Is there some net neutrality funny business going on?

[Jason Roehl]

That's what every business that sells a variable demand mass product does. Until they run into full utilization of their product, everything is hunky dory. Telephone/cell phone companies do it, water companies do it, electric companies do it, landscape and pool service companies do it. When they hit the wall, they have to shed customers, throttle customers down, improve efficiency and/or add capacity, or most likely some combination of the above.

cough, cough, BANKS, cough...

[Brian Elfert]

The entire Internet, business and home, is oversold. There is no way the Internet could sustain the traffic if the millions of Internet connections were one day to all be used to 100% of rated capacity at the same time. The issue is how close to the end user is the bandwidth oversold? If you live in a neighborhood and there are 20 homes on a 100 megabit connection you're more likely to see an issue than if your cable company doesn't have a big enough pipe to the Internet to support the tens of thousands of users they have. The likelihood of tens of thousands of users all using a large portion of their bandwidth at the same time is far less.

[Curt Harms]

Cox blatantly traffic shapes and denies it. You can run "speed tests" all day that show great numbers but, run some specific protocol sockets and the truth shows up. Despite best intentions from many providers there are large players who are not in the communications business, they are in the making money business and are moving to maximize their success. Another example of not making a product, simply making money . . . did I say that out loud? Sorry ;-)

I suspect Verizon FiOS throttles certain connection types. I'd noticed when running torrents (legal content only) the uploads were pretty slow regardless of the time of day. Verizon started advertising that uploads are now the same speed as downloads. Torrents now seem to be faster, like 10X faster. Coincidence? Maybe.

[Mark Bolton]

Here was an interesting listen I caught recently. Not necessarily about net neutrality but very pertinent...

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/sciencefriday/scifri201411071.mp3

[David Weaver]

I suspect Verizon FiOS throttles certain connection types. I'd noticed when running torrents (legal content only) the uploads were pretty slow regardless of the time of day. Verizon started advertising that uploads are now the same speed as downloads. Torrents now seem to be faster, like 10X faster. Coincidence? Maybe.

That parity issue is a competitive thing with comcast. Comcast will give you 50 megabits of potential downstream speed, and give you something like 1 or 2 megabits of upstream to go with it. People who like to trade media or upload large videos to youtube will find out quickly that even with a 15 minute video, comcast's upload is eye-bleedingly slow. Whatever limits them over coax doesn't seem to be the same issue for DSL or fiber or whatever you call those connection types.

[Jason Roehl]

That parity issue is a competitive thing with comcast. Comcast will give you 50 megabits of potential downstream speed, and give you something like 1 or 2 megabits of upstream to go with it. People who like to trade media or upload large videos to youtube will find out quickly that even with a 15 minute video, comcast's upload is eye-bleedingly slow. Whatever limits them over coax doesn't seem to be the same issue for DSL or fiber or whatever you call those connection types.

I don't know what my "contract" speed with Comcast is, but my tested speed just this morning (speedtest.net, on my iPhone) was 33 Mbps down (I've been getting 33-39 regularly) and 12 Mbps up. The download speed is up about 4 Mbps from just a few months ago (I never saw more than 29 Mbps previously), and the upload speed has gone up from a max of about 5.7 Mbps. This with no price increase or action on my part. Our church has the business class service, and the upload speed is much closer to the download speed, though both are lower, I suspect because of location (only 3 or so customers down that leg of cable), and because there is probably less disparity between available bandwidth and sold bandwidth on that node.

Jason