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Time Warner Cable customers in parts of the northeast have noticed their broadband speeds increased slightly over the last several days.
Stop the Cap! reader Howard Goldberg was among those who noticed Time Warner’s broadband performance in upstate New York has improved, at least for upper tiers.
“Over the past 24 hours, Speedtest.net (against the TWC site in Syracuse, and many others) is reporting 60-62Mbps down and 6.0-6.2Mbps up, an increase from 55/5.5Mbps we have had over the past few years,” Goldberg notes. He is subscribed to Time Warner Cable Ultimate, marketed in upstate New York as 50/5Mbps service.
We noticed the same thing late last week here in Rochester as speed test results now consistently top 60Mbps when using a Time Warner Cable-based server. The upstream speed increase was less visible, but still measurable.
Goldberg also reports ping times have dropped from the 18-22ms range to 13-15ms when using the Syracuse, N.Y. test site, which could also point to a more responsive Internet connection overall.
Cable companies occasionally deliver speeds that are actually faster than what they sell, known as overprovisioning, to improve customer satisfaction and boost their performance in the Federal Communications Commission’s ongoing national speed test program, designed to verify if providers are actually providing the speeds they are marketing to customers.
Are Time Warner customers in other areas seeing similar results? Report your findings in the comment section.
This reminds me how AT&T and TWC have squandered opportunities to avoid customer dissatisfaction by provisioning the modems at *exactly* the contracted speed… After protocol overhead and transmission errors, this results in it being impossible to deliver the “up to” speed marketing seem to be promising. They should always “over provision” the equipment enough, if necessary, to provide the advertised speed. The customer isn’t satisfied with a tiny clause in the fine print that says the ISP will just configure the modem at exact speed and then hope for the best. It’s the experience which they have that counts. When… Read more »
For what it’s worth, I’ve had Time Warner’s 300mbps service for about a year, and it has consistently given me speeds of around 322mbps, which I can’t complain about.
Our low end Comcast “Performance Starter” is rated 6/1 and we speed test regularly at 7.1/1.3, so looks about 20% overprovisioning. Can’t complain, except for the fact that after our year promo is up our price will jump from $30 – $50/month, which is no bargain no matter how you slice it. We just refuse to pay more than $50/mo for internet and Comcast is the only selection available in our area.
I realize we don’t have TWC, but thought it an interesting comparison for the article.
While we’ve been focused on talking about your modem’s effective throughput from the house to the ISP’s Central Office, we also need to consider the bottleneck caused by the ISP under-provisioning its connection to the rest of the Internet. Your modem uplink just might be faster than the ISP is willing/capable of carrying on through the rest of the network. ISPs know the IP addresses of most of the “Internet speed check” sites. To conceal their bottleneck, they literally whitelist these sites so that the connection isn’t throttled. In other words, they’ll throttle their other customers while you’re running a… Read more »
TWC increased their overprovisioning once again.
They increased it from 15% to 25%.
So 30/5 tier which had been running at 34.5/5.75 is now 37.5/6.25. And 50/5 tier which had been 57.5/5.75 is now 62.5/6.25.
Nice little increase.
Sidney, NY (and Bainbridge, NY) is seeing this too. 64512000 bps/6451200 bps (~61.52mbps/~6.15mbps)
Downstream and upstream officially (respectfully): max tx rate, bps = 64512000, max tx rate, bps = 6451200