Friday, December 19, 2008

Signed up Comcast Extreme/Ultra Cable Internet

I was upset because there is no FiOS in my apartment building. Today, I noticed Comcast offers an Extreme edition, which is quite comparable to FiOS: 50MB/s download + 20MB/s upload. Both with a whopping price of >$140/month. The good thing about Comcast is that you can scale up and down at any time. It's pro-rated. No need to wait for a month. Of course, FiOS claims that they are the true fiber optical all the way, it will be interesting to see how fast Comcast extreme edition is and if it's constant. Sorry, Sergey, will support verizon when they are here.

btw: Nickolay, who is in Moscow, told me that he only pays $50 for that speed in Moscow. It made me wondering a bit.

Shall receive the new modem soon.

6 comments:

Jeremy said...

I've been pretty happy with FIOS :)

Ben Jiang said...

good for you. I bet FiOS is never going to make into apartment building. The single thing I care the most is whether the speed is constant. Is it constantly fast with FiOS?

SN said...

Ben --
of course it is constantly fast and very reliable with FIOS:-) I only wish that they had employee discount

Well, even without employee discount, I am paying $69 a month for the high speed intrnet basic channels.. They used to block all incoming traffic, but now eased a bit and let traffic in on ports 22 and 8080/8443 -- all that i need.

Ben Jiang said...

really? you must be kidding. only 22/8080/8443? Then I am glad that I am with Comcast. Every port is open here. I do believe FiOS is faster though. Even Comcast, their backbone is fiber.

SN said...

yes, really.
Previously I had comcast and they are wide open (be that good or bad). I don't really serve anything from my home, though had web server enabled, and got accustomed to occasionally connect to my home workstation to pull files or run some tools. For a while, could not do that with Fios, but now they opened up access for incoming traffic a little.

I suspect that not having incoming ports open is not a big deal to most people, but found it weird that verizon does not give that option. (i think that having such a high throughput data pipes to homes would promote use of high-bandwidth applications, and limiting access from outside to homes cripples that ) -- well, at least browsing/downloading is very fast. I think you should get fios the first chance that you get (my bonus sort of depends on that !!!!) Seriously, having incoming traffic blocked only prevents me from doing just a couple of things that I would have done otherwise (direct connecting with others for video calls is one thing that comes to mind) -- but I do not think that it is right to limit access, it sort of violates "free speech" and "freedom of the Internet"

Ben Jiang said...

Yes, for sure. They should have that as an option at least. Besides, most people have router at home which has firewall anyway.

Also read here: FCC formally rules Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent was illegal:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10004508-38.html