I get higher than advertised speeds with Cox often. It's flaky though, and slows down at peak hours and can go down like a whore at any minute.

 

-----signature-----

I have to agree that its mostly the caps that are in place that are the source of the irritation. I can say that being able to see what Comcast will hold you to in terms of traffic (rather than attempting to rely on something they would ignore) is pretty nice.

So far when I note a significant mistake, its in my favor not theirs. In June, they were 100GB off and I'm not sure what happened but I'm fine with that.

A 250gb cap is still pretty decent (and far better than 150gb) but the funny part is that 4 or 5 years ago, I just used bit torrent a alot. Now I use Steam and Netflix, and use more than I ever did. Legitimate traffic is growing quite a bit, and I hope there is a plan other than "leave the cap at 250GB for the next 10 years".

I would like to mention to those using CABLE internet services...


The main cable that enters the dwelling should goto a 2spliter, with 1 line running to the modem, the other side for TVs....These can become degraded in approx 3years and needs to be changed....service for TV will not have any issues, but service for cable will....I would use a 5mHz-2500mHz unit.


This will save you a $100 inside home service call, and weeks of frustration.

AFAIK the main reason they split it off, is because you cannot have an amplifier on the same line as the modem. In houses with several TVs, having an inline amp to maintain picture quality is almost a must.

Never really had a splitter slowly die on me. Lightning on the other hand...


I saw a full page add in the paper highlighting this graph. Cablevision vs Fios, kinda made me chuckle.

 

-----signature-----

6Mbps on a 7Mbps line is actually 7Mbps.


What you don't see in any speed test is the bandwidth being used for other purposes besides your speed test. ACKs, Retransmissions, CRCs, keepalives, DNS, TCP headers, WAN and LAN broadcasts, ARPs etc etc ad infinitum.


At a minimum, 10% of your bandwidth is being consumed by this secondary stuff - but usually it's closer to 15%. If you don't want to do the math yourself that means the 7Mbps line will always "speed test" right at 6.0Mbps.


This is true of all speeds, all technologies. If you set up a simple 100Mbps LAN via a switch and test the speed between two machines plugged into that LAN - they'll "speed test" at ~85Mbps. The other 15Mbps is there, it's just being used for housekeeping so the speed test can't measure it.

 

-----signature-----