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Cox Cable DOCSIS 3 modem
Cox Cable’s ‘Ultimate Internet’ broadband tier is now available to Cox customers in Rhode Island. Offering 50Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream, the premium speed service sells for $109.99 a month with an annual contract. The service comes as a benefit from the recent upgrade to DOCSIS 3 technology in Cox Cable’s Rhode Island service area. Cox Cable has generally unenforced usage allowances on all of their broadband service tiers. Theoretically, the ‘Ultimate Internet’ tier is limited to 300GB downstream and 100GB upstream traffic per month, but very few Cox Cable customers have ever been contacted about their usage, regardless of the amount.
Joel Evans, a Cox Cable customer living in Rhode Island, posted a review of his experience with the new Cox Cable broadband tier on Geek.com:
Before the upgrade I was peaking around 21 Mbps download and 4 Mbps upload. These were actually great speeds considering that the promised speed was really more around 20 Mbps and 3 Mbps, respectively. After the upgrade, however, I noticed an incredible speed bump. Instead of the promised 50 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up, I received 65 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up. I can only imagine that these will probably fluctuate over time.
It wasn’t until I was recently asked by Cox how my experience has been that I noticed how much of a difference more bandwidth makes. For example, I stream Hulu to my Apple TV (thanks to boxee) and usually there’s a bit of lag with the stream. Nowadays it streams right away as if I’m watching live television.
A mandatory service call by Cox Cable is required for installation, because technicians will check line quality and also swap out a customer’s older cable modem with one capable of handing DOCSIS 3 “channel bonding,” which allows multiple cable channels to be connected together to permit faster broadband speeds.
Cox plans to expand availability of the ‘Ultimate Internet’ tier to more than two-thirds of its systems by the end of 2010.
Other stories of interest:
- Competition Equals Better, Faster Service: Fiber Is Good For You!
- Damage Control Technique #1: Increase Speeds in San Antonio
- Cogeco Follows Rogers: Introduces New “Ultimate HSI” Package for $149 a Month… With 150GB Cap
- ‘Qwest’ for Speed in the West: Phone Company Introducing 40/20Mbps Service in 23 Cities
- New Details on Rogers “Extreme Plus” and “Ultimate Tier” Packages
Would anyone mind showing the math on the maximum amount you could download in a month at 50Mbps, constantly downloading and how many days it would take to reach 300 GB doing this?
I’m trying to do the math on it but I’m not doing something correctly.
You would get about this
It works out to about 10 bits per byte on average (with overhead this has served me well over the years).
So you can download about 5 megabytes per second
We will just say 30 days in a month
So 60 seconds in a min, 60 mins in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 30 days in a month
So 60*60*24*30*5 or 12960000 Megabytes in one month, 12656.25 Gigabytes, ~12.35 Terabytes.
You can do ~17.57 gig in 1 hour. So 300/17.57 and you run out in about ~17.06 hours.
Remember that does not include the upstream you would be doing during this time. Some plans add them together. This is just downloading. So your 14 hours is probably closer to the truth…
There are 8 bits to a byte not 10.
4bits = 1 nybble
8 bits or 2 nybbles = 1 byte
16 bytes = 1 word
2 words = 1 double word
so on…
50 Megabits/second / 8 bits/byte = 6.25 Megabytes/ second
6.25MB/sec * 60 seconds/min = 375MB/min
375MB/min * 60 min/hr = 22,500MB/hr / 1000MB/GB = 22.5GB/hr
22.5GB/hr * 24 hr/day = 540GB/day
540GB./day * 30 days/month (average) = 16,200GB/month / 1000GB/TB = 16.2 TB/month theoretical maximum.
How long will it take you to get to 300GB?
540GB/day = 300GB/ x day
300GB/540GB = .55 of a day to download 300GB
1 day = 24 hours
24 hours * .55 = 13.2 Hours to reach your 300GB limit with a 50Mb/second connection.
http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/
Yes however with TCP overhead you end up with about 10 per (its a good rule of thumb that has served me well since the dialup days). However, now that I think about it you are right they would ding you for the overhead too. I usually discount the overhead so I can figure out what I would really get.
When saturating a 100mb Ethernet line I usually end up with ~9.8MB per second download. But that does not include the overhead. So my bad it was part of my assumptions and I should have stated that.
