Comcast XFINITY → The Bandwidth Limits/Congestion Management Topic

The goal being: "always provide high availability to low-user customers." - These are the people paying the most money per bit, as it were. You want to keep those folks VERY happy. You care less about the folks that you are losing money on.

So yes, they want to maintain the Quality of Service for their cash cows.

It's QoS. You might not like how they define it, but it is.

Has anyone seen their speed drop below 128kbps during deprioritization? I've never actually experienced it myself.

No, that's not what I mean by "specific quality goal." It's also not what I mean by "different applications."

I mean measurable and specific goals, such as, "Fairchild DBMS latency to Alpine office maintained below 70 ms. with a 95% confidence during the peak hour, and an overall average of all samples under 18 ms." This might be one of a list of goals that mention other quality vectors such as speed or packet drops. QoS Rules are the network's instructions designed to accomplish those goals.

I understand your rationale because prioritization is a tool for achieving QoS goals and we tend to think of these in connected ways, but Comcast's method is pretty far from the way we should think about QoS.

Comcast's method is a kick toward the direction of user-vs-user fairness. It could be refined more (shorter windows, better-engineered floors with more weighted queue handling) and really be an option worth considering.

It could be, but that's something even beyond the 80/20 rule in terms of effort to benefit. If there were such a thing as an 99.999/0.001 rule, this would be a quintessential case.

Yes, it does happen. That's the point YOU ignore.

Then my node must be horribly overutilized because I can assure you if I attempt a file transfer at any time of day or night using full bandwidth my speeds will be cut within a few minutes and will remain so. If I stop the transfer and wait, speeds will return to normal. If I manually limit my transfer speeds to about 60-65% of maximum, my the transfers complete as normal.

That is my continued observations of the Comcast system and has been for the several months that the "upgrade" has been implemented in my area (getting the 12/2 upgrade from 6/1). Comcast techs continue to say my line is "clean" and everything is functioning within specs.

So, then, my observations tell me one thing while you guys say something else. I believe my own eyes over propaganda.

W.I.W., node devices themselves do not get saturated. The upstream and downstream channels that are on one's segment can have capacity/congestion issues.

Speaking of propaganda, you still haven't taken the 5 minutes to actually explain what you are doing and the problem / symptoms that you are seeing. From the vague references to the actual symptoms you have posted, it sounds more like you are trying to use a P2P program and are having trouble with the upstream which usually involves the items below:

1) Your router's NAT table is becoming overloaded.
2) Your upstream is becoming over-saturated.
3) You believe you're on 12/2, but are really still on 6/1 - see #2.

The way I see it; you can continue to think that we must be a bunch of morons that don't get it and are trying to spread evil corporate propaganda, or, if this is an actual problem that you would like solved it might be worth considering using a different approach.

You're the only one seeing this, or your area is terribly oversubscribed, or you have some technical problem.

Unless you are mistaking speedboost for your actual speed? Speedboost will drop out in a few seconds, you should see 1.4Mbit down on a 12/2 line consistently after speedboost.

I can run at my rated pipe speed for hours on end in a high density residential area.

Have you tried posting in the comcast help forum here?

If "a few minutes" is less than 10, then you're not affected by Comcast's bandwidth management method.I believe you, but I don't do propaganda. Your problems are real. Do they jive with the descriptions of the causes?

What I'd recommend is that fuziwuzi start a new thread and post all of his information so folks can assist in examining the issue. This means make/model of all equipment (modem, home gateway, etc.), OS of any devices on the network, OS of the specific device with the problem, signal levels from modem, highly detailed description of the problem (app in use, data transfer attempted with file size, traceroutes, time of day, etc.).

It'd be more fun IMHO to try to figure out what the real problem is here with fuziwuzi (just not in this thread of course).

You make a lot of inaccurate assumptions. The problem occurs whether using FTP or P2P, doesn't matter, anything involving a large file transfer. Problem occurs regardless of the presence of a router or not (i.e. plugging directly into the modem). Problem occurs with my own modem or a borrowed modem from the Comcast technician. Problem occurs regardless of operating system or computer (1 WinXP, 2 Win7 64-bit, 1 Macbook Pro). Comcast, via their CSRs and several onsite technicians say I have 12/2 service, are you saying they've lied to me?

I am quite aware of what Powerboost is and isn't, I'm not an idiot. And aren't you so lucky! I'm not that lucky here. The Comcast technicians who have been to my location say everything is working as designed. THEY told me the problem is actually how the system is designed, so in effect, it is working as it is supposed to, according to them.

