Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Cheating On Bandwidth Testing?
dynamo52 writes "I'm a freelance network admin serving mainly small business clients. Over the last few months, I have noticed that any time I run any type of bandwidth testing for clients with Comcast accounts, the results have been amazingly fast — with some connections, Speakeasy will report up to 15 Mbps down and 4 Mbps up. Of course, clients get nowhere near this performance in everyday usage. (This can be quite annoying when trying to determine whether a client needs to switch over to a T1 or if their current ISP will suffice.) Upon further investigation, it appears that Comcast is delivering this bandwidth only for a few seconds after any new request and it is immediately throttled down. Doing a download and upload test using a significantly large file (100+ MB) yields results more in line with everyday usage experience, usually about 1.2 Mbps down and about 250 Kbps up (but it varies). Is there any valid reason why Comcast would front-load transfers in this way, or is it merely an effort to prevent end-users from being able to assess their bandwidth accurately? Does anybody know of other ISPs using similar practices?"
I've had my Fios Fibre-optic connection for over a year now, and unlike everything else I've had before -- including Crumcast -- Fios has been fast and trouble-free. I can sustain the 5Mb down and the 2Mb up without a hitch, and I've tested this with BitTorrent, of all things.
It's so good, in fact, that it's been exposing problems with my Netgear Wireless Router RangeMax -- I don't think they'd figured on someone sustaining that kind of bandwidth. So it's time for me to upgrade!!!!!!
If you don't have Fios in your area, SCREAM at Verizon. I mean, I've always despised Verizon up till they delivered on Fios. What a rare occasion for a large otherwise stuck-in-the-mud bureauractic company to -- finally -- get it right. And you can't beat the 5/2 service at $40 a month. I was paying twice that for Crumcast!!!!
Fios TV is avaliable in some areas if you still find anything interesting to watch in that medium. For you lucky chums, you'll be able to nuke Crumcast entirely. No idea how good Fios TV is, since I threw out that particle accelerator long ago...
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
There is nothing trollish in what _KiTA_ says. In fact, it's quite insightful. The "low use casual customers" are the ones who are subsidizing broadband for the rest of us. And that includes you, me, and the "college assclowns".
BTW, I specifically call out college students as assclowns as they tend to have that oh so magical combination of:
1. Ignorance
2. Entitlement Syndrome (You "owe" me a huge unlimited connection)
3. EXTREMELY high usage patterns (Napster, BRO!)
4. Arrogance.
We had SOME assclowns that were just retired people who were bored, or alpha users, but by and large it was college aged students who somehow saw nothing wrong with stealing thousands of dollars worth of music and somehow felt we owed them a 5 megabit connection (used 100% 24/7) when they were paying for a 128k connection.
Perhaps calling them "college assclowns" was a bit harsh, but you have to understand, I've been on both sides of the fence, as an ISP technician, and as a user that was overusing our service so much that the owner of the company had to come up to me and tell me to knock it off.
The myth of unlimited bandwidth is just that, a myth. I donno if my ISP was unique as it was somewhat smaller than, say, Comcast (although, we weren't going billions in debt as a business plan in hopes of being bought out later like the big boys like Comcast do, either), but our set up, well, as such:
We had a series of very large antennas with Motorola Canopy Wifi equipment and large antennas on them. At a client side, we had a Wireless bridge hooked up to a 12" antenna pointing at our tower. This setup allowed us to get about a 10 mile range out of them, give or take, which is how we solved the "last mile" problem -- we could get 128k connections out to people who won't have Cable or DSL in the next 10 years.
The problem was, we didn't actually have any way to cap people at 128k. Which means, you paid for 128k, but you got whatever the tower gave you. I usually clocked around 2 megabit myself, and I was pretty far from the tower.
The downside to this is if you were an assclown, like I myself was, you could fire up eMule, Gnutella, or Bittorrent, all of which are designed to break through bandwidth throttles by simply DDOSing the network into submission, and get 2-3megabit, guaranteed. The problem is, anyone else on that tower would be getting jack and squat.
Given that Cable works on a similar system -- a set amount of bandwidth is sent to a neighborhood, you pay for a certain minimum level of service but get whatever you actually can get from the neighborhood's pipe, etc -- I imagine that Comcast has the same problem with assclowns that we did.
Now, you have to understand, for the most part, it's not the assclowns we were upset with. Most of the initial assclowns were happy to dial it in -- for example, eMule, Gnutella, Bittorrent, etc, they're all set up out of box to open up hundreds (and in some Gnutella clients, thousands) of concurrent connections in order to break past individual connection throttles. If we contacted these guys and walked them through setting their Bittorrent to say, 1 file at a time, 30 max connections, their impact on the tower was much less than if they refused to do anything and were just going to queue up 7 or 8 thousand copies of P-diddle's latest until they got a real one off eMule.
The real problem wasn't these assclowns. Remember, I was an assclown myself. The problem was when their assclowning around caused the grandmas to notice that their internet was slow or outright offline, and when we went out to fix it, realized that they were connecting to the tower just fine, it's just that the tower's full. "Sorry, we can't do anything, just live with it... oh wait, you