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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?"
The majority of the downloads would be for web pages which are pretty small. I would think that's the reason they do this as it would make the web browsing experience seem faster.
Is there any valid reason why Comcast would front-load transfers in this way
Your average webpage is not 100+MB. If they give you full bandwidth for, say, 2 seconds - most reasonable webpages will download completely within that time. It's not "cheating" exactly since they don't guarantee those speeds, but "up to" those speeds. They're not the only ones who do it, either.
Still a sleezy thing to do...
=Smidge=
Your bandwidth is increased for short periods of time. It's advertised all over the place.
It's called PowerBoost. It's advertised on TV and radio every 5 minutes. They even have a FAQ about it. Google just might have a hint of it, too. Come on...
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
As EVERYONE has pointed out, this is an advertised feature so Comcast is not "cheating". Instead of people automatically assuming to Comcast bash I think it only proper of the Moderators to post at the end of the story that this article is inaccurate and is part of a service feature. Most people don't bother reading comments, so Slashdot is feeding false information. I read one users post...I can't believe their cable company makes them pay for powerboost when Comcast offers it free!