Comcast PowerBoost Is PR BS
Comcast PowerBoost is useless. They ramble on about how Comcast Internet is so much faster than DSL, with PowerBoost giving you speeds up to 12mbit. Read the fine print, you’ll notice that PowerBoost only works for the first 10MB of a file (attached), and even that isn’t guaranteed. To put this into perspective, if I downloaded a 10MB file on my 7mbit DSL, and did the same on Comcast Internet with PowerBoost, Comcast would be a whopping 5 seconds faster, assuming both services work as advertised. Now if I were to download a 700MB iso with my 7mbit DSL, that would take ~14 minutes. If I did the same with 6mbit Comcast, compensating for PowerBoost, it would take ~16 minutes, DSL being about 2 minutes faster. Even if you had 8mbit Comcast Internet, the speed difference with DSL would still only be about 2 minutes.
Comcast relies on trickery to try and win over customers, by saying their internet service is way faster than DSL. In reality, PowerBoost does nothing to make downloads faster, there’s almost no difference between DSL and Cable download speeds (assuming that both services deliver exactly what they advertise), and Comcast’s methods of advertising are shady, to say the least.
June 16th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader..
Matt Hanson
August 9th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
This service is free and intended to speed up web surfing exactly as you describe it. They have another service called Blast or somesuch that you have to pay for to get up to 16mbps. I had a lot of trouble with my service and kept pressing Comcast to fix it. It had gotten so bad that I was only getting 4mbps down and 300kbps up. I knew it should have been higher. They finally replaced my cable modem and all of a sudden I was getting 10 down and 3 up. I realized that my router’s WAN port was the bottleneck. I replaced my router and now get 20mbps down and 3mbps up. Not to shabby. I was going to switch to FIOS as soon as it was available and now I’m not so sure. I’m happy with Comcast, but I wish they were more proactive.
August 9th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Well, I think most major ISPs suck, but what bothers me about Comcast, is they make it sound like it’s light-years ahead of DSL in terms of speed, which is just not true. I’m not sure if PowerBoost really would make basic web surfing a whole lot faster, or if you would even notice a difference if it did; Latency is the real killer, once you get past a certain level of bandwidth.
August 9th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Theoretically it should make a big difference to a normal surfer. You get faster downloads of your pages (assuming they are less than 10mb). Currently the three major technologies are all very close in term of speed: Cable, FIOS, ADSL. I think that this competition is going to push the whole net neutrality issue to go away. The competition is forcing all of them to improve their networks which is good for all of us.
August 10th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Qwest now offers 20mbps access in select areas. It’s FTTN, though, so you won’t see speeds nearly as fast as FiOS. It’s way overpriced.
August 13th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
@ Huggs: Competition? No way. Look at the speeds in Europe and Japan. They are SO much faster than in America. Why? Forced obsolescence. It is much easier (and cheaper) for corporate ISP’s to maintain their infrastructure that can only handle so much traffic instead of make the necessary upgrades to provide state-of-the-art/state-of-the-world service. This is another instance of an American corporation simply putting profit above the providing a service that rightfully earns them profit.
August 18th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
In a lot of areas that Comcast services, Verizon is the DSL provider, and only offers up to 3mbps DSL. So even if you get 6mbps Comcast, which is the slowest, crappiest package they offer, you’re still downloading twice as fast. Most of Comcast’s “PR Bull” is against Verizon, not faster, modern DSL providers.
August 18th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
@Expert
Even so, 6mbps isn’t “way” faster than 3mbps. That’s like saying 56k is “way faster than 33.6k”. The difference in web browsing, between 3 and 6mbps, isn’t significant to the average user. Downloading large files is a different matter, however.
August 23rd, 2008 at 1:18 pm
That would be nice except for one thing.
I have comcast, and I’ve downloaded files over 700mb in very short order.
Much shorter than that.
September 1st, 2008 at 12:00 am
I had Comcast for years , my only problem was that i had to pay for cable TV just to get internet service. So one day i decide to switch to verizon. I sign up for the FIOS service. And a few days latter a DSL modem shows up and I it is so slow I am disgusted. The DSL speed difference changed how i used the internet because it was just to slow to do most of the type of downloads i was used to. Plus my router would not work with Verizon’s service and they wanted me to rent a different one from them. I went back to comcast now and I pay the extra ten bucks to get 16mbs. I love it. All is well. but then i find out Comcast is going to screw all of us with this new download limit starting Oct. 1st.