Did Comcast just convince me they are not throttling my bandwidth?
Written on the original Movable Type site and recovered from the Internet Archive.
Humm. I chatted with consumer concast and they said I need to talk to Business. I called business. They had a problem with the account, but finally got it. They said I am paying for 6Mb up and 1Mb down. Now that is MegaBits. There are 8 Bits in a Byte. This is where it gets interesting and where many people go wrong. I have been running Pure Networks performance monitor for the last two weeks. It says my average network performance is 443KB/sec down and 105KB/sec up. Now KB is KiloBYTES and Comcast is selling MegaBits so you have to multiply Bytes by 8 to get Bits. So Comcast is delivering me 443x8 = 3.544Mb/sec download and .84 Mb/sec up. Now I have two computers on this network and my SonicWall Firewall/router. Unless I configure it differently, it will basically split the available bandwidth in half between the two computers. So I SHOULD be getting about 3Mb/sec down and .5Mb/sec up on each computer. Comcast saw my actuals and said, I am getting more than average actually. And then they said if that wasn’t enough I could upgrade to 16Mb/down and 2Mb/up. I may have to.
Can this be right? Do I actually believe I am getting the bandwith i am paying for from Comcast????