Anyone using Blast Plus xfinity in Woods Hole? Getting advertised speed? (Falmouth: house, neighborhoods)

[parentologist]

Supposed to be 105. Getting 50 -75 Mbps. Online chat rep says that speed here is limited to 50 Mbps, so why am I paying for 105? I think he's either misinformed, or deliberately misrepresenting the situation. Anyone out there know what the story is with Comcast Xfinity Blast Plus internet in Woods Hole?

[wolfgang239]

Not in Woods Hole, but that is the "theoretical maximum" as stated in their terms of service. Kinda BS if you ask me.

[GeoffD]

I'm a cable modem vendor to Comcast. I have a few million cable modems in their network. My summer house is in South Dartmouth. The Falmouth infrastructure and the infrastructure between me and the Fairhaven head end should be identical. I just ran a SpeedTest on a test cable modem in my house that has the rate limiters removed. This is at 9:30am when nobody is on the network. 119.2 down, 24.35 up. If I wanted to hook up Ethernet instead of doing this over WiFi, it would be a bit faster. If I ran the same test when the whole world is streaming Netflix and Hulu, I'd see results similar to yours or perhaps a bit worse. I'm in the business and good internet connectivity is my lifeblood. As long as I'm seeing at least 10 megabit/sec down, nothing I do acts any differently. I realize Comcast is the root of all evil but their data network is very good and they monitor it carefully to do node splits in neighborhoods that are seeing a lot of network congestion. Falmouth has a big summer population. It was pouring rain all day. People were streaming video instead of hanging outside. 50 megabit down is like complaining that it takes you 32 minutes to get to Wareham from Woods Hole instead if 28. It doesn't impact your life at all. If it were 2 hours all the time like in a Sunday afternoon traffic jam, by all means complain and write to your state rep to fix the Bourne Bridge mess.

Something between 5 and 10 years from now, Comcast is going to migrate their video product to 100% streaming video. Their data network will shift over to DOCSIS 3.1. They will have a gigabit speed tier. At busy times like a rainy Saturday, it might slow down to 100 megabit from the network congestion. 4K streaming video is 20 to 40 gigabit/sec so there is nothing you can do in your house that will be impacted.

If you want horror stories, talk to somebody held hostage to some of the other cable operators. Trust me, Comcast is the best of the lot. They are extremely good about providing uniform quality across their huge footprint. None of us like paying that huge cable bill every month and, like any huge company, there are sometimes customer service disasters. My ***** is their HD video product. I have a nice plasma panel and refuse to watch the jillions of crap SD channels they offer. It's going to be at least 5 years and likely closer to 10 before they catch up. Their internet and phone products are really good and internet is going to get better soon.