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The Internet

Comcast Scrambled To Fix Mistake That Cut Some Users' Upload Speeds By 20% (arstechnica.com) 38

Posted by BeauHD from the journalists-holding-companies-accountable dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Comcast customers received an unwelcome surprise yesterday morning when their upload speeds were suddenly lowered from 20Mbps to 16Mbps. Comcast was raising download speeds on its "Extreme Pro" tier from 600Mbps to 800Mbps -- good news, to be sure -- but the plan's relatively paltry 20Mbps upload speeds received a simultaneous 20 percent cut. Customers affected by the change complained to Comcast, and two of them emailed Ars yesterday. When we passed these complaints on to Comcast public relations, a spokesperson initially told us that "there was no change to the upstream speed." But after we pointed out that customers were in fact getting reduced upload speeds, Comcast investigated further and discovered it made a mistake while rolling out download-speed upgrades for some of its plans.

"The customers who received the [download] speed increase last night should now be seeing the correct upload speeds in their usage meter," Comcast told Ars last night. "When we pushed the speed increase overnight, there was an issue with how the upload speeds were provisioned, which is why the meter and our internal tools that our care agents use were showing the upload speed of 16Mbps. Once you notified us, we quickly looked into it and everything should be correct now." The fix is rolling out automatically so customers don't have to do anything, Comcast said. "For a period of less than 24 hours, customers would have seen slightly slower upload speeds," Comcast told us. "This issue only impacted customers in our Central markets who received this [download] speed increase from 600Mbps to 800Mbps." Comcast told us that the problem affected users in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
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Comcast Scrambled To Fix Mistake That Cut Some Users' Upload Speeds By 20% More

Comcast Scrambled To Fix Mistake That Cut Some Users' Upload Speeds By 20%

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  • Why is it that.. (Score:3)

    by bazmail ( 764941 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @07:21PM (#61145530)
    Why is it that all their "mistakes" screw the customer. they never see to make a fuckup that benefits the customer. Strange that.
    • By "screw" you mean that when they upgraded peoples services to add 200mbps download speed at no extra cost to them, those same users upload speed lost 4mbps for less than a day...

      Perhaps you are the problem. For two decades the local cable ISP here (with a franchise agreement) has regularly upgraded everyone. The reason they have done so is because ~20 years ago the local cable co tried to play stupid games. They no longer have a franchise agreement. We are on a 3rd cable co in 20 years, the first left i

      • ...I've seen you cry about these problems, always looking to the federal government for a solution, because you have some sort of fucked up theory in your head that Nancy Pelosi or something likes you and wants to help you. None of them like you and none of them want to help you. They are Federal and its not their fucking job to police your fucking local ISP anyways. Its your job. You and your local leaders.

        When you brag about all those infrastructure upgrades, stop pretending there aren't millionaire executives sitting on their collective boards. The Federal government allowed monopolies to extort customers whenever they felt like it, along with pocketing millions in taxpayer funded infrastructure rollout funds over decades, while floating profits overseas to be cleansed of any tax burden. That is why people want to look to the Feds to correct this; they enable it.

        In other words, it is their fucking job.

        A

    • They do. But when a mistake benefits the customer, they don't complain.

    • Re:Why is it that.. (Score:5, Funny)

      by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @08:02PM (#61145664)

      Why is it that all their "mistakes" screw the customer. they never see to make a fuckup that benefits the customer. Strange that.

      Uh, that's probably because the average customer (read: 98% of them) obtaining a benefit by mistake, isn't advertising it?

      I know you're asking for a lot from citizen Morality here, but let's just say very few are running back into the store yelling, "HEY! You forgot to charge me for this $300 item on the bottom of my cart!"

      Just sayin'...

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Xenx ( 2211586 )
        I don't doubt a lot of people would keep their mouth shut, but I don't think it's as bad as you imply. I'm much more likely to point out a mistake if it's an expensive one. I may not be bothered to go back in if I accidentally got a $5 item for free, but I would definitely say something on a big ticket item.
        • Agreed, and I don't care if it's a small store or a big one, leaving without paying is theft. There is nothing in stores that I couldn't afford if I wanted it, so I don't see why I would ever walk out with something that's not rightfully mine.

