still use it over a 1Gbps connection with a stupid data cap. Not only does it make zero sense for me to pay for data that they don't own, but it's stupid that they start offering these fast, uncapped connections while still supporting legacy connections... that have caps. From what I remember, it's the stupid Canadian ISP's up there that had the notion of "hey, let's take money that isn't ours by springing data caps on our customers!" and then the US ISPs followed. Everyone wants more money. Plenty obvious that they just want a piece of Netflix's pie.


Well end rant about data caps. I just hate them that much.
 
I also have Verizon Fios and I pay around 150 for internet. I pay for all the movie channels because I just like rewatching movies.
 
I'm curious how real the current Comcast data caps are. They claim not to have any in most areas and I've never known anyone who got had any issues with "normal" use that doesn't include torrenting tons of questionable files 24/7. We've gone over plenty of times via streaming, Steam, Origin, and online gaming with no issues.
 
Domingo said:
I'm curious how real the current Comcast data caps are. They claim not to have any in most areas and I've never known anyone who got had any issues with "normal" use that doesn't include torrenting tons of questionable files 24/7. We've gone over plenty of times via streaming, Steam, Origin, and online gaming with no issues.
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Could be that they just selectively go after those who they consider to be using the service excessively.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
Well end rant about data caps. I just hate them that much.
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I still think, as time goes on, we're going to see caps put in and enforced with insane overage charges. Especially as people get more accustomed to "streaming" everything and digital downloads for software purchases.

Once they get you hooked, then they'll bend you over financially even more than they do now, and it'll be either pay up, or go without all the content you've gotten used to being able to stream when you want it.
 
fairlane said:
Who's got a NIC in their box that supports 2Gbps and up anyway? A quick check on Amazon shows a 10Gbps card costs between $200-$500. I don't see Comcast supplying it's customers that...A capable router and cabling maybe, but not a nic. :confused:
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Don't forget an SSD. The fastest platter drive I've ever had could only write at around 160 MB/s. 2Gbps is about 250 MB/s.
 
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