Quite possible, which is why I and others have suggested to you to start a separate thread and post the details of your configuration and the details of what you are doing when you see the problem.That's a few more details, but it would be really good to start a new thread and put all the pieces together to give a complete picture.No, that's not what I said and I think you know that. You can however confirm easily for yourself by downloading a large file such as a Linux ISO via a browser and look at the transfer rate after it has transfered about 60MB or so. If the download rate is 1.5 MB/s that would be 12/2 or if 1 MB/s that would 6/1.

Good, are you ready to try and fix your issue now?

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And aren't you so lucky! I'm not that lucky here.

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Good. Now we have established you're having a site-specific issue. I am not lucky, I am simply not having any service issues.

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The Comcast technicians who have been to my location say everything is working as designed.

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Were you seeing the performance issue during the tech visits? Did they reproduce the exact issue on their equipment? If not, then likely the tech was correct - as far as they could see, you were operating correctly at that moment.If all they had to go on was your description, then I would expect that would be the on-site tech's answer to why your system, which seemed to be working correctly, would experience slowdowns.

At this point all I can do is join the greek choir and suggest you start a new thread with detailed information and work with both the mass of people here and the comcast techs here to troubleshoot your issue. Because it is a service issue. Plain and simple. Really.

Please see your Instant Messages. Nobody is trying to insult you here. In fact, many are trying to help you.

Please take this to a new topic and allow others to assist you in troubleshooting. Unless that new topic makes it clear this is a Comcast congestion management issue, please don't continue in this huge thread.

For those following this issue, fuziwuzi has started a help topic here ---> »Throttling?

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so looks like my service was cancelled. I thought I was under the 250gb too.

do I still have a chance to upgrade to business class or am I screwed out of comcast for a year no matter what?

@skreweler2

Yes, you can still sign up for business class service. I went over a 2nd time in December and was recently shut off. Surprisingly, they never actually called to tell me my service was cancelled. I called in to tech support to inquire why my modem wasn't receiving an IP and the lady was basically like "Huh? You don't have internet service with us."

Anyway, I signed up for business class and there weren't any issues, the cancellation was never mentioned. When they asked why I was signing up for business class service, I told them it was due to bandwidth issues with my residential service. The lady said that they "don't currently have any bandwidth limitations on their business service" but it's possible they would be put into place in the future. She assured me that I would be informed if that ever happened.

Hope this helps.

i just talked to a comast rap
they bitched at me for having passed their 250g monthly cap

thing is, am one of their COMCAST Xtreme: 50Mb Down/12 Up

am like this is a sick joke
, i can download 250g in 3 days easy if i wanted to
and the rap just played dumb

this is the must stupid company ever

am like what the cap for the Economy Internet Service
that is 1mb DOWN max
and their like, their cap is also 250g,

am like, am paying 4 times what they pay for 50mb line
and the cap the same, she just keeped on playing am a totaly dumbass robot that repeats the same lines

atfer i told her in not so nice terms, their threats to disconnect me for heavy use would not taken into account and hang on on her in disbelief at the amount of stupidness that is comcast caps

WOW Your sub english is hard to understand.

I don't know what your question is.

What the rep told you is true. Having the 50 Mb tier has the same transfer cap as the 1 Mb. If you go over the treshhold again, they might disconnect you.

You could either subscribe to business class or watch to be under the 250 GB/mo. What you tell the rep does not really matter.

So, here's a chance for you to be the smart one.

Since you download a lot, don't download at faster than 750 Kbps (93 KB/s) and you'll never download more than 243 GB/mo. You don't need the 50 Mbps service, you can do that on the 1 Mbps (1000 Kbps) economy-class line!

Of course, if you do like surfing really fast, too, and watching YouTube and other things like that, then keep your faster connection and set your constant downloader to 60 KB/s or 500 Kbps. That will give you some left over in the 250 GB budget for your other things.

(*if you share this connection with your family, be sure to divide the budgeted amounts between them.)

If you need TB of data to go along with the SPEED you currently pay for, switch to 50/10 business class.

Same speed, but at $189/mo you pay for all the bandwidth you can use. Or at least many TB of data a month.

There you go. Go for it!

This is how I figure mine out ...

Since I am going to turn on my computer about 16 hrs a day anyway, it doesnt matter if I got 50 mbps or 100 mbps download. I can wait for it to download.

I think 6 mbps is my comfort zone and 12 mbps is just icing on the cake.

One thing I do wish is upload speed should keep getting higher.