[Discuss] recent Internet speed upgrade by Comcast?

[mark at buttery.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

They quietly did the upgrade here in my neighborhood of Boston. So far
they haven't said anything to me about it but the peak speeds have
gone up; I noticed when I was downloading some rather large music
software and it was taking less time than should have been possible.
Even before the upgrade they were overdelivering during non-peak
times; I saw Speedtest results as high as 70Mbps before, and 100Mbps
after, although the promised peak speed was "up to 50Mbps".

But meanwhile, performance of some things, notably streaming video
from YouTube and Amazon, seems to have gone down. I think their
motivation is to offer a perception of giving people more (at little
cost to them, because what they are doing is giving you extra speed at
times of day when the network is under no strain so there is no
incremental cost) so that they will be less critical of other changes
(like more slowing during peak periods, or shaking down content
providers for money).

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 11:26 AM, Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:
> Recently I got email from Comcast telling me that they were going to increase
> the speed of my Internet connection.   The package that I purchase includes
> their Blast Internet tier.    In the past, they rated Blast as "up to
> 45Mbps".   The email
> said that the new limit was going to be up to 105Mbps.   I did some
> performance testing at that time and I did see numbers well above
> 45Mbps.   I can also go into the status page of the Comcast supplied
> cable modem and see that there are 8 channels  bonded on the
> downstream side with 4 on the upstream which can easily handle 105
> Mbps.  I have two
> questions though:
>
> 1. Has anybody else gotten a similar upgrade from Comcast recently?
>
> 2. What is Comcast's angle?   I have no other residential option for high
> speed Internet in my community so why would they upgrade my speed for
> no reason?
>
> Bill Bogstad
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