Verizon to Charter: Not so fast!

In the escalating speed war of download speeds, Charter seemed to up the ante this week with a (limited) 60Meg/sec DOCSIS 3.0 alternative.  

Verizon responded immediately by pointing out that the speeds were only achievable if certain (upstream) pipes were widened -- something they might already have done.

Interesting concept embedded in the back-and-forth is the concept of guaranteed quality-of-service.  You can't offer a triple-play without partitioning bandwidth.  For example, if you put all your eggs in winning the download competition, your users may not have enough bandwidth allocated to make a simple phone call.  Similarly, triple play users can reasonably expect to watch TV and make a phone call at the same time.  

This is going to get interesting... More here:

http://www.cedmagazine.com/Verizon-DOCSIS-3-0-not-answer-013009.aspx