Broadband speed

[Chuckanut]

I'd belive that. They(comcast) have a finite number of bits they can send through a cable. Normally it's sliced and diced up so everyone appears to get a fair share. When the network is saturated and a transmission is sent that has priority(class of service) it gets more resources and other traffic queues. There's about 512 other ways this can happen.

With DSL and FIOS the wire/fiber into your home is used just by you. Whatever your neighbors are doing does not affect what is happening in your home.

But.....

Unlike DSL or FIOS, cable Internet has one big pipe going into your area, say the block you live on. It feeds a lot of little pipes that go to the various homes on your block.

So, you may only downloading small photos of your grandchildren, but if your neighbors are streaming multiple 4K videos, playing games, steaming music, downloading pirated movies, etc. you may end up slowing down anyway.

What? They didn't tell you that?

 

[Lsbcal]

For us the TV + Blueray DVD (that gets the streaming signal) is located in another room with some walls in between it and the cable modem + router. I had to buy a good router but that is still probably the bottleneck in speed for streaming. As I recall we are getting about 12 Mbps at the streaming DVD receiver (down from 50+ Mbps for web stuff at the PC).

If I needed better, I'd route a wire under the house to the streaming receiver.

 

[robertf57]

I've only got 3meg DSL (and happy to get it) out here in the middle of nowhere. Works well except for streaming video which I don't really care about since I don't like watching movies on the computer. (Prefer my 60" TV)

Need to get a Roku and stream to that Bad Boy big screen!

For us the TV + Blueray DVD (that gets the streaming signal) is located in another room with some walls in between it and the cable modem + router. I had to buy a good router but that is still probably the bottleneck in speed for streaming. As I recall we are getting about 12 Mbps at the streaming DVD receiver (down from 50+ Mbps for web stuff at the PC).

If I needed better, I'd route a wire under the house to the streaming receiver.

From your reply, I guess you are connecting to your network wirelessly (wifi). If that is true, then your speed probably is limited by the wifi. A good wired ethernet connection to the router is not going to be the bottleneck. I have a 1g ethernet (1000BASET cat 6 cabling) connection to the media center from the router that is 2 orders of magnitude better than my broadband speed.

 

[Texas Proud]

I am curious. Have you actually tested that speed using some of the speed test sites? I find that many of these speeds are 'upto' speeds, as in 'up to 50MPS'. In reality, that means that a speed of 3MPS meets the standard. Not so good.

From what I was told by AT&T, they do not consider anything less than half of their 'up to' to be meeting standard... so in your example there would be a problem even for them....

 

[donheff]

Have any of you who carefully evaluate this stuff analysed the "guarantee" or reality of the speeds that can be expected across the Internet? My understanding has always been that an ISP may be able to guarantee a speed from you to the provider's point of access but after that you are in the wild west. Congestion on Internet trunks, limitation of content providers' pipes and servers, etc can throttle you down to nothing at any time. Same goes with assuming your wifi is the choke point because it has limited bandwidth. I stream Netflix over wifi all regularly and have no problem most of the time. But at weekend prime times I will frequently get buffering problems, sometimes too severe to continue. My assumption is that my pipe and my wifi are irrelevant to that issue. My carrier could be the problem (traffic across their network or intentional throttling) or various Internet bottlenecks could by the problem. Are there technical reasons you engineers can suggest that would explain why if my pipe and home infrastructure are sufficient most of the time, a bigger pipe would improve things on the weekends when I experience problems?

 

[frank]

i have centurylink with 1.5 mbs and I stream netflix with no problem, use a desktop, two laptops and a couple ipods. I think a lot of speed problems come from viruses or computers that are too cluttered and just need a cleanout.

 

[ziggy29]

In a rural town of 300 people, we're actually pretty fortunate to have DSL service, sad to say. We pay for 6 Mbps but often we can pull in 9-10 Mbps depending on network conditions. It's good enough for most purposes and, when it's not constipated, is good enough to pull in HD content on our Roku box.

 

[target2019]

Have any of you who carefully evaluate this stuff analysed the "guarantee" or reality of the speeds that can be expected across the Internet? My understanding has always been that an ISP may be able to guarantee a speed from you to the provider's point of access but after that you are in the wild west. Congestion on Internet trunks, limitation of content providers' pipes and servers, etc can throttle you down to nothing at any time. Same goes with assuming your wifi is the choke point because it has limited bandwidth. I stream Netflix over wifi all regularly and have no problem most of the time. But at weekend prime times I will frequently get buffering problems, sometimes too severe to continue. My assumption is that my pipe and my wifi are irrelevant to that issue. My carrier could be the problem (traffic across their network or intentional throttling) or various Internet bottlenecks could by the problem. Are there technical reasons you engineers can suggest that would explain why if my pipe and home infrastructure are sufficient most of the time, a bigger pipe would improve things on the weekends when I experience problems?

You've mentioned all the bottlenecks, and know how dicey it can be. Netflix pays Comcast for some level of performance. If you have another ISP there may or may not be a problem in getting the video packets to you in a timely way.

A bigger pipe won't hurt. But if you pay substantially more for it, and still have buffering problems, you'll be mighty disappointed.

Does your WIFI router have specific features for video and media streaming? The one I purchased a year or two ago does have such features, but I had to enable them.

If you can get a wire from your device to the WIFI router, that could be a big help too. There can be interference all around your devices. Takes time to look at these issues and eliminated potential bottleneck(s).

If this is really caused by more neighborhood traffic, keep complaining to the ISP.

 

[Chuckanut]

Here's an article on competition among broadband providers. Of particular interest is the chart showing that as broadband speeds get above 25 MPS, competition goes way down.

A Commerce Department report released last December found that once you get to speeds of 25 Mbps or higher, only 37% of the country has even two providers to choose between, let alone a third nearby.

Two Big Reasons The New Broadband Standard Is Bad News For The Comcast Merger – Consumerist