    • wow cable one fucked and left analog ppv clear for an day

    • My experience with Comcast and the mistakes they cause is that it seems really easy for Comcast to make a mistake, but a customer seems to need to move Heaven and Earth to get Comcast to acknowledge and fix their mistake. This especially applies to Comcast's invoice errors.
  • Comcast's idea scrambling is like the Zootopia DMV sloth's idea of working faster.
  • Glad my provider stopped doing that a few years ago. But that is a 30:1 ratio, ouch, never had anything that bad. Looks like the Extreme PRO connection is a 40:1 ratio, lol even worse - now that is pro! Haha and their error made is 50:1, how bad can they go?
    • Well, it says "extreme" right there; did they ever promise what exactly would be "extreme" about the plan?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xenx ( 2211586 )
      Talking about the difference as a ratio is borderline useless. The amount of upload speed needed is not dependent upon the amount of download needed. The current environment changes the norm, but most people don't need massive upload speeds. That isn't to say upload speed isn't important, or that it isn't becoming more important. It's just that download speeds are still more important for almost everyone.
      • Eventually at some ratio, the acknowledgement data for what you are downloading for some protocols will saturate the upload thereby limiting download bandwidth. Sure that point of saturation is probably near 100000:1, but the closer you get the greater chance someone doing an upload in the household will start stalling other people's downloads within the household.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xenx ( 2211586 )
          Your point is a bit of a stretch, but you seem to also recognize that. But yes, anything doing an upload that isn't properly managed will swamp most consumer level services. I deal with it periodically with customers at work. It sucks for those affected, but it's still a minority of users. And then, most of them are only minimally impacted. It's almost always icloud or google drive backups from a phone.

          I'm all for fiber or similar with symmetric speeds. But, symmetrical speeds are just impractical over a

    • Glad my provider stopped doing that a few years ago. But that is a 30:1 ratio, ouch, never had anything that bad. Looks like the Extreme PRO connection is a 40:1 ratio, lol even worse - now that is pro! Haha and their error made is 50:1, how bad can they go?

      Don't ask. I'm at at a real-world ~35:1, and every time a sales drone mentions anything about speed or cloud, I tell them "Your downlink is fine. Your uplink sucks." I can deal fine with 35-40 m/bps download speed, but not the 1.25 m/bps upload. The latter makes cloud backups PAINFUL.
      So yes, I do expect that gap to widen.

  • Quit working there 12 years ago (Score:5, Informative)

    by dicobalt ( 1536225 ) on Wednesday March 10, 2021 @07:36PM (#61145590)
    and I see their internal tools are still garbage. They always had problems with provisioning hardware in just about every market. The internal tools never worked the way they were supposed to, you'd have to juggle different functions in each until the data would propagate correctly. Just about every CMTS would have about half the modems outside acceptable signal ranges. This is what happens when you aren't regulated.

  • Here's what happened:
    As part of a planned service upgrade (a 33% increase in download speed) for it's customer, a mistake slowed the upload speed by 20%.
    Customers noted the issue almost immediately, alerted AT&T and the media.
    Comcast Public Relations initially responded that there was no change to the upload speed as part of the upgrade (because there wasn't).
    The media pressed the issue, Comcast pushed the issue on to the technical group, who confirmed the issue and worked to rectify it.
    The day after th

    • The 'missing from advertising' much, much slower upload speed is the modern limiting factor. Comcast announced and improvement, while actually harming the choke point of the service. Comcast has been caught lying in the past about throttling and actual service speeds. The last time I checked they played games with QOS to speedtest websites to game those results.
      No wonder folks would respond as though they thought Comcast was sneaking in a downgrade. What's the trustworthiness perception of Comcast? How far

      • The 'missing from advertising' much, much slower upload speed is the modern limiting factor. Comcast announced and improvement, while actually harming the choke point of the service.

        FFS, the slowdown was detected almost immediately by the customers, was reported to Comcast, and was resolved within 24 hours.

        It was an ACCIDENT, and it was FIXED within a very reasonable timeframe.

        Your issues with imagined 'missing' upload data speeds in advertising don't enter into it.

        The fact that the PR department wasn't aware of the issue immediately when it was first detected is meaningless noise - they (ArsTrchnica) should have called technical support, who could have confirmed the issue in real time

  • and other cable co's have Up to 50Mbps upload. But comcast is stuck at 20 max

  • ...I've been a happy customer for going on two decades. Decent speeds, even for the slow tiers, and I have never had an issue with them not fixing problems.

    All in all, good service at a good price. Looks like they made a mistake here, and when they realized it they fixed it. What's the problem?

  • LAUGH WITH ME!

  • I'm getting about 25 up on Starlink and a friend is planning to switch away from Comcast specifically because they want to make him pay for 600 down to get 20 up. 30:1 is just too dramatic but they use it as a cudgel to get people to pay for expensive plans.

    I think he's at 12 down now and paying 30% more than me. It's slow enough that he has to wait for business work to complete and never touches the upper end of it's downlink capacity.

    This isn't a technology problem, it's a greed problem (coupled with m

    • It's a "charge what people will pay" problem ( for loose definition of the term "problem" ). Honestly I don't really see it as a problem; for 99% of the folks out there comcast is perfectly fine. It's unfortunate they can't offer a tier for those of us who'd like more upload at a reasonable price, but we're the niche and that's how it always is.

      So yes, "greed" but there's nothing wrong with that. That's how businesses operate, and as far as businesses go Comcast really does a great job delivering a produ

  • The reduction in speed was intended to be applied to all customers, not just 20%.

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