DOCSIS 3.0 has been a standard that, for many, was pie-in-the-sky. Now Comcast announces the service will soon be available in the land of Minnesota. To be specific, the service will begin in Minneapolis and St. Paul, with promised speed of 50 Mb/s.

The promised speed comes at quite a price, however, as it will be priced at $150 per month for non-commercial users, and $200 per month for business. That’s some heavy outlay for something that will, surely be questioned as to its efficacy, because the 150Mb/s pipe will not extend to every location one might want to contact. For consumers, this will only make sense if several computers are accessing the internet concurrently, all expecting to max out each individual computer’s download speed.

Comcast will be opening up the speed on all of their accounts, although the increments are small, and mostly in the up direction.

It will be interesting to see how well this will materialize, and how much more Comcast is willing to ratchet up the speed, as DOCSIS is theoretically capable of 160Mb/s. One thing is for sure, it has run out of excuses to throttle P2P traffic on the basis of total speed available to its customer base. Perhaps the whole throttling scenario was simply an advertising pointer to the new services.

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[tags] Comcast, DOCSIS 3.0, Twin Cities speed, cable modem, ISP, Verizon FiOS [/tags]