If your Comcast connection seems to be running slower than in

[canoeist52]

the past. Here's a link as to the possibe explanation.

Bandwidth Overload

“Thanks in large measure to social-networking sites, Web sites like YouTube and other diversions nonexistent in the 1990s, global bandwidth usage has grown by an average of 50% since 2002. It’s on pace to double every 1.4 years, according to TeleGeography, a research firm in Washington, D.C. Growing online use by businesses and a wider availability of high-speed Internet services are also fueling demand.

Over the past decade, scant new capacity was added due to the glut and a battered industry. Though many older cables are still operative, all the activity has rendered networks insufficient, requiring newer ones capable of handling traffic measured in terabits, or one trillion bits, per second instead of much smaller megabits a second.”

http://www.freepress.net/news/30245

Prices go up we get less.

[thunder rising]

1. correction: that should read, "the gluttony of a greedy industry"

[Deja Q]

2. Cable broadband is a joke... but even with DSL, I've noted slowness.

And unlike cable, DSL lines are not shared amongst a bunch of people. I could hog up my connection and my DSL-using neighbor wouldn't know the difference.

If both of us used Cable, and I downloaded two service packs and played an online game, the neighbor - along with everyone else attached to the segment, would see a huge drop in speed.

For that and other reasons, many who pitch cable broadband owe a big apology for misadvertising. I mean, my DSL is not turtle-slow...

Yeah, the more people who use the internet will eventually slow down both the most popular web site servers AND the routers keeping peoples' data moving back and forth, but to blame Facebook as the sole problem - get real.

[Norrin Radd]

3. It would be nice to have what they have in Japan:

Japan's Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/28/AR2007082801990.html

[flashl]

4. U.S. problem is greed and failure to maintain infrastructure. nt

[Life Long Dem]

5. Verizon also.

They are talking about changing the speed of Megabits per second to Gigabits per second with FIOS.

http://internetservicedeals.com/blog/40/verizon-fios-internet/