I'm planning to pay only 30% of my Comcast bill, from now on....

[Broni]

Probably, I can't do this, by I feel like ranting...

I'm sure, some of you are aware of *censored* Comcast throttling policy.
I guess, it applies to some other ISPs, as well, but since Comcast is my ISP, I feel like giving them some...
Since January (I believe), Comcast does it officially.
It's two-way tier:

If you, or your neighbourhood exceed 70% of bandwidth limit for more than 15 minutes, they'll throttle your connection until bandwidth usage drops to below 50% for another 15 minutes.

It's pretty easy to see, if you visit http://www.speedtest.net/ at different times of the day.
My advertised speed is 15Mbps, but, if I test my speed, roughly between 5PM-10PM, I'm not getting more than 3-4Mbps.
When I test my speed after 10PM, it flies...often even over 15Mbps

...which pisses me off to the extreme...

Dear Comcast
I hope, you'll end up in *censored*!!

[patio]

If those Idiots we send to Washington had any guts at all this would be illegal...as well it should be.

[soybean]

I understand the reason you're upset about this. But, from a practical standpoint, does it really impact you?  My DSL service is 1.5Mbps.  For the life of me, I can't imagine why anyone needs 15Mbps unless they're just constantly downloading very large files, and I can't imagine why you'd need to be doing that.

BTW, how much does your Comcast service cost?

[Helpmeh]

I understand the reason you're upset about this. But, from a practical standpoint, does it really impact you?  My DSL service is 1.5Mbps.  For the life of me, I can't imagine why anyone needs 15Mbps unless they're just constantly downloading very large files, and I can't imagine why you'd need to be doing that.

BTW, how much does your Comcast service cost?

I agree, Broni, you are seriously freaking out over not getting 15+MBs? I've never gotten better than 415KBs. If I got 5MBs, I would thank my lucky stars.

[BC_Programmer]

no he's "freaking out" because comcast promises one thing and delivers another.

[patio]

no he's "freaking out" because comcast promises one thing and delivers another.

Excellent Point !

[BC_Programmer]

I think I can draw an analogy of sorts with a Pizza place.

Some such locations have a promise of delivery within a certain period of time; say, 30 minutes or it's free. a Promise of sorts- a verbal contract even. advertisements, etc display this new feature.

So, business picks up, because of this new promise. But guess what? because they were unprepared and are not beating the time limit often enough, they simply shrug it off; they'll tell customers "oh, it's just so busy" and so forth.

Well, the only REASON your so busy is you promised something that you apparently cannot deliver because you were unprepared for the load on your business to meat that demand.

This is probably a similar scenario to Comcast; people obviously choose their service based on a number of factors... one of these is the advertised speed. In this case- 15mbps. But because there are too many subscribers, or more precisely, because they are unwilling to devote more resources to improving their core architecture, they cannot always deliver this to all customers, and invoke esoteric rules that define that the service will be throttled back over 70%... in this case, that reduces the effective download speed from 15mbps  (1.875 megabytes/s) to 30% of that, which is a mere  562Kilobytes/sec.

The fact is, all else being equal, the advertised speed should be the speed that it normally goes. If using this "advertised" speed for a certain unadvertised period of time suddenly reduces your speed to the same speed that can be had with far cheaper deals from comcasts competitors, exactly what do you gain?

basically, what you are signing up for is not 15mbps service, but rather 4496 kbps service that happens to go faster for the first 15 minutes.

As a comparison- I tested my connection right now:



the most interesting thing is, even with that speed, if I am downloading- say, a Linux ISO or some other very large file, then my transfer rate boosts to nearly 60mbps at intervals for a few seconds. This is ALL advertised by my provider and is EXACTLY what I signed up for, it should NOT be a coincidence that what I signed up for and pay for happens to be what I get. In Broni's case, what he is getting is FAR less then what he is paying for.

[Broni]

If those Idiots we send to Washington had any guts at all this would be illegal...as well it should be.

no he's "freaking out" because comcast promises one thing and delivers another.

I can't say it better.

It doesn't matter how much I pay, it matters what I pay for.
I pay for a web page to open in 1/8 of a second, not 1/2 of a second....just to be sarcastic, but seriously, it's a matter of a principal.
I remember, Comcast started this whole crap with targeting just one application, BitTorrent and somehow, "those idiots in Washington" considered it illegal, so I believe, FCC stopped it.
Well, Comcast found a better solution, throttling a whole piece.

Another funny thing is this...
Initially, I had 6Mbps connection. Then, Comcast with a big bang, announced a big, free speed "improvement", bumped the speed to 15Mbps. That's when the throttling started.

[soybean]

It doesn't matter how much I pay, it matters what I pay for.

I hear you and acknowledge your point. I'd say Comcast and other cable providers need to be more honest in explaining to customers that Internet access speed via cable can vary.  While cable generally offers higher maximum speeds, it tends not to be as consistent in speed as DSL.  I believe numerous references can be found to support this statement.  For example, http://compnetworking.about.com/od/dslvscablemodem/a/speedcompare.htm says:
In practice, cable's speed advantage over DSL is much less than the theoretical numbers suggest. Why? 

    * Cable modem services can slow down significantly if many people in your neighborhood access the Internet simultaenously.

If you, or your neighbourhood exceed 70% of bandwidth limit for more than 15 minutes, they'll throttle your connection until bandwidth usage drops to below 50% for another 15 minutes.

This does seem like a very crappy policy. Why not allow bandwidth usage to reach 100%?  Are they afraid the cable might explode?     And, then throttling down to 50% for 15 minutes.  That sucks.

[Broni]

Cable modem services can slow down significantly if many people in your neighborhood access the Internet simultaenously.

Agreed, but not from 15 to 3 Mbps!
I know and you know, it's about throttling, not  number of people using Internet.