Comcast and Net Speed Tests

JimDaGeek writes "I recently moved to Columbia, SC where I have Time Warner as my cable ISP and pay for an 8 Mbps connection and have been very happy with the service, speed, and reliability. In contrast I have heard bad things about Comcast. So now that I am up in the Philadelphia PA area visiting my parents, I decided to test out the speed and reliability using the Speakeasy speed test. The results surprised me. Here are the reported download speeds in Kbps: New York, 18,946; Washington, 15,821; Atlanta, 11,257; Chicago, 10,042; San Francisco, 4,230. What is going on? I know my father is not paying for a 10+ Mbps connection. Is Comcast giving priority to popular speed-test sites?" From Comcast's site, in the Philadelphia area they seem to offer download speeds of 6 or 8 Mbps, with an option for a "PowerBoost" to 12 Mbps on large files. This wouldn't explain the results JimDaGeek got of almost 19 Mbps down.

Update: 07/10 12:07 GMT by KD : A friend in Massachusetts had a tree fall on his house. The Comcast guy who reconnected the lines told him that they are boosting the line speed to 20 Mbps down / 2 Mbps up in certain areas to be more competitive with Verizon FiOS.

Comments

Well thank god we still have TW in Raleigh

[gelfling]

What with their rock solid 3.7MB down and 374KB up - Anything more would be Goddamn communism.

Re:Time of day?

[Firehed]

You remind me of the time that I single-handedly saturated half the pipe for the entire school with a couple of unusually fast torrents. Oh, what I wouldn't do for a personal T3...

Re:Time of day?

[Matey-O]

Oh, what I wouldn't do for a personal T3...

What, short of paying money for it?

Re:Time of day?

[CopaceticOpus]

What, short of paying money for it?

Dude, a T3 would be almost as expensive as just buying all those CDs and movies.

:)

Re:REAL BANDWITH TEST

[Kamokazi]

I think THEY just got a bandwidth test...