Harrison Pham

I usually bash Comcast a lot because of their poor support and very weird package offerings. But today they formally announced an all-market speed increase for their two main packages. The 6000/384kbps package becomes 6000/1000kbps while the 8000/768kbps becomes 8000/2000kbps. This is an amazing increase, and probably took them a really long time to get ready for.

This brings them pretty much up to par with AT&T's DSL and Uverse offerings. I really felt that AT&T had the upper hand with their new VDSL deployments since it offered the fastest speeds for a really competitive price. They only held this status for a year before Comcast announced this speed increase.

I actually got this update on Monday when my modem rebooted as a result of the new config file push. I figured it was just one of Comcast's various random network updates and didn't check into it. I only noticed that they had increased the speeds when I read a news post on DSLReports. I got really excited and proceeded to test the supposed speed increase. Comcast disabled config file names in my modem log so I have to use a more scientific method of finding out my provisioned speed (speed testing).

I used WinSCP to upload a 3GB CentOS ISO to a server in Atlanta, GA and used SNMP to monitor my outbound connection speed. I was very pleased to see the speed stayed between 850 - 980kbps for the 1 hour I ran the test. In fact, I could upload at this speed without causing any delays to my other internet traffic. My gaming and VOIP packets had no added latency, which surprised me because I used to get +500ms latency in the past with my 384kbps upload provisioning.

I'm very pleased right now. I was very annoyed in the past about the lack of good upload speeds. Now I don't have anything else to complain about (that is, until I find a use for all this new found upload bandwidth). Maybe Comcast will push out a bump in the near future...