Broadband Reports has an interesting article up discussing Next-gen Broadband. At this point it looks like Verizon and the cable co’s are in the lead to offer high megabit services (i.e. 100Mbps). In my neighborhood, the first wave of Verizon contractors has already come through burying fiber and in response Cox Communications has upgraded my cable modem service (at no additional cost — though see my notes below for more). It looks like Verizon isn’t going to actually hook fiber up to my house until I order their FiOS service (which I’m not likely to do until it is either cheaper or considerably faster than my cable internet service).
Even though Cox claims they have upgraded my service to 5Mbps down/2Mbps up, I have not noticed any increase in speed, either way. Apparently they have not upgraded anything and are just putting a new label on the existing shared 38Mbps. Hopefully now that DOCSIS 3.0 is mostly finalized, we’ll see the equipment hit the streets early next year (though it would be really nice if LinkSys figured out a way to upgrade my existing cable modem’s firmware instead of having to fork over more $ for a new box). At any rate, I’m looking forward to the higher speeds, both downstream and upstream.