Comcast - The Speed Test
April 23, 2008
I’ve been hearing a lot of rumblings lately about Comcast, slow speeds and traffic shaping. Whether it’s Chris Pirillo, Leo Laporte or one of their community members, I’ve never really shared their experiences with slow speeds or traffic shaping. Now, I’ve been a Comcast customer since moving to the Seattle metro area back in 2002 and have only had a few issues with outages, but nothing more. Our household is a heavy user of bandwidth as we have a VOIP (Vonage) telephone and at least 3 computers connected to the Internet 24 hours per day. During the daytime there are usually several streams getting pulled down from UStream.tv or Leo’s site over at Twit.tv on top of the usual web browsing, FTP’ing and remote office connections about 10 hours a day.
Now the Speedtest.net image I’ve displayed in this post shows one of our better connection speeds; we typically attain speeds varying between 22 megs down and a pretty steady 1.2 to 1.5 megs up.
Much of the complaints I’ve heard all seem to have a common theme - Bittorrents and their supposed value to download Linux distros. I don’t use bittorrents. Why? Because with my current connection speed, downloading files via FTP or HTTP work just as fast, if not faster.
So, are these guys really worried about using bittorrent and it getting blocked or throttled at Comcast? I think a better reason for the complaints centers around the simple fact that they (nor do I) want anything or anyone limiting Internet connections speeds. Herein lies the problem with the focus of their complaints - the simple fact is Comcast limits/adjusts bandwidth because their networks get bogged down with people downloading less than legal software and movies. I think you will agree, the main reason people use bittorrent is to download pirated (illegal) software and movies with little chance of getting caught. If they stopped the “I can’t download my Linux” schpiel, their argument would a much more validity with me.
Hey, what do I know? It’s just my two cents on the topic. What do you think? Let me know in the comment section below.