From http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/downloadcalculator.php
‘Layer 4 transport and transmission protocol maintainence/overhead. Amazingly, these below processes can eat up to 10% of your transfer speed.’ Hence my 10 bits per byte calculation…
What I have seen in practice is 10% is a pretty good guess. It is not always true. But most of the time for an average it works.
My calculations are based on a theoretical maximum. Most people won’t get exactly 50Mb/second but around 98%-99% of that. However, with my line, 12Mb/sec, when downloading from Usenet, I get over 12Mb/sec. I usually get 12.1 to 12.3Mb/sec. I don’t know if that is due to the Xzver compression my usenet server uses, Astraweb, or what.
Ok, now I understand what you are saying. Yea, the ISP, would count that overhead in there too. They sure as hell wouldn’t give you a break on it.
For the average user, there shouldn’t be a problem but for the average user, you really don’t need 50/5 service to begin with. It is total overkill. Someone that would benefit from a 50/5 line would be a gamer wanting to run a few gaming servers, someone like me that downloads a lot from Usenet, and someone who watches a lot of HD movies or TV from the internet. P2P people really don’t need that amount because they will never be able to download that fast or even upload that fast. Even on 12Mb, I have only seen 1/4 to 1/2 my connection speed with P2P with optimized settings and encryption. One of the main reasons I hate P2P is because it is incredibly slow.
Don’t forget about gimmicks like SpeedBoost which give you a burst of bandwidth up to something like 24Mbps for the first 10MB on standard Road Runner. Comcast and others have the same concept available either for free or as an option.
While the burst is small it does fudge with the numbers a bit so calculating using the theoretical maximum is probably good enough.
Indeed hadnt taken speedboost into account. But in the end we are arguing over about 2-3 hours difference here
Which as a good swag is about 1/60th of what they sell you in the bold print. What the bold print gives away the fine print taketh away.
@Tim
I know what you mean about p2p. But it really just depends on the torrent you end up in. I have had many torrents max out my bw (think im at 7 or 8mb these days). Even had to throttle them a bit to get them to max out. I usually set the upload to about 1/4 to 1/2 the max possible upload. Basically if you dont give the upload enough room you can not ack fast enough and you get choked. Get on a good linux ISO torrent and you probably will max out.
Yea I got my upload max at 80% and download at 90% from the optimization tutorial I read on Utorrent. The most I get is maybe 400KB/sec out of 1.5MB/sec that I can get. I guess it is the torrents I have been on. I stick mainly to Usenet anyways even though you pay for it. Usenet has many benefits that torrents don’t have. I have heard people downloading at 100Mb/sec on Usenet servers. Also, most accounts include 256 SSL encryption so your ISP or anyone else can’t spy on you or keep record of what you download. Astraweb is offering a awesome deal, $96 for the whole year with SSL and 20 connections. Anyways, I guess it has me spoiled and my patience runs thin on torrents.
The last I checked, that Speedboost or Powerboost, whatever Timewarner calls it, only works for like 3 seconds and your connection has to be idle for a certain period to use it again. Have they changed it to 10MB now?
I don’t know if it was ever time based, but if you do a speed test with your RR connection you’ll find it far exceeds your promised speed and that test takes more than 3 seconds but is under 10MB of data I think (or maybe just 10MB).
Upload is not affected by SpeedBoost.
I was with TW and had their 10Mb line. Speedboost never lasted long enough for 10MB. It usually lasted for 3-5 seconds and then went back to normal. Worthless feature if you ask me.
@Tim due to inability to reply deeper: PowerBoost is really something to help get things such as streaming content buffered quickly, honestly. Nothing to really get all hyped about as I’m sure we all know. A friend of mine has RR Standard with PowerBoost. His speedtests somehow maintain 30Mbps down, 1Mbps on a good morning (at night he can’t pull any more than 14-18Mbps. Sometimes PowerBoost doesn’t even come on at night) but on tuned and optimized PCs, that PowerBoost which’ll peak a download at 3.8MB/s when the speed tests as such will only last for 4 seconds. Helps with buffering, doesn’t help with long downloading much at all. This spike in speed though doesn’t help much with the RWIN on systems (Windows XP will scale it’s receive window as speeds/distance increases, and Vista does this automatically anyways) as it causes the RWIN to be set higher than it’s supposed to be at for the line’s normal speed, causing re-transmissions until the RWIN sets back to a good size.
