Comcast 'Powerboost' > ?

?

Exactly, that was what I was thinking, half assed.

reply to 99664227
Yup, seems like nothing more than a gimmick. A side benefit is that speed test results will be nicely skewed giving those unaware of the bursting false hope that they've been upgraded. Advantage Comcast and not the end user.

reply to 99664227
They'll compete with FIOS on a market by market basis if it even gets rolled out on a large scale. This would be prudent considering the number of years that it is going to take the Telcos to get their "FIOS" offering rolled out in a meaningful way.

I would expect that this "speed burst" thing will better distribute the load during off-peak hours and keep the 24x7 heavy user / pr0n-types from sucking up everyone's bandwidth.
--
"If PCs are hard, then Macs are flaccid" -bb

reply to 99664227
Bandwidth costs money, and I assume Comcast does not want to raise the price of their HSI offerings (especially considering all people do is bitch about it being too expensive already)

FiOS speeds are unnecessary to 95% of Customers at this point (see Verizon adding tens of thousands of DSL customers at $14.95 a month for 768k speeds)

Comcast looks to be competing speed wise with FiOS on a market by market basis, but continues to add bells and whistles to their HSI service (Comcast.net portal, Photo Show, McAfee Security Suite,Speed Boost, Games On Demand, Video Mail, The Fan, etc..) that appeal to the masses (especially those coming off of AOL and similar services)

Not everyone who uses the internet is as web savvy as the people who post on this board. We have to realize that we are in the minority and that these ISPs such as Comcast, are trying to appeal to the masses (thats where the real money is). Bandwidth and Speed hungry niche markets will find their services with FiOS for the time being. I believe that once it becomes strategically and financially necessary to compete with FiOS' speed offerings on a national level Comcast will do so and all these discussions will be moot.

reply to DarkSly
When networks upgraded their speeds but kept their monthly caps the same; many people here didn't seem to understand the point. (they argued that higher speeds only let them hit their cap faster and did nothing to increase how much they could download) Either they where too much of a power downloader to see the point or they just wanted to complain some more.

I bet that the most average internet users have habits of downloading bursts of data. And making burst transfers faster is a good thing even if it doesn't help the power downloader (OMG you aren't important to comcast?!)

Preferably, I don't care about download speed; i can wait a little; but I want good latency because i play some first person shooter on-line multiplayer games (game clients in general are low bandwidth but low latency applications) but are they going to make a super low latency service because on-line gamers care? NO! not unless the average user plays enough on-line games to notice latency problems. (So I like the success of things like halo and xbox even when I use a pc, because that just makes my preferences that much more important to the isp.)

Just like bandwidth increases (with the same cap). This helps the average customer, and it will also likely keep operating costs down.

This is also a concession to the fact that trying to offer cheap guaranteed high-speed upstream bandwidth is impossible. People always complain when they can not get their advertised speed, but a guaranteed speed is merely a fantasy. Now they can have a guaranteed speed (no upgrades this year because they just can't make it any higher without destroying the network) but also utilize extra bandwidth (lets say when much of their users aren't using their connection. gasp what a concept ) to make people happy.

Capitalism once said that companies would compete with each other and improve produce quality to increase their competitiveness. Whoever believed that forgot two things. Companies only need to please their majority market to become competitive, and the majority market can easily be pleased by poor quality but super cheap. (and compared to high quality business and ISDN connections, the residential service of broadband is cheap)

reply to DarkSly

reply to DarkSly
So if you say that bandwith costs money and Comcast doesn't want to raise speeds and raise rates, then how is Verizon able to offer much higher speeds with Fios at the same, or better price points than Comcast?

Verizon is losing money, their investors aren't happy. Comcast is a healthy company that makes money (one of the only cable companies that can make that claim). Verizon is already begun to slow their deployment of FiOS services due to investor unhappiness, while Comcast continues to gradually upgrade speed and services as the mass majority of customers demand it. You may call me a "cable fan boy", and maybe I am, I just love Comcast and the services they provide in my area... I can see the forest for the trees....