[jsz0]

About 90-95% of the bandwidth available 'on the wire' is already being used to deliver Comcast's video service. So if this is the first nail it's been there for an awful long time. The way traditional VOD is delivered (QAMS full of MPEG2 programs) is actually very inefficient. There may be 4-8 QAMS just sitting there inactive if your neighbors aren't watching VOD. The switch to IP delivery eventually will allow Comcast and other MSOs to use their bandwidth more efficiently.

From the customer's perspective nothing really changes. Technically your modem will probably be provisioned differently to support the extra services. So for example if you buy a 50Mbit/sec Internet package and a video package from Comcast your modem would actually be provisioned with multiple service flows -- a 50Mbit/sec for Internet traffic and another 50Mbit/sec reserved for Comcast services. That second 50Mbit/sec service flow allows you to have the same video service functionality as the 2-3Gbit/sec of broadcast video they presently waste 90-95% of their spectrum on. This will be reclaimed for the big general-purpose IP data pipe. Comcast will continue to use some percentage of that pipe for their own services but it will be a much smaller percentage than they use today.

So really everyone wins in the end. IP set tops are cheaper than traditional cable set tops. Consumers get to use Comcast services integrated into devices they already own. Comcast's competitors get a bigger dumb-pipe into people's homes to ride on. I admit it looks bad if you don't understand the technology but it's important to remember the bandwidth crunch that Comcast and other MSOs have is directly related to how they presently deliver their own services. Any effort they make to solve that problem is good for consumers in the end.