Comcast not delivering enough bandwitdth during peak hours

Lately I've been having this huge problem with Comcast in my city. In the mornings, I ping google with a time of ~13ms. That's about as good as it has ever been for me. Once it passes noon, it goes to about ~150ms, and in the evenings it is not uncommon for it to be higher than 200. So I did a little test...and here are the results... (BTW, we're supposed to have a 6mb/s download speed)

Morning:

5.3 megabits per second...Awesome

Evening:

260 kilobits per second.....Good Lord....

The weirdest part is this is ONLY for my city. Even the bordering cities are fine. Everyone in my city has this problem though.


I have tried calling 5 different times, and all they can reply with is: "that is what happens during peak hours". 260kb/s is completely inexcusable. Isn't that somehow violating the terms of service? It's really quite annoying having a ping of over 200 in video games these days. What can I do?!

This may not relate but something like that happen to me some time ago with comast. It turn out to be that when comcast was up speed in my area it was getting slow in the night and normal in the morning. I had technician coming in few times, the singnal was good regardless of time of a day. After some time connection got speedy again.

Use testmy.net to get speed, it works better than any other speed tests online. Also you could read some topics in forum of testmy.net. You can check signal strengh on the modem, http://192.168.100.1/ it suppose to be in certain range for it to work effeciently.

that is one of the problems with cable internet, everyone basically in your neighborhood shares unlike DSL. My guess would be you have a number of people in your city probably using BT like crazy and hogging all the bandwith. Is there any way you could switch to another provider?

I've checked the signal strength, and Comcast claims that it's within range. Unfortunately, my only alternative to Comcast is SBC DSL which is much slower overall. I guess if this keeps up for too much longer, that could be my only choice.

Call them up and tell them you are going to switch if they don't fix it. Companys are usually more motivated when they are going to lose your money.

I would suggest you read your ToS before accusing them of anything. I would imagine in there it says something along the lines of 'We guarantee up to xx Mb/s'. See, they cover themselves with the 'up to'.

In the end, you can always find a different company and switch. That's your power as a consumer. If you don't like a product, find a better one.

Man, that stinks. I'm on Comcast, and here in Murfreesboro, TN (just south of Nashville), they've started rocking.

It used to be 4Mbps, or 6Mbps if you paid an extra $10/month. They upped that to 6Mbps standard, so I started paying $10/month to get 8Mbps. Saw no speed increase for almost two months, and then one day had to plug a comp straight into the wall in another room because it didn't have any wifi access ... and was blown away to find out I was peaking at over 12Mbps. I ditched my wifi setup that night.

But anywho ... even at 12Mbps, I usually only get those in the middle of the day when I come home for lunch and everyone else is at work, or very late at night. I bounce between 7Mbps and 12Mbps in the early evenings, and while our subdivision is fairly dense, we're still not a major metropolis, so I can only imagine what kind of hit bandwidth might take with too many users crammed into one place.

I would definitely call them, though. There were times at my old house when things would be screwed up (back when it was Intermedia, and then switched over to Comcast, too) and there would be some error on their end. I worked for the ABC station in Nashville for a while, and we had problems with a particular group of Comcast users in one section of town access our streaming video. Seems something was screwed up in a gateway somewhere on Comcast's end that they never even knew about (and argued with me about until their management got a senior tech went to actually check it out ... gotta love stubborness. ).

Oni said:

I would suggest you read your ToS before accusing them of anything. I would imagine in there it says something along the lines of 'We guarantee up to xx Mb/s'. See, they cover themselves with the 'up to'.

In the end, you can always find a different company and switch. That's your power as a consumer. If you don't like a product, find a better one.

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Unless your town designates a cable provider, so you really do only have one choice. The area I live isn't rural, but adelphia is the only ISP available here.

Regarding speeds and pings, most of the time there's really nothing you can do. Speeds aren't guaranteed, and most ISPs won't even bother to change anything if your latency is under 300ms.

Sounds like they need more bandwidth in your area. You're best bet is to call and complain about this issue. The problem is getting up a few levels so that the person you're complaining to actually cares. Someone working level 1 helpdesk is just going to act concerned and tell you they're sorry.

I would not pay for a cable service that goes down to 2-300kbps during peak hours. I used to have AT&T cable service when I lived in Auburn, and it was slower than dial up on my side of town during peak hours. I called and complained a few times, they sent guys out that did nothing. I swapped over to Bellsouth DSL and never looked back. Bellsouth has always provided me with great latency and close to their advertised speeds. I'm usually 12-1400kbps on a 1.5mbps plan.

Would I like to have 6mbps? of course. Is it worth testing the waters with a cable company for it? not in my opinion.

DSL companies are starting to offer 3 and 6mbps packages as well, but I think I'm still limited to 1.5

SBC offers 6 mbs for $27 a month.....I had really good expierence with them.

Whoaaaaa

I pay $45/mo. for "6mb" in my cable connection. Notice the quotes.
I talked to someone who "sent a ticket to the engineer office asking them to check it out".....basically if the problem isn't better by June, I'm switching to SBC. This is out of control.

Thanks for all the reccomendations!

Most ISP will not listen to ping gripes. If the signal is strong they will hardly listen to you. There is a lot of things that can effect a speed test. I been having horrible speeds of late myself. Testing off my backbone gives me great speeds. Anything else is trash. I should of stayed on the partial T3 line...

A good way to check is do an upload and download. If your getting hit on both sides, then you can be sure there is a 'pipe hogger' near you.

if you rent your modem, ask for a new one to see if that fixes the problem, i was having problems a few months ago with only get 100KB and it was disconnecting all the time, so comcast come out and they said the signal for the line in the street was too high, they had another tech come out a few days later to fix the signal in the street, but it didn't fix the problems, so they had another tech come out a few days later and he gave us a new modem and it fixed all the problems.

I experienced this same issue with comcast 6 yrs ago. Since then I have used Verizon Business 3MB DSL and love it!

3mb might not be what comcast can peak, but I have 3mb 24/7, DSL is a dedicated line.

I don't think I've ever seen my ping above 65. It consistently hangs around 20.

TalRW said:

that is one of the problems with cable internet, everyone basically in your neighborhood shares unlike DSL. My guess would be you have a number of people in your city probably using BT like crazy and hogging all the bandwith. Is there any way you could switch to another provider?

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Bs. DSL shares too. During peak hours I get less bandwidth.

RangerXLT8 said:

I experienced this same issue with comcast 6 yrs ago. Since then I have used Verizon Business 3MB DSL and love it!

3mb might not be what comcast can peak, but I have 3mb 24/7, DSL is a dedicated line.

I don't think I've ever seen my ping above 65. It consistently hangs around 20.

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And you pay $200 a month?

heh, i guess im just lucky than...

I live in a area surrounded by McChord Air Force Base (I think they have their own service + a service for homes on base) and than i also have a few apartment complexes who's mainly residence is old people who dont use comcast...

all i know is no matter what time of day... i get almost 100% bandwith..

Everyone shares bandwidth on the internet. Past the CO anyways. You are dedicated up to that. That is what everyone is refering to.

A business line is not much more then a home line. Maybe $20 more a month. Depending how greedy the ISP is. There is plenty of perks for going on a business line, for some it is worth the extra cost. Usually it is not a whole lot more then a home line.

Even when I was on a partial T3 I got slowdowns when traffic was really heavy on the backbone.

If you want a mission critical application for the internet, have fun buying at least 3 lines so that you never experience downtime.