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Businesses Communications The Almighty Buck The Internet

Speed Report Finds T-Mobile and Xfinity Providing Fastest Mobile and Broadband Internet in US (geekwire.com) 39

Posted by msmash from the reality-check dept.
Mobile and fixed broadband internet speeds in the U.S. are improving, but not all carriers and providers are created equal and not all areas of the country are benefitting equally from fast speeds. From a report: Those are the findings according to a new market report from Speedtest by Ookla out of Seattle, which relied on data it captured from user-initiated tests during the first half of 2017. And for customers using T-Mobile for mobile internet and Comcast Xfinity for broadband, the results are especially good. Speedtest credits infrastructure investments and upgrades as well as increased affordability of higher tiered packages for the fact that fast broadband keeps getting faster. The average download speed in the U.S. over fixed broadband during Q1 to Q2 was 64.17 Mbps (ranking 15th in the world) and average upload speed was 22.79 Mbps (24th in the world). Xfinity is the top provider when it comes to Speed Score -- which incorporates low-end, median and top-end performance for both download and upload speed -- with a score of 69.58. Speedtest says that Comcast has been aggressively seeding the market over the past year with advanced modems capable of delivering a more consistent experience for customers. The cable provider has also been increasing the amount of DOCSIS 3.1 channels in order to deliver faster speeds, according to the report.
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Speed Report Finds T-Mobile and Xfinity Providing Fastest Mobile and Broadband Internet in US More

Speed Report Finds T-Mobile and Xfinity Providing Fastest Mobile and Broadband Internet in US

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  • Feels like an ad (Score:3)

    by evolutionary ( 933064 ) on Thursday September 07, 2017 @09:52AM (#55153255)
    Sorry, gotta ask, who is reviewing these articles before it gets posted. This feels a a lot like ads/spam on the site by a marketing/PR specialist. Whatever the original source, doesn't change an article that is in fact a promotion/ad.

    • A technician I know once told me that the ISPs are very good at detecting speed testing and that many testers do so from well known addresses.

      Even if the testers have gotten better at hiding how and where they are running the tests, I still seriously question the results. There are too many ways the ISPs can "fast lane" the testing while blaming "real world" experience on "factors beyond their control."

  • Speed's great, but (Score:4, Informative)

    by Lucas123 ( 935744 ) on Thursday September 07, 2017 @10:02AM (#55153319) Homepage
    When it comes to service, Comcast is at the bottom of the heap. I had them years ago, and I'd never go back.

    • I went from 400mb Comcast to 50mb AT&T due to Comcast having to come out every month due to line issues.

    • I first had Excite @home. They went bankrupt and sold it all to AT&T, which then sold it to Comcast. AT&T had the best customer service of the 3. Comcast had the fastest speeds and reliability, but was the most expensive and has the worst support on the planet. Expect to waste 1 to 6 hours on the phone trying to get something simple fixed. When something goes wrong with your connection you'll take weeks working with them to resolve it. I've on Cable One now. Great speeds most of the time. Usually

  • Comcast found as fastest by Speedtest... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    which it partially owns? Color me shocked!

    Honestly, I don't care that Comcast is fastest. I'd rather have a reliable service. I cancelled their service as they couldn't provide reliable service - kept having loss of signal.

  • Mean or median? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday September 07, 2017 @10:37AM (#55153545)
    The mean can be elevated by vastly improving speeds to a select few customers. e.g. If 10 people have service with an average (mean) speed of 10 Mbps, and you upgrade just one of them to 1 Gbps fiber, the mean speed of all 10 people will now be 109 Mbps, even though the mean speed of the slower 9 people is still 10 Mbps.

    The median can only be elevated by improving the service speed for more than half your customers.

    • The problem is median doesn't take into account capabilities because you can bet your bottom dollar that out of all your customers waaaay more than half are not interested in a faster speed, but rather a lower cost service.

      The art of lying with statistics.

