New technology promises super-fast cable modems

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Comcast Corp. chief executive officer Brian Roberts dazzled a cable industry audience Tuesday with the first public showing of technology that enabled a data download speed of 150 megabits per second, or roughly 25 times faster than today's standard cable modems.


Yawn !

The technology, called DOCSIS 3.0, was developed by ...

DOCSIS isn't a technology. It's a standard.
Thats like ...developing new traffic rules that all drivers must learn and calling those new rules a new "traffic technology".


"It's an exponential step forward and we're very excited. What consumers actually do with all this speed is up to the imagination of the entrepreneurs of tomorrow."


The answer to that question is ... "diddly squat".

Why ?

The cable modems we have today already go up to 10 megabits and what does that get the owner ? Nothing but a larger cable bill. Your modem is your ability to receive data. But the server on the other end isn't going to send data at 10 megabits Uh uh !

Yahoo , you see, makes its money by servicing as many users as possible. And that means that it puts a cap on connection speed. It's only going to give you one megabit of connection (or less) , so that it can spread out it's bandwidth among as many users as it possibly can. And most other sites on the internet do exactly the same (though where they place the cap varies). And that means that if your modem goes faster than , say , about two megs, all the extra is totally wasted. The server won't send at ten megabits and that's just the end of that. You can't complain to them because yahoo (and the rest) are private business's, they run their servers the way they feel like running them and if anyone disagree's they give you the finger and tell you to plick off and mind your own business.

Now you want to tell me you have a new toy that goes 25 x's faster than this ? Wasted !

I suppose , maybe , it makes running a server cheaper, which means more people can do it. But hey , 150 megabits ... some manager's gonna say 1 megabit per connection is fine , the pages still download quite quickly and we can service 150 customers at once with that kind of speed cap.

Your new super fast modems will mean a lot of start up businesses will be able to put up a web site without outsourcing that component. A nice touch ... but the average home user see's no benefit. Beyond a lot more web sites suddenly popping up. Most of which will be fly by night operations.


(edit) how did they get a 25 fold speed increase out of 150 megabits ? The ones in Los Angeles can be run up to 10 megabits and they're just ordinary standard Docsis 2.0 cable modems ? Little bit of the advertising distortion there , I think.