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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Comcast’s upload is so bad that they don’t even bother advertising a minimum upload bandwidth. Zero mention of upload capacity anywhere.

It could be 5Mb/s split over 200 households for all you know.

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They do publish numbers in a very hidden page: https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement

This page isn't accurate to their new upgraded infrastructure (mid-splits, DOCSIS 4.0) they've gradually been rolling out over the last year or so. Currently only available in certain areas and limited to their rented xFi modems, but it increases speeds to something like 50 down/50 up, 100~900 down/100 up, 1200~2000 down/200 up.

Edit: You can see these new speeds listed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/wiki/knowledgebase/...

I don’t trust Comcast and coaxial technology to actually deliver close to that if multiple people in the neighborhood are using. As far as I understand, Comcast splits a small amount of bandwidth between a ton of homes, and then applies QoS based on how much people pay. If you buy the 200Mbps up tier, then you might get 200Mbps up for a little bit as a “burst” speed while they take away from the rest of the neighborhood, but not continuous.

If it was comparable to fiber, then they would advertising the upload prominently like fiber ISPs advertise it.

Fiber is not immune to this problem either. You 48 10gbps homes might share a single 20gbps bonded uplink on a switch.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I want to add a quote that I found very informative

> If you're given the choice between a low bandwidth private connection, or a small share of a larger bandwidth connection, take the small share.

From http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html

You are not being serious right? That article is discussing the realities of 90s internet

oversubscription ratios for consumer isp's are typically in the hundreds.

and mostly that is fine because wifi is also involved which will domniate any availability or service quality metrics.

Theoretically, yes. Practically, the fact that no coaxial cable internet prominently advertises upload bandwidth leads me to believe there is far less upload bandwidth available than fiber networks.

Almost every network uses Statistical Multiplexing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_time-division_mult...

I hate that you have to use their modem. I already have a D4.0 modem, just let me use the new speeds.

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