Symmetric Connections?

Question

Hello all!

I have been a loyal customer of Comcast for years, even prior to business class, with multiple business customers all using the service. Recently, I've been receiving more and more complaints of "slow internet", with customers that have the 50/10 tier!

I thought this was odd, so I began to do more investigation on the QoS on my networks, and started to realize that most of the users complaining of "slowness" are complaining because they don't have the upstream bandwidth to send large files, or to sustain the file transfers across a VPN between sites.

With the recent announcement made by Verizon FiOS that residential speeds are being made symmetric... but them still leaving business owners behind... I think this would be a perfect opportunity to garner some additional attention from the business class world!

Is there a plan, or could a plan be established, to work on increasing our upstream bandwidth? I would love to see 10/10, 25/25, 50/50, 100/100, etcetera connection speeds. Hell, I'd like to see even a doubling of upstream bandwidth! (50/20, 75/30).

It is hard to imagine that this isn't something being worked on in some capacity, or isn't planned, as cloud computing and the requirements for off-site backups/storage are just growing too rapidly to exist on an outdated and starving upstream bandwidth model.

Thanks for reading!

train_wreck · Answer

I'm right with you on this, symmetrical speeds, or at least more balanced speeds, would be desirable, particularly as more business is done via the cloud. My guess is that the slower uploads are affected by the lower amount of upstream channels available on the DOCSIS systems that Comcast uses, and indeed on the customer end equipment; Arris recently announced their latest TG2472, which can bond 24 downstream channels, but only 8 upstream. While that's certainly an improvement over the standard 4 up, it's still unbalanced. At the IT management company i am interning for, our largest clients have somewhere north of 50 employees; we have them subscribed to the fastest tier available (100/20), but even at 20mbps up, it only takes 5-10 employees concurrently running an online backup or participating in video conferencing for that connection to be floored. QoS helps, but more bandwidth helps even more.

There's also the real data point that the majority of end users up to now have done far more downloading than uploading on their connections; though as i stated, ever-increasing use of internet services makes this ripe for changing.

tborland · Answer

I agree with the price issue...

I am two blocks away from what I've been told is a local termination point for comcast metro-e fiber.

Great, I thought! Until they told me it was upwards of $1K a month for a 10/10 link!

Why not offer the metro-e service without the SLA (which obviously raises the price significantly).

I'd gladly pay $150/month for a 50/50 connection with no SLA (DOCSIS or Fiber), and I know a lot of other businesses that would as well.

EDIT: Shouldn't DOCSIS 3.0 support a maximum of 108mbit/s (after calculating the control channels/overhead) on a four channel lock?

From netgear: "8 Downstream plus 4 Upstream Channel bonding on the WAN, delivering up to 320 Mbps downstream x 160 Mbps upstream" -http://www.netgear.com/service-providers/products/cable/gateways/cg3000dcr.aspx

kraze · Answer

I would definitely like to see increased upload speeds. In today's world 10,15 and even 20 is not enough. Unfortunately, the insane price increase for  a single increment of 5mbps is simply not worth it to me.

train_wreck · Answer

yes 108 for 4 channels, but keep in mind that other customers are using those 4 channels along with you. How many mbps you get depends on how congested the local system is.

(at least thats my understanding of it; feel free to correct.)

tborland

Symmetric Connections?

train_wreck

tborland

kraze

train_wreck