linuxrunner

WARNING, LONG!!!

I have moved recently and in the past I had a relationship with the owner of an ISP which in trade for regular vacations at our beach house, he provided me with a full business class T1 line for no charge. I must say it ROCKED…

Now I no longer live in his service area so I had to go out on my own and pay for my internet. I got 7mb Qwest DSL with no phone service and a month to month contract. But within the first month I found that they seem to be throttling bittorrent downloads a great deal, I have also found that either they throttle traffic extensively during peek times or they have too many users on their local servers/lines.

Then last month they over billed me $100, I called them up and the promised they would fix it and refund it on the next bill… a few days ago I got this months bill… guess what, they over billed me $200, it looks like instead of a $100 credit they ran it as a charge. Since I am on a month to month contract I can leave at any time so I am looking into Comcast.

I have a few questions for those who may have Comcast or even better those with Comcast in the Portland area…

If you live in an apartment with many other Comcast users, how bad is the slow down at peek hours when everybody else is online?

For those who live around Portland, have you noticed if Comcast is actively throttling bittorrent traffic, and if so how much and is it only at peek times?

I have 3-7mb DSL and can usually get about 2.5 – 4mb of that, how accurate is the max bandwidth that Comcast advertises? (looking for within 80%)


Basically I am looking to switch because of the bittorrent throttling, my employer often distributes large packages out via bittorrent and I prefer to download linux distributions via bittorrent. I know something is up because my fellow employees can average 500 – 800kbps on a torrent that I can’t seem to get above 30k, yet I can download http things at 600k. I know that Comcast does throttle bittorrent I just wonder if maybe it isn’t as bad.

89macrunner

cable is faster than dsl hands down no matter which isp you have. I have comcast and I dont have any issues, I do run torrents on different ports then default though.

my opinion, get fios if possible, cable is ok besides that.

linuxrunner

I wouldn't say always faster, I had a neighbor who was in a test pool for adsl2 and was getting 18mbps, while his old comcast connection got him an average of about 5mbps. But in my case comcast may be faster, just wondering how it acts when you have an appartment building all downloading (pirated) moveis at the same time?

Also anybody know if comcast sells static IP addresses? or would i need to get their spendy busness account.


I wish i could get fios, that would rock!

linuxrunner

I complained to qwest enough that they moved me to a new DSLAM and refunded me my $200 plus a $50 credit, so i don't have to pay for like 5 months. Service has gotten better once i was on the new circut it upped my connection to about 5mbps or so pretty much all the time. Then i got a cisco 678 modem and that upped my connection so now i can download at 6.5mbps all day long, which is amazeingly close to the 7mbps cap.

I was able to get around the bittorrent throttleing with an article i found about editing my iptables.

I know i'll stick with qwest for at least 5 more months because i am all paid up for the next 5 months, but as long as things don't slow down again I will stay with them. (all my neighbors are haveing a really tough time with comcast)

Corey

iTrader: (1)

Up here where I live I am on Comcasts 6 megabit service.
However they just upgraded me for free to the 8 megabit service for three months.

But...with my speed tests using DSL Reports speed Test, I get around 24,000 kbps down, and 3,000 up.

If I disconnect my router and go straight through the modem, I get 30,000 kbps.
The service where I live rocks.
However they are cracking down on those who run bit torent and home servers, as it screws with others who are on the same node.

Workhorse

From what I have heard from one of my friends that works for Comcast there network is bogged down right now in quite a few area's. When i left the Portland area 2 years ago, they had just started the torrent throttling and bandwidth limitations (one of my friends got a nasty letter saying he downloaded / uploaded too much in a month rofl). Good choice on the modem btw

Edit: on a side note if anybody does want Comcast internet/tv ect.

http://www.comcastoffers.com/

Info on them:
About Comcastoffers.com
Comcastoffers.com is a Web Site independently operated by Consumercomm.com under license by Comcast Corporation. Some offers brought to you by Comcastoffers.com are not available directly from Comcast Corporation.

The promotions change every month or so. They are reliable was given the info by my friend (comcast billing dept lol and i have used them twice for promotions when i moved in the Portland area.

BT17R

I'm on Comcast basic package (6 Mbps) and about 25 miles East of town in a house. I typically see 12Mbps down, 2Mbps up, +/- 4Mbps down depending on time of day.

I've never had any service outages and any billing glitches are fixed quickly.