Comcast is fishy.

[hool10]

I had 56k back in 2003 for the longest time. In 2004 I finally got Comcast high-speed internet and it was a dream. Speeds sometimes exceeded 1MB for download in fact! Now all of a sudden starting around August, they forced all customers to use Digital Voice telephones. You put a modem that went through your internet and it really slowed things down. It dropped things down to 700k-500k and we really started to look for other phone companies. Then at the start of October, the slow internet appeared. You would notice at 6PM EST the internet speeds got slow slightly.

Then at 9PM EST sharp the internet would almost drop. Like the speeds would be at 23k! If you would run a speed test, it would say you are getting 500k with an upload speed of 800k though! Why is that happening at that time, that speed, and the speed test getting fooled? This slow period would last until 6AM EST when it would start to get to normal. My family has been making excuses mainly my dumbass father saying I had viruses on my computer. No viruses were found on any computer in the house. Now the speeds have been crippled so much so that the fastest speed is 180k! This is not "So fast it's Com-castic!" it's more like "So slow it's Shit-tastic!". My family is currently paying $70 for phone and internet a month from $50 when the service started. Trailers now take half an hour to download instead of 5 minutes. What do I do about this? My L4D games ping out from the server even though my ping is in the green. Comcast is essentially fooling ping tests so you can't provide evidence!

I did recently find this:

On August 28th, 2008, Comcast confirmed the rumors of a controversial 250GB per month cap on downloads, set to go into effect on October 1st, 2008. [22] As such, Comcast has changed their Network Management page to reflect the new policy. On September 4, 2008 Comcast sued the FCC over the findings. [23]

The cap combines both upload and download for the total limit. If a user exceeds the cap, on a first offense, a warning email and/or phone call will be issued with information on how to track bandwidth usage by suggesting software monitoring programs. On the second offense, the user will have their services terminated for one year. The monitoring window is from the first day of the month to the last day of the month. [24]

I have no clue how anybody can hit the 250GB limit in a month and even if I did, I have gotten no warnings or notifications of this change. My father did call up Comcast and they gave him a BS response. He did run an IP check at 9PM EST once and found an IP from Comcast and another IP that wasn't Comast and that's why we thought we had a virus.

Now what sucks about this is that Comcast is a kind of Monopoly and there are no alternative options in our area. You must have Comcast or else you have no phone, internet, and TV (unless you use satellite services). Anybody else having this problem?

This is a ping test from Portland, ME to MA during a "good time" which took 10min:

 

[Krynn72]

Ask them if you can trade your upload speed for your download speed.

 

[DEATHMASTER]

if u torrent, they throttle your speeds

 

[Barney Fife]

I used to use Comcast for many years, then one day they started charging me crazy rates like $300 a month. All requests to fix the problem fell into deaf-ears; giving me a solid reason to split.
Then one day Verizon's Fios came to my neighborhood, and their advertisement stated something like Fios is twice as fast as Comcast, and promised up to 15mb/s download. I gave them a call and I never looked back.
The down side is that Fios isn't available everywhere, but if it is available in your area I'd encourage you to give them a call.

Oh Yeah, like DeathMaster said; if you torrent a lot they (Comcast) will scale down your speed, but I don't know if Verizon does the same, but most ISPs do.

Good Luck.

 

[DEATHMASTER]

Verizon does not. At least not to me or that I know of.

 

[OmegaX]

Yeah Verizon doesn't have a cap and they don't seem to care if you use bit torrent heavily. I'm switching to Time Warner Cable RoadRunner just because I'm fed up with Verizon's slow DSL speed and it only seems to work about 30% of the time.

I hear Comcast is launching a 50/5mbps tier soon. Would be nice to have but their limits and torrent throttling piss me off too much.

 

[hool10]

So I called them up and was asked "are you using WiFi", "did you clear the cache" and the ever popular "did you restart the modem"? They are sending out a guy on Wednesday and if he doesn't find anything, they will charge me a service fee. I told them twice (but the woman made it sound like she didn't care) that it happens at a specific time. To prove this I'm doing a speed test at 6PM EST every hour to 9PM EST. At 10PM EST I will make the final one for today and continue early morning tomorrow. I'm making a chart out of it too. So even if he doesn't find anything wrong (even though it's way too slow under normal operations) I have evidence. I do use torrents but I don't download much. It's mainly a Dirty jobs episode here and there but that's about it. Even then Steam uses torrents to download content.

 

[hool10]

Guy just came by and did his stuff. He got on the ladder and changed the lines and it just snowed here, so poor guy. My mom mentioned that there is a god awful amount of static on our telephone and it's true even though we have digital telephone service. Well the phone is still static-y and L4D is unplayable do to the lag. It shows green bars in L4D then it turns red and green back and forth. My dad found out at 5AM EST that we had 50% packet loss on a ping check. So we probably have to call them again and to fix THEIR SIDE and they can't make a BS excuse that it's the lines. This is a real mess. They can't just fess up and admit it's their side and aren't even checking. They just change lines or just send a refresh signal. It takes over an hour (almost an hour and half) to download a 73MB NVIDIA driver at this point. *Also the man didn't confirm that he fixed the problem. He just changed the lines and said he was done and was off.