Friday, April 15, 2011
News Comcast Offers Really High Speed Internet at Really High Price
Posted by Asher Klein on Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 5:24 PM
Comcast released Extreme 105 today. No, it's not a new radio station, it's Comcast's fastest Internet service ever, a 105 Mbps connection that's being called "Smoking-Fast" and "Wallet-Burning"
That's because the service is between twice as fast and around 18 times as fast as Comcast's current offerings, depending on your bundle. It comes at a pretty steep cost: $105/month for the first year with TV and phone, rising to something between $130 and $150 after the promotion, according to Yahoo! You can also get Extreme 105 for $200 without the service bundle. By comparison, a six Mbps connection costs $50 on its own.
UPDATE: No, you can't get the $105/month deal, according to theTribune on April 22, which says both new and existing Comcast customers in the area are being offered the $200 rate, while other markets get the $105/month promotion.
So what can so many megabits per second get me, you ask? Well, Comcast's official blog said something about connecting us with our families better, but as we all know what really matters is how fast you can download movies, and the new service delivers. It takes Extreme 105 just two minutes to download a movie and three seconds to download an album, according to a Comcast press release; that six Mbps connection takes 30 minutes for a movie and a whole 50 seconds to download an album. Of course the release also noted that "Typical file sizes and actual download times may vary. Times are approximate." So.
If you're really looking for fast Internet service, go to Chattanooga, where the city provides an astonishing one-gigabit-per-second connection for uploading and downloading at a whopping $350 each month, which makes Extreme 105 look like Tempered 105 on all fronts.
Who knew living in the future would be this expensive?
Comments (4)
Showing 1-4 of 4
Quite the contrary. If you had told someone in around 1970 or 1980 about the internet and everything they could do with it and that they could get all this as well as the ability to download albums in three seconds and movies in two minutes for less than seven times the average hourly wage in the U.S. (around $19.75, according to the Federal Reserve) I think they would be stunned at how inexpensive that is. And to top it all off, that includes phone service. People spend similar amounts for magazine subscriptions or museum memberships or to go to one concert or play lasting a few hours. And, of course, if people are willing to use more common average speed internet service it is just two and a half times the average hourly wage. I would be stunned if anyone in living prior to the internet would think that is expensive.
like
dislike"That's because the service is between twice as fast and around 18 times as fast as Comcast's current offerings, depending on your bundle. "
Twice as fast AND 18 times as fast?
-- MrJM
And I would be stunned if a caveman wouldn't think that a Chevy Citation for two and a half times the average yearly wage was expensive.
But also I'd be stunned if that mattered.
-- MrJM
"If you had told someone in around 1970 or 1980 about the internet and everything they could do with it and that they could get all this as well as the ability to download albums in three seconds and movies in two minutes for less than seven times the average hourly wage in the U.S. (around $19.75, according to the Federal Reserve) I think they would be stunned at how inexpensive that is. "
Some people thought that we'd have commercial space flight by 2001 and we settled for computerized cable television.
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