@Smith6612 below
My neighbor had TW, before I convinced him to get Uverse, and he couldn’t test his connection reliably without that Powerboost crap skewing his results. When I had it, TW said it would boost it for only a few seconds but I guess they might of changed it to 10MB now, from what you guys are telling me. Buffering, well I guess it depends on the website. I have a 12Mb connection now and 10Mb back in my TW days and I can’t tell a difference between 12Mb and Powerboosted 16Mb on buffered video. It did boost my Usenet downloads for a few seconds but what, that might of bought me a few seconds faster download on a 4GB file? Powerboost is nothing but a gimmick and it is there to fool people into thinking it is the best thing since the invention of the cookie. People like you and I, don’t fall for it because we are somewhat knowledgeable on how things are calculated. Most people don’t know the difference between a bit or byte. I ask all the time what their speed is and I get like, “Ohh it is 10 megabyte speed.”. What you got a 100Mb line or something, lol. Anyways…
It may be 10s not 10MB. Pretty much ever network speed test I know of takes less than 10 seconds to run so boosting your speed for the first 10 seconds would give one the impression that their connection has a sustained speed much faster than it really is. Meanwhile they are only paying for 10Mbps, so it feels like their beating the system somehow and are very pleased with their ISP giving them more speed than they’re paying for.
You can test it out for yourself at http://speedtest.net/. I tried several tests to servers near me and then moved farther and farther away including Japan and Australia. The latter two gave me test results of about 3Mbps while Ontario gave me 20Mbps and Alaska about 10Mbps.
@Tim: I did find that if you were to kill of PowerBoost with a large file, and then start a speed test and stop the file download, it’ll give you an accurate result. PowerBoost won’t even come on until the upload test starts. Also, many of the Java speed tests and NDT speed tests I believe can run long enough to kill Powerboost off as well.
I keep getting under 14 hours to max out at 300 GB at 50Mb/sec connection….That just doesn’t seem right. If it is, this plan sucks big time.
Bear in mind you’re talking about 13.5 hours of sustained maximum throughput. In reality you probably won’t get anywhere near that and it would take a 1 to 1.5 days of constant downloading to hit the cap.
Most people won’t do that and packet shaping may kick in if your connection is seen to be sustained at very high bandwidths.
Let’s make it a bit more realistic. Assume a 1 hour TV show streamed from Hulu.com or any broadcast network website will be 1GB. You could exhaust your limit by only watching TV online in 300 hours or approximately 12.5 days or 10 hours a day.
Keep in mind this is ONLY turning on the computer to watch TV, and if you’re watching TV for 10 hours a day every day for a month you’re probably out of work and can’t afford high speed Internet (unless you’re living off some inheritance or are retired and very bored).
If you start factoring in 5GB movies from streaming Netflix then your video-watching time is reduced (because Netflix movies are generally higher resolution than hulu and network broadcasts, plus movies average about 2 hours these days).
300GB in 5GB chunks = about 60 Netflix movies per month or two a day.
Hopefully these numbers are a little easier to comprehend to non-computer geeks.
But again, remember these examples are representing the 300 GB data cap in absolute terms. That’s like trying to figure out how many candy canes you can eat to reach 2,000 calories. Interesting, but not very realistic.
In practice the following behavior averages between 30 and 40 GB / month:
* small amount of online tv watching (2 – 3 hours per week)
* 2 – 3 hours of daily facebook browsing and Mafia Wars
* twice weekly playing online games for 3 – 4 hours per session
* once or twice monthly downloading a few songs from Amazon / iTunes
* daily use of twitter and Google Reader (including watching embedded video clips and imaages)
* moderate use of Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony – mix of brief and long calls
* occasional large downloads such as Linux ISO files or Windows 7 RC ISO
* frequent OS software updates for 4 computer systems
This is basically a profile of my household’s use and I average between 30 and 40GB / month. I’ve gone as high as 60 since I started collecting data and some months are as low as 25GB, but I’ve never gone below that and I have no kids.
I household with kids or who plays online games (XBox 360, PS 3, Wii) and / or uses Hulu / Netflix will find their usages MUCH higher. Probably closer to 70 or 80GB / month depending on several factors.