  • ...but my Xfinity mobile connection is 88 Down and 30 Up. It's almost as fast as my home connection. (especially on the upload side). Generally Comcast's mobile division hasn't been bad. (Their call center still sucks) but so far it's been working great, with some minor hiccups at launch.

  • Gaming the system? (Score:3)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Thursday September 07, 2017 @10:45AM (#55153591) Journal
    Microprocessor manufacturers find ways to game the system when it comes to benchmark tests on their products, and it's entirely likely Comcast and T-Mobile are doing the same.

  • hmmm (Score:3)

    by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Thursday September 07, 2017 @10:48AM (#55153611)
    I wonder how selective this is, or how a few good connections can raise a low of mediocre ones. I have Comcast that claims 25Mbps down but I routinely get 8-12, and use a Arris surfboard 6190 3.0 with 32 downsream channel bonding. Precisely 8 down are actually offered and they do not support 3.1. Not only that but I had problems with my cable to my house and it took 5 years to get it fixed properly because they had to run a line under the street (during which time I got as low as 0.32 Mbps. I seriously lost track of the calls (over 50) and every time it was a 15 minute exercise to show it wasn't me being a dumbass. Only positive thing was of the 9 techs they sent out, each one kept saying "What the hell is going on here, this is so screwed up. I'll fix everything and do it right. Believe me." Every FKN time.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I wonder how selective this is, or how a few good connections can raise a low of mediocre ones. I have Comcast that claims 25Mbps down but I routinely get 8-12, and use a Arris surfboard 6190 3.0 with 32 downsream channel bonding. Precisely 8 down are actually offered and they do not support 3.1. Not only that but I had problems with my cable to my house and it took 5 years to get it fixed properly because they had to run a line under the street (during which time I got as low as 0.32 Mbps. I seriously lost track of the calls (over 50) and every time it was a 15 minute exercise to show it wasn't me being a dumbass. Only positive thing was of the 9 techs they sent out, each one kept saying "What the hell is going on here, this is so screwed up. I'll fix everything and do it right. Believe me." Every FKN time.

      Your particular modem has a known chipset issue that causes lag spikes: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/11/intel_puma_6_arris/. You should get another modem that doesn't have the Puma 6 chipset.

      • That's mostly a latency issue, not the reason my comcast connection sucks in download and upload speeds. Havent had any connectivity issues with it either. Had the same issues on multiple modems.

  • Tech site and terminology (Score:5, Informative)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Thursday September 07, 2017 @11:07AM (#55153751) Homepage

    I can understand regular media using the term "fast" to classify broadband characteristics, but as a tech site can't we do better? The term "speed" doesn't really make sense, especially when applied to bandwidth ( as is the case here ).

    Using the same definition, a minivan full of thumb drives is "fast" in that it can deliver gigabytes of bandwidth, but I don't know that anyone would actually want to use such a connection.

    An internet connection can be measured by 3 main metrics; latency, bandwidth and reliability ( well, and media if you want to get technical ). Perhaps we could start using that here?

  • Comcast cheats (Score:5, Interesting)

    by darthyoshiboy ( 1086569 ) * on Thursday September 07, 2017 @12:36PM (#55154263)
    I can hit a Speedtest.net server even when my general internet is dead with Comcast. They've obviously got an OOB route for Speedtest.net that allows that traffic to flow regardless of the actual status of the network. It also somehow always manages to get my full allotment of bandwidth even when I have several streaming video services running with Steam downloads which should be taking a chunk out of what can be used to hit Speedtest.net.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • It's plenty good. 20Mbps upload is pretty good. Not great, but most people really don't need more than that.

  • combination of [true] speed or reliability. As I told the shill at my door once, I would switch to Verizon FiOS in a heartbeat if it became available. Now if Comcast were the only option (in the future) I would consider dropping an internet connection.

    The speed tests I have run contradict those in the summary. Tests run at 3am on a weekday do not make Comcast the winner.

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