Oddball Update

I complained about their mishandling of my TiVo’s CableCARDs, but I can’t fault them for this. In fact, I can only thank them — profusely. Comcast has upgraded all broadband customers to 1 megabit upload (if you were on the 6/384 tier, like me), or 2 megabits (if you were on the 8/768 tier) — at no additional charge. Finally, the dad-blasted 384k upload cap is gone.

Not only that, but I’m actually getting closer to 2 megabits in real-world speed on FTP uploads, even though I should be getting 1. Now that’s service! (Actually, that’s PowerBoost - a Comcast feature wherein you get double your cap for the first 10-30 seconds of an upload or download.)

It was a hard road getting here, though. The upgrades supposedly went out to all areas a few days ago, but by this afternoon I still hadn’t seen them and was starting to become concerned. I discovered that Comcast has tech support guys on Twitter who actually respond to questions and problems with your service, so I actually got a Twitter account just so I could message them and ask when we were gonna get the upload speed bump. They responded with an email address to send my account info to so they could look into it.

To my surprise, a Comcast “Digital Media Outreach” executive actually called me personally not 30 minutes later and told me he had actually looked at my modem and confirmed that my signal levels are good and that I have the upgraded speeds. This was great customer service, but it still didn’t explain why I wasn’t seeing those speeds. The Comcast exec suggested a few things to try and told me to give him a call on Monday if I still hadn’t resolved the issue, and he’d get the local Florida techs involved.

I remained thoroughly perplexed throughout the rest of the day. I was too busy to deal with the problem further, but it remained stuck firmly in the back of my mind until I could no longer take it. Already feeling a surge of energy and industriousness after some other events that occurred today, I laid around in bed tonight for a while, thinking about the problem, before I decided to get up and try some experiments.

In the end, I solved the problem and learned it had been my own fault from the very beginning. I run a custom firmware on my wireless router that does QoS; this ensures that important data packets from my VoIP phone and Skype aways receive priority over things like BitTorrent and FTP. At some point in the distant past, I had manually set my connection’s upload bandwidth limit at 330k for QoS purposes — which actually limits throughput at the router level. What an idiot!

Long story short, the self-imposed cap has been removed, my router firmware has been upgraded for good measure, and I am now flying along at 1.5-2 megabit upload speeds. Fantastic!

This, I suspect, will provide the catalyst I’ve been needing to convert and upload the videos we shot in Thailand, so our family there can see them. I can also toss some more photos up on my Flickr account, enjoy far greater responsiveness when working remotely with terminal services at my office, and, of course, treat my peers to faster shares of Torrents if the need arises.

Now I can go to bed satisfied.

Tagged as Comcast, computer problems, epiphanies + Categorized as Computers