SpeedPlexer Blog

The internet is expanding at an astronomical pace, and the amount of video and multimedia that the web pages contain these days makes it imperative for internet users to upgrade to a wider bandwidth.

A faster internet speed is what web-surfers are demanding nowadays. As a consequence, a few of the major broadband service providers in Canada and the US are serving up better and faster broadband packages. Many of the broadband providers have moved on to fiber-optic network to give their subscribers a blistering connection speed. Besides the internet, the use of fiber optics extends to phone, media, and cable-TV.

After introducing fiber optic networking, Comcast has doubled the connection speed of its second cheapest connection plan for residents in Philadelphia. The bandwidth offered currently is 12 megabits per second, and the company plans to offer fiber optic network to about 2 million customers in the Greater Philadelphia region.

Although the Canadian economy is experiencing a slowdown, its companies and residents show no signs of slowing down their internet speed. As a response to the increasing demands for wider bandwidth, Shaw Communications has forged ahead with an internet revamp, hiring hundreds of employees in the process. Hi-Speed Nitro (100 Mbps) is their latest offering, which is undoubtedly the fastest internet speed available in Canada. In the coming months, the Hi-Speed Nitro subscribers need to brace themselves as it promises to boost connection speed by 50%.

If you are experiencing a sluggish internet speed while surfing the net, maybe you need to change your present subscription plan. It is also important that you test your connection speed since some of the broadband service providers don’t offer the bandwidth that was initially promised.

About a year ago, Comcast’s “network management” techniques got a lot of negative publicity–mostly because of the way they slowed people’s connections, or cut them off entirely. In fact, Federal Communications Commission was brought in to investigate its widely criticized anti-BitTorrent filtering.

(BitTorrent is an advanced peer-to-peer sharing technology that allows users to share music, movies, software, and other intellectual property. It works by splitting up files into tiny bits of data that can be shared in any order. Eventually after sharing a file with others, the speed for downloading increases, thereby taking the burden off of the servers and putting it on the users.)

The FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, said the question was, “Are they reasonable network practices?” He added that “when they have reasonable network practices, they should disclose those and make those public.”

One blogger put it this way: “Many ISPs routinely filter the traffic on their networks. …the fact that a major ISP is now filtering yet another class of Internet traffic should not be major news–except for two factors: BitTorrent traffic accounts for upwards of 25 percent of U.S. Internet traffic, and the techniques used by Comcast are essentially the same as those used by the Great Firewall of China.”

Another blogger said that Comcast was surreptitiously interfering with file transfers by posing as the client, and then disconnecting. Tests by the Associated Press seemed to prove that Comcast was actively interfering with peer-to-peer networks, even if relatively small files were being transferred.

One blogger/customer noted that while clocking his internet speed, he noticed that regularly got only a portion of what Comcast was promising.  One customer even took Comcast to court over their phrasing of offering an “always-on” connection in their press and promotions. But the fine print seems to have been more binding than the press release.

The final word may be this headline from Reuters news from only a few weeks ago: “Comcast beats forecast but loses subscribers,” of course, they attribute it to “recession and competition”, but it could simply be poor customer service and bad press. 

The moral of the story for internet users:  measure your internet speeds and read the fine print!