Minnesota Realty Blog n News

Bloggers and Twitter-ers: Comcast wants to be your friend.

It seems Comcast is trying to get with the Media 2.0 revolution, monitoring Twitter for user discontent (at least to a degree) while wooing tech bloggers.

I have no documented cases of local Twitter watching by the Comcast behemoth so far, but the wooing-bloggers part is quite local. The Twin Cities Comcast office recently hired a local PR agency, which then unleashed local blogger and podcaster Tim Elliott on a charm offensive.

Recipients of said charm include noted tech blogger Steve Borsch (featured prominently on a new local Comcast site) and famed video blogger Chuck Olsen, who were persuaded to try Comcast broadband-Internet service, blog about it and otherwise discuss their experiences.

Nothing overtly fishy is going on here, that I can see. I happen to know Elliott as well as his PR-agency boss, and think they’re classy folks. Borsch and Olsen, for their part, have taken pains to disclose Comcast’s overtures. Both are people of integrity, in my experience.

But I found it interesting how Comcast never told me about this parallel new-media effort, separate from its traditional P.R. operation, and was surprised when I mentioned that I knew about it.

I mention all of this because it’s possible other local bloggers may take to raving about Comcast service, maybe without disclaimers of any kind. If so, scrutinize such posts with extra care.

On a related note, blogger and author Michael Fraase believes I raved a wee bit much about Comcast’s new 50-megabit service in a recent tech-test-type piece. (My short answer: The service worked flawlessly for me in my limited testing, and I said so.) He said my coverage and that of my colleague Les Suzukamo could have been better.

See a comment of his below this post; more detail here.

Local tech blogger Benjamin Higginbotham responds in detail (he jokingly calls the below his “comment novel”) to Fraase’s criticism:

1 - It is 50Mbps down and 5Mbps up. There is no technical requirement for the service to be symmetrical and they may be doing that to help preserve bandwidth for the cable side (keep in mind that this is a new technology sitting atop the old lines and Comcast has deployed in such a way that the cable and VoIP offerings have not taken any dip). Once Comcast is able to dump their analog channels we will hopefully see additional bandwidth on both the download and upload side; however, even when maxed out the DOCSIS 3.0 spec won’t allow it to be symmetrical so Comcast will be at the mercy of the technology itself.  Complain to Cisco and CableLabs for that one.

2 - According to my Comcast rep, Business class is available now. $200.00 a month for the 50/5 service (so a $50.00 premium) and $10.00 a month for a block of 5 static IPs. $250.00 install but I believe new accounts with a 3 year contract can get that waived.  Call your rep to verify.

3 - Bandwidth to the home does not a network make. Just because the trunks leading to the central office have improved that does not mean that the backhaul bandwidth has. While bandwidth to the home is now radically faster that does not mean the network as a whole has improved its speed.

I’m all for a neutral network, but I also think that torrents need to be taken care of. Torrents have a serious impact on the backhaul lines and as such something needs to be done. The easiest solution is to place distribution servers in front of the back haul so that the connections are local to just the central office and home. This would reduce load across the network and allow us to get much better speeds. All parties benefit, the ISP uses less bandwidth that they have to pay for (it becomes mostly internal) and the customer gets a much faster torrent download. Win/Win IMO.

The second method is to start blocking or inhibiting torrents which is what Comcast did, and poorly.  Enter public outcry, backlash and bad things. Which happened. But I don’t believe for a moment that Comcast reversed their torrent decision because of the media. Verizon came out with an internal torrent system so Comcast did the same to stay competitive. Heck, look at Fort Wayne where Comcast and Verizon compete head to head! Simple business at work here.

Michael, if I may be so bold, I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. This is the first step in getting real bandwidth to the home. Verizon has been pushing the envelope with FiOS and now Comcast has to answer. $150.00 a month for the equivalent of thirty three T1 lines down or three T1 lines up (or $13,200/mo download speed and $1,200/mo upload speed) doesn′t seem that bad to me. Compare it to what other nations can get and yeah, it’s pretty expensive, so it all depends on how you look at it. But we’re FINALLY starting to move forward. I think that is a very, very good thing.

The media won’t push Comcast, Verizon, Qwest, AT&T or anyone else to get bigger, fatter pipes. What will push these companies to move forward with a new generation of bandwidth is demand.  Pure and simple. We’re starting to see demand, so now we’re starting to see better bandwidth.

Here’s hoping that the trend continues. I believe 4 channel DOCSIS 3.0 can scale to 171.52Mbps download and 122.88Mbps upload speeds and 8 channel can scale to 343.04Mbps download and 122.88Mbps upload.  They just need to see demand, ensure their backhaul can take the traffic, then flip the switch!