DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Wideband Internet?

So, i've been seeing the TW commercials for wideband and read a little about it. But, since we have a number of tech geeks here (and I love tech geeks...married one), I thought I'd start asking around about it. Is it better than broadband, as claimed by one website? Is it faster? Etc.

What can you all tell me about it?

It's normal cable internet that uses DOCSIS 3.0, a new specification that allows faster speeds over the same copper. Well, new to Northeast Ohio. Other cable companies have been been rolling it out around the country for the past few years. Time Warner just now is finally bringing it to us.

Previously around here the fastest Time Warner offered was 15Mbit down/1Mbit up.

The two "wideband" tiers are:
30Mbit down/5Mbit up for $75 a month
50Mbit down/5Mbit up for $99 a month

A nice bump. We're looking at it for the extra upload, 1Mbit is barely enough for a stable Slingbox connection.

If those are the speeds.. I do agree that 5Mb would be a nice bump in upload. Even when I had Time Warner, I'd regularly get downloads of 13/15Mbps or higher, but the upload rarely hit 500k. And while it's fine for lots of applications, if you do want to do things like slingbox or watching vids off a home computer, it's not ideal.

The $75 package seems reasonable for a power user.. but 50 Mbps seems like overkill, honestly. I just can't imagine anybody needing it at this point. Maybe down the line.. but I just don't see most households being able to even need it for anything.

I work for a small fixed-wireless ISP. And I can log in to my gear, the company's towers/routers etc, and monitor a lot of things in real time that a lot of people can't normally see on their home connections. I was running some experiments, and even when my connection was running at over 20Mbps down and around 5 Mbps up (maybe even 7.. can't remember-but upload isn't too important here), an HD netflix stream was usually around 5 Mbps. There are a couple times it jumped to around 7 and I think even 9.. but that was rare. But even blown up on my roommate's 55 inch flatscreen, it looked great at 5 Mbps. Granted.. I'm not and expert, and I know TRUE HD takes more than 5 Mbps. But 50 Mbps would mean I could practically have TEN TV's in my house, all streaming that same quality video. That's nuts. Even at 30 Mbps.. if something's running slow, there's very little chance it's b/c you don't have enough bandwidth..

Thanks guys...something to ponder for sure.