Think about in the future a little. One true 1080p movie can be well over 20 GB, when you think about is 300 GB future proof I don’t think it is.
For a matter of fact I sent Phil a News Request about movie streaming to put up on this website. Now a days 2k resolution movies (yes, the resolution of video shown in higher end movie theaters) is what is the future. Some of my shorter videos that I’m uploading to the Internet as tests, I’ve been encoding in the H.264 codec at 19Mbps, playing at 2k resolution. Sure, the file can be big, but when you look at it, to stream a normal 2k resolution movie should Netflix adapt the codec, bitrate and resolution I’m talking about, you’re looking at roughly 14GB for 2 hours of video on the H.264 codec. Now, bump up the quality even more or use a less efficient codec such as MPEG-2/MPEG-4 and you’re talking double, maybe even triple the file size. Now, the reason I’m not exporting my gaming videos in this high of a res with the particular codec and bitrate at the moment is because it chokes many PCs out there. You need to have a pretty decent box with a large monitor running at a res greater than 1920 to be able to see it the best. I don’t mind uploading it at 386kbps lol.
I’m just hoping that when the most recent Harry Potter movie is released, I can buy a download of the 2k resolution version of it, with something encoded in a good codec/container with a high bitrate (like this’ll ever happen. I can never find 1080p versions of many movies that I can buy online and download). I couldn’t find any 1080p downloads that I could buy of the Dark Knight besides going to Blu-Ray disk which I don’t even want to bother with at the moment, and because I couldn’t find it, the only results Google gave me were links to Torrent Sites which had torrent files to 1080p downloads.
I didn’t mean to imply 300GB is a good cap. To wit there is no such thing as a good cap. I was just trying to put the numbers into an easily understandable form for everyone.
I think the future of TV and movies is streaming video once we get past all this cap nonsense.
I’ve already sent Amazon feedback about their downloadable videos and how I would buy movies from them if they were DRM free just like the MP3s I buy because it would save me a lot of effort and physical space if I didn’t have to store the DVDs in their cases.
There are ways to strip that DRM out of the movie. I had bought the movie 300 and it came with a digital copy that had DRM. I used a couple of free utilities that can be found around the net and now the DC is DRM free.
But I don’t want to reward Amazon for selling broken products. When they come to their senses than I’ll give them some of my money.
8 bits/byte * 300GBytes/month / (50Mbits/second) = 48000 seconds / month
48000seconds/month * 1 hour/3600seconds = 13.3 hours/month
That looks right to me.
so basically that connection would be good for a few days if you used it to even close of its full potential. what a waste of a plan.
I use to be COX Communication client since they introduced hi-speed in my service area. At the beginning it was great. But it did not lasted for long.
1. They forced me to switch from “Home” to “Business” plan by blocking port 80, and other well known ports so I can host my servers at home.
2. They play silly games like:
“You can get static IP address on new at the time DOCSIS 1.0″ and forced me to pay rent of their proprietary modem. This lie lasted for few months until their modem broke and they replaced with DOCSIS modem.
3. The last problem started when they introduced “Digital Phone” service. After successfully running my own VoIP server at home for more then year without any problem, I started experiencing connectivity problem. After some test I found out that they are overwriting my QoS tags of my VoIP traffic like low priority traffic. Effectively braking my VoIP solution.
4. Don’t ever try to run a BitTorrent server. They will treat you like criminal. For the record I never downloaded a single song since I declare boycott of record industry in 1999. I was hosting Linux distributions.
So COX is not better then any cable company. Here they have monopoly over the Cable service and they will abuse it. For comparison in 2005 I was paying more then $65 per month for 512kbps/128kbps for the same amount of money and time in Montreal you could get 3Mbps/512kbps.
While i realize my following statement isn’t exactly relevant to this thread… just wanted to say (as i sit here waiting now for over 20 minutes to upload a 3.5meg file… COX is THE ABSOLUTE WORST company to ever come into existence in the entire universe. lies upon lies about their rates and speeds, the worst customer service ever imaginable, total ineptitude. i’ve never dealt with a company like COX before in their ultimate and total horribleness. they’re worse than any insurance company is on a bad day. their website doesn’t work for sh!t, the webmail is completely NOT user-friendly, all the defaults are donk, and no one there seems to know what the f’k they’re doing.
worst… ever… cox