Comcast Corp (CMCSA)

kingcheese (75.93) Submitted: 10/31/06 9:51 PM

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Oh, Verizon, right. Let me hold my breath and wait for this high-speed fiber to come to my house (sarcasm). Verizon was late to my geographic area by about two years and then could only deliver DSL (not to my house...too far from the CO). I was glad to dump the Verizon phone bill I had for so long to switch to Comcast. ...I'm sure I'm not alone. How fast do you need to surf the web anyway? Of course I'd like to have Fiber, but I'm sure I'm not in the "best market". Meanwhile, Comcast keeps growing and collecting and growing and collecting...

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drmdrake (< 20) Submitted: 6/29/07 2:56 PM

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It is a common misconception that Comcast is strictly coax cable. Comcast has its own nation-wide fiber backbone which they use for all their traffic - data, video and VOIP (VOIP does not go over the internet - it uses the Comcast backbone). Fiber is also used all the way up the node which services a community of about 500 households. From there it converts from fiber to copper up to the home. Comcast aways has the option to gain additional bandwidths by decreasing the number of households a node serves. They can effectively double the bandwidth by reducing the number from 500 to 250. There are also new signal encoding techniques that allow increasing the information carried by a particular frequency.

You also need to remember that FIOS is only optic up to the exterior wall of the home. From there it gets converted to - guess what - coax cable. Finally the up steam path for data (when you hit a key on your remote to purchase a movie, data has to travel upstream) does not go through the coax as it would with Comcast. The signal goes through a second Ethernet cable. Two separate connections means two possible points of failure. Aside from all of this, fiber itself in very delicate and finicky. There will be many problem with fiber lines running underground in a harsh environment.

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