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Ask HN: Is Comcast ripping me off and how can I prove it?

2 points by tomcam ↗ HN
I pay $80 per month for Comcast to deliver at least 300mbs per second. While fast.com and speedtest.net show roughly that figure, I can’t even stream a YouTube video without frequent dropouts or pauses lasting up to a minute. YouTube’s Stats for Nerds reveals numbers closer to 10Mbps on a good day. My computers, phones, and tablets are state of the art or one gen old.

Service has declined over the years and I suspect they are severely oversubscribed. Going through phone support is exhausting. Of course I grit my teeth and endure the reboots, etc. even though I’ve always taken those measures before calling.

They talked me into renting their modem instead of my $500 Orbi the last time. I figured he’ll, maybe it was a scam to force me to pay for acceptable service. Whatever, worth the additional $15. Shockingly, no improvement and in fact it got worse.

Are there commonly accepted diagnostic programs that I can use to find and confirm the issues such that they can’t deny it’s them? Or if not them show me the cause? How do I get them to deliver the kind of service they had no trouble with two years ago?

11 comments

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brucethemoose2
Try hosting a DIY speed test on a cloud server (like Google colab or the free oracle instances or whatever):

https://github.com/librespeed/speedtest

Also try a YouTube download with youtube-dl

Yeah, fast.com (which is Netflix) and speedtest.net are unfortunately not useful tests.

tomcam
Thank you. I will have to give this a try when I get the energy and time.
ignorantguy
I had a similar issue and switched my provider. Are there any alternatives for you?
tomcam
Other providers are even worse! I live in a “rural” area (across the street from the same town as Microsoft) and the only other option is DSL.
NoZebra120vClip
Do you use the Internet for work? Perhaps you can negotiate a business connection.

Consumer Internet contracts have no Service Level Agreement (SLA) and so, you can call Support all you want, but it's not their problem what sort of speeds you get to third-party sites, not even across their own backbone. The advertised speeds are signaling rates and not download/upload speeds. If your modem is displaying the correct lights on the front panel, then your connection is trained up at the correct signaling rate according to your chosen connectivity package, and your ISP won't care about YouTube.

If you obtain a business service, then you can negotiate a particular SLA in your contract, which won't necessarily make them care about YouTube, but you may be able to specify a minimum bitrate and uptime.

speedtest.net and the like, by default, will make use of a co-located server as close as possible to you, in terms of network topology, and so the speed results you obtain will be under ideal conditions, and indicate the maximum possible performance.

tomcam
It’s $2500 a month here and that just makes me angry. I would probably do it if it weren’t for the fact that it worked fine a couple of years ago.

Interestingly, the sales people for Comcast do say I should actually get those download speeds. They did not used to make claims that way. Comcast is happy to downgrade my performance.

Thanks for that last paragraph. I didn’t realize that’s how the speed tests work, but of course you can see the negotiation process as they happen.

NoZebra120vClip
The other thing to know is that content distribution networks (CDNs) are rather complex nowadays, so it's not merely a question of "my connection to example.com is laggy" but more like "how is data from example.com getting from their servers through caches/load balancers/round-robin/co-locations?"

When I took a course five years ago, our instructor said a few words on "Net Neutrality" and he explained that many companies who distribute content, like Netflix, positioned their servers, or at least caches, right where the ISPs are. Now, YouTube might only use Google's data centers for distribution; I don't know.

There is also the question of whether Comcast perceives on-demand video as a competition for their own Cable TV services, and whether they're actively throttling video traffic that isn't their own content. Hopefully that would be a well-known fact.

tomcam
Damn this is complex. Didn’t think about that.
fatnoah
I had similar issues, such as everyone seeing my video and voice pause several times in Zoom meetings. Looking at modem stats, I could see that only kne of four upstream channels bonded, resulting in a tenuous connection. Ironically, the TV also didn't work well since each ca STB remote control button press requires a round trip to the server over IP. The result was that I'd be watching something and a non dismissable popup would cover the content to tell me there was an issue.

In any case, the only way I got them to stop telling me it was an inside wiring problem was to run an extension cord to the interface on the outside of my house where the wire from the street was connected to my home wiring and then connect my modem directly there. When they finally agreed to send someone, I was told it would be 7 business days.

Fios was able to install the next day, so I switched.

LinuxBender
fast.com has anycast nodes on most major ISP's so they can be misleading when there is a problem on your network. Have you verified the duplex/speed settings have negotiated properly on each link of your LAN? What OS are you using? What is between your PC/phone and your Comcast modem? What make/model of NIC is on your computer?
Noler
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