Game on! Cablevision, a cable company that serves the suburbs of New York City, and whose ISP, OptimumOnline, I use, recently announced that it will offer the fastest broadband in America starting next month. Speeds will top out at 101 megabits per second down, 15 megabits per second up. (That translates to around 12.6 megabytes per second down, 1.8 megabytes per second up. BitTorrent seeding just got a whole lot easier. I mean, what else would you use these speeds for?) But you know who’s not too pleased about this? Verizon, what’s with its competing FiOS service. In fact, Verizon is calling Cablevision’s plan a “parlor trick.” I do believe Verizon is stylin’ on Cablevision.
Right, so Verizon, in so many words, is calling Cablevision a bunch of punks. There’s a few bullet points it wants us to “consider,” like how FiOS has the capacity to deliver 400 megabits per second to a single home (and how it already offers 20 megabits per second upstream on all its FiOS connections). Fair enough, but just because every child has the potential to become president doesn’t mean he or she will. Capacity is one thing; what I can actually use is another.
Verizon then goes into the ol’ one bad apple can ruin the bunch song and dance. That is, one bandwidth fiend using Cablevision’s system can slow down the network for everyone else. “One estimate,” no doubt carried out by “We hate Cablevision, Inc.,” said that one person can sap 60 percent of a given neighborhood’s bandwidth. And that may well be, but Verizon is missing one key point: I can actually get Cablevision’s super service.
Look, I couldn’t give a toss about the stupid Cablevison vs. Verizon war. (These guys have been at each others’ throats for years now. It’s like a terrible, truly awful sitcom.) Verizon can hate on Cablevision’s service, with theoretical, “well your service doesn’t do this, while ours does that,” all it wants. The fact is, come next month, I’ll actually be using Cablevison’s new service; FiOS is still nowhere to be found.
So maybe Verizon should get its act together and offer FiOS to more areas. Maybe then I’ll evaluate both services rather than deal in hypotheticals. Till then, all I have access to is Cablevision.
And believe you me: Cablevision is no saint. I mean, look at this awful commercial and you’ll see what we have to put up with over here. It actually hurts my insides:
Fios is probably is available in my part of LI, judging by the way they obnoxiously advertise. It’s bad enough that I constantly get their ads in the mail and over the phone, but now they periodically go door to door and trying to be polite doesn’t work. They only thing that gets them to leave is closing the door on them mid sentence.
I haven’t had any issues with cablevision for years. The only thing that would make me switch is if they announced they were going to cap usage like some other ISP’s of late. Thankfully for now, with cablevision, unlimited means unlimited.
omg I know, I live in SW CT and these awful commercials are on every few minutes. And every day my snail mailbox is clogged with multilingual ads to “our neighbor” etc. even though I am already a customer and they have my info.
And I’m sure they pass all the advertising costs right along to me too.
I’d love to switch to another internet provider like FIOS or AT&T but they aren’t available in my area yet.
Well I get the constant adverts and every time I call they try and get me to switch to FIOS. Even though I tell them it is not available in my area they still try to sell me on it.
I HATE VERIZON.
Alas I am in an indi area for Cable so stuck with pathetic dsl or pathetic local no name cable company internet.
Wow! 300 MG file, like SO QUICK (top right testimonial)! I’m totally convinced. We all need to switch to Verizon right away. G is a few letters down, so it must be WAY better than MB, whether that means bits OR bytes. I’m going with FiOS. Dang! Not available in my area…
Good point on the perpetual unavailability of FiOS. Cablevision’s big advantage in this fight is the infrastructure is already there, it just needs some cheap DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades. But bringing fiber to everyone’s house is time consuming and expensive. VZ is rolling FIOS out as fast as it can, but that’s just not fast enough for most.
One but: like the man says, these kinds of speeds aren’t all that useful…yet. But eventually our network will be upgraded enough for it to start making a difference. By that time, there will be tons more of the “big files” were starting to see more of (i.e. high def movies). The question is, how many more fancy nobs can Cablevision keep putting on its thin pipes before it hits a dead end while fiber leaves it in the dust?
> “One estimate,” no doubt carried out by “We hate Cablevision, Inc.,” said that one person can sap 60 percent of a given neighborhood’s bandwidth.
Actually that’s true.
I used to do tech support for @home/ATTBI/Comcast.
Cable internet uses a shared bandwidth system. In each neighborhood there is a “pedestal” that contains a router that is allotted a specific amount of bandwidth. Everyone who has cable internet in that neighborhood has a connection plugged into that one router.
If someone in your neighborhood has enough open, streaming connections to consume all of the bandwidth on your neighborhood router it slows down everyone else’s connection because no more bandwidth may be allocated to that local router until that person’s streaming connections drop.
So it only takes one person backing up their hard drive over an FTP connection to hose everyone in the neighborhood.
Given, that’s not a big problem if you live in an area where there are not a lot of power users like, say, Prague, Oklahoma.
However if you live somewhere like Portland or San Jose and you’re on cable, you’re probably looking at DSL speeds most of the time.
I am not a fan of Verizon, but I love my FiOS connection.