Comcast Internet Question

[plantlet]

My mom got me Comcast Economy Internet-- it's a bit slow, but I don't really have a problem since it's okay for surfing the web and gaming, it's supposedly 1.5 megabit/s download and 384 kilobit/s upload.

Anyways, our bill says that Comcast is merging economy internet and economy internet plus, so we are supposedley being boosted to 3mb/s for free, which is double the speed.

However, a calculator says 1.5 megabits/s is only 192 kilobytes/s download. I downloaded torrents at 380 kilobytes per second before. This means my speed was nearly double what it is supposed to be. However, my upload speed is usually around 5 kilobytes/s or less, but it's supposed to be 48 kilobytes/s. Why is this?

So does that mean with the free 3 megabit/s upgrade I can expect to download nearly 800 kilobytes per second? It says all I have to do is unplug the modem for 30 seconds and plug it back in.

I would have tried it now, but I'm at my dad's house at the moment, and not going to my mom's house for 3 more hours.

 

[RealBeast]

Speeds will vary by time of day, as the service is shared among the surrounding neighbors. Your best bet to test the service is to run www.speedtest.net at different times. Upload speeds for 3Mbps download are usually around .3Mpbs, so don't expect much although upload speeds are far less important that download for the average non-torrent user.

Considering the network overhead, you can expect to get about 1/10 of the Mbps (bits) rate in real bytes download speeds from a fast enough site. So for 3Mbps, around 300KBps (big B) is about what you would expect.

Also your download speeds will vary by where you are downloading from -- high bandwidth sources are going to give you better results. And Comcast will boot you after a couple of strikes for torrents, so be smart and avoid that.

 

[plantlet]

Speeds will vary by time of day, as the service is shared among the surrounding neighbors. Your best bet to test the service is to run www.speedtest.net at different times. Upload speeds for 3Mbps download are usually around .3Mpbs, so don't expect much although upload speeds are far less important that download for the average non-torrent user.

Considering the network overhead, you can expect to get about 1/10 of the Mbps (bits) rate in real bytes download speeds from a fast enough site. So for 3Mbps, around 300KBps (big B) is about what you would expect.

Also your download speeds will vary by where you are downloading from -- high bandwidth sources are going to give you better results. And Comcast will boot you after a couple of strikes for torrents, so be smart and avoid that.

Didn't change my internet speed at all which is pretty disappointing. Only downloading around 3.4mb/s. Going to throw my mom an extra $20 a month and have her ugprade to performance starter which is 6mb/s.