Comcast download speed is much slower than it's supposed to be?

Question

My plan for comcast states i'm supposed to pull a download speed of around 25mbps. now, when i test it per speedtest.org or whatnot, this is what it comes back as. However, it seems to only pull that speed for the speed test. when downloading anything, be it p2p, work related, updates, anything, it caps out at around 2mbps. I've pulled my router out of the loop and connected directly to the modem, no change. reset the computer, reset the modem, still 2mbps. i've called the company, they can only tell me nothing is wrong with their equipment, and haven't been showing any latency spikes or heavy loads on the local setup as far as the internet block shared in my neighborhood, or any other indication of problems, for that matter.

Now, i did have one guy potentially explain this to me, and the reason he gave was this. comcast fakes it. because there are a finite amount of speed test sites, he believes comcast captures their ip address, and runs connections to said IP adress uncapped, but for other services, they put the cap back on. I ran this past the comcast rep, who denied it, of course, but still she couldn't say what might be causing the discrepancy in my download speeds.

So, my question is this. does anyone else have an idea what might be going on? should i bother calling them up and getting a technicain out here? i don't have problems with connectivity, it's just my connection is slower than advertised. by about 10x.

Answer 1

The 25Mbit/sec connection speed is in megaBITS per second. Speedtest.net also shows your speed in megabits, which is why it is very close to the number your ISP advertises.



When you download a file or torrent, the speed is almost always shown in megaBYTES per second. There are 8 bits in one byte, so divide 25 by 8 to see what your typical download should cap at (3.125 megabytes/second).





Carefully look wherever speed or bandwidth are listed. Mbit or Mbs stands for megabit while MBit or MBs (big B) stands for megabyte.

Answer 2

Many things effect your download speeds.



1. The upload speed of the node you are downloading from. Someone uploading on a P2P network at only 500kbps isn't going to magically make things faster on your end. Same for websites with high amounts of traffic (it has to get divided up among the connections) and some small websites may not be able to afford lightning fast upload speeds.



2. Usually ISPs say "Up to XXmbps". Technically that 2mbps is "Up to 25mbps". It sucks but that's what they are allowed to get away with.



3. Speedtest websites are optimized for speed and close to your location. There are MANY servers spread out geographically to do this. This cuts down on the number of connections to any one server at a time. Plus the tests take all of about 10 seconds so it's like a burst instead of many hours of P2P downloading or Youtube.



4. In addition since you have cable, all the homes/buildings in your neighborhood go through 1 junction box to a bunch of fiber cable to run back to the ISP. So if everyone in your neighborhood is downloading/uploading this can slow your connection down.



I'm not saying all this to defend your ISP, in my experience ISPs suck and suck hard. I'm guessing you live in a large metro area since you have Comcast, if you can I would suggest switching to another ISP.



-edit-

John brings up a good point, there's a BIG difference between mbps and MBps. Basically 10x difference.

Answer 3

Cable cyber web stocks the bandwidth with surely everyone else on a similar public subnet. In English, there should be many human beings on your section which have Comcast, and are connecting to the web at the same time, causing it to be slower. Your connection at nighttime can be a lot swifter than the sunlight hours, considering maximum surely everyone appears to be like asleep at evening.