Bandwidth crazy

[greatbear]

Sometime in the last few days, I noticed that my bandwidth seemed noticeably increased. I've had a 4Mbps download with a paltry 384kbps upload for a long time through Comcast. It's been mostly adequate, with the download being more than sufficient, but seriously lacking in upload speeds. So I ran a speed test. I just wondered what I did to deserve this:



I think someone goofed. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I had been considering calling up Comcast to see what they'd do in the way of service enhancements, being that Verizon FiOS went in a couple years ago and I was considering switching over. This very well could be in response. Or possible just a test. We'll see.

Comments

[redmoonriver.livejournal.com]

and your bill hasn't gone up? wow.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Well, the bill is going up by about 4 dollars a month. There was a notice to the effect in the bill I just paid a couple days ago.

[mh58.livejournal.com]

You will notice that ALL speed tests are overstated on Comcast as the place these sites in a preferred proxy. Plus if you weigh in the new 250Gb limit per month it could be worth while to switch. I wish we had an alternative here, but a low speed DSL and Comcast are our only options.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, these things are at best benchmarks to compare one's own bandwidth over time and a very rough gauge to compare plans. But there is definitely a huge change over what I had about a week ago.

The 250G cap is teh suck, that's for sure. Even though I am a heavy downloader, I dont think I have gotten near that limit yet, but that could always change as I watch more and more HD content over the web.

[mh58.livejournal.com]

I remember when I had the 4 MB/s service and was regularly getting speeds of 12MB/s. Now that I'm on the 16MB/s plan, I get 8 MB/s tests :( On the upside I appear to be getting about 7MB/s up which is better than the 2MB/s the plan offers.

Yes the HD porn does eat into the allocation!

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Supposedly I could get higher speeds from a cable modem (here we have Charter, not Comcrap) but I've also heard about the dread 6pm slump - everyone comes home, gets online and the available bandwidth for the local node gets eaten up.

Unfortunately, I'm not in a Verizon area, so FiOS isn't an option for me - but I'm happy with my DSL line. It's rated at a maximum of 6000/768 and I get about 4096/640 - for $34.95/month (DHCP, 5 IPs).

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Everything in the general area is new as far as infrastructure goes. Nothing is more than about 6 years old. There were initial growing pains, but after it stabilized, it's been solid and consistent. There does not seem to be any slump from excessive usage on the node, I think they are allocating more bandwidth to each node by default.

Let's hope it stays that way.

[shuntphl.livejournal.com]

I think I read last week that Comcast has started a pilot in NJ/PA/DE/MD to release† more bandwidth. So, I could well be accurate. My results were around 12000 kbps download and 1200 kbps upload and I am "only" on their 6 Mbs plan.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I read about the planned increases as well, but did not think it would be so much of a bump.

Cuz I just couldn't resist...

[notdefined.livejournal.com]

I ran the speed test at work via http://speedtest.net and these are my results:

Re: Cuz I just couldn't resist...

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I thought it would be even higher for you, after all, you're in the nexus of all things intarweb.

I tested my speed at work today and I averaged about 60M down, but at most about 4M up. Granted, this is shared among a few thousand people at the facility.

Re: Cuz I just couldn't resist...

[notdefined.livejournal.com]

I think that is the maximum that it can display. Our pipes in and out of this place are 10Gb/sec. It is hard to say what sort of connectivity the server over in SF had though.