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Comment by aaronbrager | Hacker News Reader

Can you discuss why DOCSIS 3.0 users get this notice? I have a 3.0 modem, and received the notice, but it looks like my modem will still support my speed tier (75mbps in Chicago)

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A 4x4 channel 3.0 modem should really only be used for ~75-100Mbps tiers, and is capable of at best 150Mbps. The more channels you have available the more capacity you can pull from — higher peak speeds and potentially better speeds at peak time.

It usually means you are about to get a speed upgrade that will go beyond what your modem is capable of delivering. In that case it is possible you could have a 1st generation 4x4 modem (so it can bond 4 downstream and 4 upstream channels).

Comcast does not provide any speed on residential lines that DOCIS 3.x cannot accommodate. It is like requiring Formula car to drive on a gravel road in Alaska.

Different modems can use different numbers of DOCSIS channels. A 4x4 DOCSIS 3 modem is only capable of, at most, 150Mbps and on average 75-100Mbps. A new DOCSIS 3.1 model can do >1.2Gbps.

Yeah, no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS

3.0 spec does up to 1.2Gbit/sec, just like Comcast. You know up to 200Mbit/sec, which is more like 20 because of all the "extreme complexities of the internet service".

DOCSIS 3.0 supports 38Mbps per channel, which is in the table on wikipedia. Not every modem is capable of 1.2Gbps - The fanciest modem out there is 32 channels, which gets to your theoretical 1.2Gbps. If you have a 4 channel modem and expect consistent speeds of more than 100Mbps, you are SOL.

I wonder if your customers would be happy enough without the speed upgrade if they weren’t wasting bandwidth downloading code they never wanted to run in the first place

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