Cox Promises 1 Gbps Sometime This Year

ya just like bringing On-Demand to TiVo which you guys announced like 5 years ago but still isn't available.

Great. Now, how about addressing the caps?

I mean, as it is right now, with what "most ordinary people" have, at 25Mbps, one can blast through the cap in just under 24hrs. Will this fabled gigabit service have a cap that even approaches that, or will it be capped at all of 1TB/mo, which one could use up in a few hrs.?

I have a feeling that if Cox does go through with this, their first launch city I would imagine would probably be Omaha, since that's where Century Link has their gigabit service.

please don't use that argument. it makes no sense as much as we wish it did.

keep it as far away from any technological corridor as possible.

Why? Explain to us again why caps make sense for the customer rather than the shareholder. Bytes are cheap. 10Gbit ports in colos and tier one ISPs cost nothing (100Gbit is coming down in price).

Yeah they do make sense, to a point. I recall 1997 through 2001 when Cox's service was unreliable as hell because they gave everybody an uncapped service (it went as fast as you could make it go; it was generally possible to achieve 10mbit symmetrical due to cable modems only having 10mbit ethernet ports at the time.) Trouble is, the SNR was so bad because the line was flooded that you'd frequently lose sync with the CMTS.

This was mainly because Cox operated under the @home banner, who didn't give them the leeway to do this (as far as I recall, though I could be wrong about the exact politics.)

This finally ended with their first cap of 3mbit down 256kbit up, after which the service was extremely reliable. It wasn't tiered either, rather when you subscribed, that's just what you got. They eventually expanded that though.

Now as far as aggregate data caps (the kind you're referring to) Cox never started capping that until it became necessary in certain areas. Some nodes became over saturated, and the above mentioned problem occurred in those nodes. It was mainly the result of just a few users eating up TONS of bandwidth.

I'm personally one of those users, and I've hit somewhere north of 1TB in a month. I've gotten the emails from Cox, but I've ignored them for well over the last 3 years now. The reason they don't take action against me is because my node remains unsaturated. The only reason they'd take action against me is if what I was doing was affecting the service of other users, but at present, it is not.

I am a big critic of Cox, by the way, but as a network engineer I understand that home broadband isn't possible without oversubscription, and oversubscription isn't possible without certain limits. It just isn't. Having an OC3072 link evenly divided amongst the customers would cost each customer much more than they pay today. Not only that, but the last mile, support services, and everything else that goes with them also have to be maintained, and those aren't free either.

why do these isp's bother. they rarely compete with each other in the same last mile marker, so what do i care if other isp's may deliver 100 or 500 or 1000 mbps, when I can't ever get them anyway. do they expect people to pickup and migrate to this faster isp coverage area? it's completely laughable of course we all know the moment isp's get comfortable delivering higher speeds is the exact same time they'll start data capping us - how stupid do they really think we all are?

Considering that DOCSIS 3.1 is necessary and it's not really off the drawing board yet ... there are no certified modems for it ... I think 1 Gps is still a couple years off! Sounds to me he's saying that they'll be looking at it later this year ... but I would doubt anyone will actually get it!

Not arguing against your point, just pointing out that often hardware is released as they met the anticipated specs that whatever the new technology is going to require to be "certified".

A lot sooner then fiber could possible reach large numbers of people.
Say it takes until 2020 to widely deploy... How many customers will Google fiber reach by then? A million, maybe two? (if you're really lucky and nothing shiny distracts them) where cable touches hundreds of millions of peoples already.
The dreamers here hope for a widespread fiber rollout, but a near ubiquitous HFC network that is almost complete may be more practical, more affordable and actually possible within 5 years, some thing google-like fiber could never accomplish in that timescale.

The spec is out and first gen test hardware is in process (it can take a couple revs. to hit the target ) Part of the goals this was to make the spec/test/and ramp to deployment more timely as that was a big negative in the 3.0 development.

Century Link also offers gigabit service in Las Vegas which is a Cox service area also.

At this rate it will be 2030 before a widespread fiber network is installed. However, if it started about 15 years ago as it should have when industries committed to 45 symmetrical connections then we wouldn't be talking about what could of been with fiber and would be talking about 10GB to every home as we should be.

No matter how you spin it, copper is very limited compared to fiber and every single time copper makes a big "break through" it is based on fiber already shortening the loop to the consumer to begin with. Even deploying FTTN is much more expensive long term then just deploying FTTP.

All this talk of Gigabit downloads, but what about upload? If it's anything typical of cable companies, the speed package will be something like 1000/20.

What your talking about and what he is talking about is totally different, your talking basically "unlimited speed boost" he is talking about bandwidth, with a proper management it is easily to offer the speeds without the system crumbling.

A bit of an exaggeration?
Under D3 and 3.1 such extremely unbalanced speeds aren't necessary even if it was possible.
MOST Cable providers do actual try to/ succeed at offering desirable product lines, contrary to some of the silly things some people say here.

Well let's get out the time machine and see if we can fix that for ya!
The equipment and ecomnomics didn't exist back then for widespread FTTP (in fact we were near the end of the DOT com bubble when people/companies promised all sorts of miricales were near at hand)
Time to forget all those woulda, coulda, shoulda's and work with the realitiy we see today. IF they were starting today the HFC plant probably would look more like FTTC or even FTTP and would be forty years from completion...however it's already in place has moved fiber to the node, and coax unlike teleco low twist pairs (ie the pots plant) has lots of last mile bandwidth.
I know you want to push a PON type solution but it isn't going to happen for most places for a longtime. Cable is that interim step which MAY or MAYNOT later transform to FTTP.

I believe it will happen sooner than we think as I believe eventually the government will step in and force it through a government build out of some sort.

Coax and 2 pair copper are inadequate.

Care to explain this???

This is very silly if you guys think 3.1 will offer Gig speeds to end users. This would require no TV on the lines and what 10 customers per node??

Gig service will be on fiber just like Comcast uses for its highest tiers.

residential connections are not sold to be used 24/7 at full speed.

Caps are all about protecting LEGACY VIDEO, has nothing to do with speed.

cox is a private company, there are no shareholders.

You realize that you can hit some of these caps in less than a day?

Not even close to 24/7

If you think that's an exaggeration, my provider, Mediacom, is testing a 305/10 package in certain markets. Yup, 305 down, 10 up. All because they don't want to currently offer multiple upload channels.

and people that do so should be on a business class connection.

Why??

People using ~2% of the capacity of their lines are abusers!!??

Sorry, that argument won't get you very far.