Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Comcast and Net Speed Tests

Posted by kdawson on from the mystery-but-in-a-good-way dept.

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.

2 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Time of day? by Matey-O · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh, what I wouldn't do for a personal T3...
    What, short of paying money for it?
    --
    "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
  2. Re:Time of day? by CopaceticOpus · · Score: 4, Funny

    What, short of paying money for it?

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

    :)