Comcast's roumored bandwidth nonsense

[Camel]

I've been hearing for quite some time now about how Comcast is notorious for doing some tricky bandwidth limiting tactics to make it seem to the user that they've got move bandwidth than they actually do. Some time this week, I became among the target of these tactics.



I can get, for short bursts of time, in the 5Mbit range, but as you can see I can only sustain about 1Mbit. This image is scrolling at about 1px/sec.

[Sidoh]

Wow, that sucks.  It makes me glad I cancelled my comcast internet service before it started.

Unfortunately, the other options don't look great either, but at least they're not doing shady bullshit like that.  I'll probably go with Qwest.

[iago]

I found that there's a small two-man company in my city that provides Internet over the telephone company's DSL lines. I'm planning on switching over to them when I get back from vacation, since they're about as open/honest as you'll get in the ISP market.

[Newby]

That's shitty. I'll have issues where I'll start a download on newsgroups, and it'll start out at 500 KB/s. I'll pause it, resume it, and it'll trickle down to 80 KB/s. I'll continue this, and eventually it'll jump up to my limit (~950-1000 KB/s). :/

[CrAz3D]

Theyre supposed to cap at 250gb/month now IIRC

[Sidoh]

Theyre supposed to cap at 250gb/month now IIRC

This is a separate, but also annoying issue.

Fuck Comcast.  I'll never use them for an ISP.  I'm half tempted to cancel my cable just so I'm not supporting them.

[CrAz3D]

Its all going that way, sometime or another.  Fuck it all.

[rabbit]

Normally Comcast has a monopoly on University City, Olde City, and Center City in Philadelphia, but my building is lucky enough to have a deal with Verizon for FiOS (which we're getting!) so I won't have to deal with this shit.

[iago]

Its all going that way, sometime or another.  Fuck it all.

Money talks. If enough people dump them for that reason, they'll rethink it.

[CrAz3D]

Its all going that way, sometime or another.  Fuck it all.

Money talks. If enough people dump them for that reason, they'll rethink it.

Not when there are so few ISP's.....in our area there is Comcast, Qwest dsl, or ... uhm ... *maybe* satellite of sorts

[Blaze]

My ISP limits at 95GB and then charges for overages. 

[Camel]

Theyre supposed to cap at 250gb/month now IIRC

I don't understand why people are whining about this. Who's transferring over 10GB/day? It took me about a day to download Spore, and that was only 3.5GB.

[edit] and my share ratio is 6.2, so that's ~25GB

[Newby]

[edit] and my share ratio is 6.2, so that's ~25GB

With newsgroups, I could easily see myself hitting that limit.

But yes, you're right: people are complaining, and nobody will ever legitimately hit that limit.

[Sidoh]

Theyre supposed to cap at 250gb/month now IIRC

I don't understand why people are whining about this. Who's transferring over 10GB/day? It took me about a day to download Spore, and that was only 3.5GB.

[edit] and my share ratio is 6.2, so that's ~25GB

It is a very large limit, but what guarantee is there that they won't lower it when they realize it doesn't solve their "problems"?

For me, it's more of a matter of principle than practicality.

[MyndFyre]

Just as an interesting sidenote, when I was at the Microsoft campus in February I ran this and they had something obscene, as in it broke the speakeasy test.  I think they're right on the pipe or something.