Last night I saw a Comcast commercials on TV advertising “Comcast Speedboost”. This was the first time that I saw or heard of this addition to the Comcast internet service. Just now I remember the commercial and decided to run a broadband speed test to see if my download speeds had increased at all.

Wow! How does a 6x download speed increase sound? That is exactly what I saw!

Let me back up a bit. Around the holidays, I decided that I had enough of the slow speed and line problems I was seeing with my AT&T DSL service. So I switched to the Comcast triple play (bye bye AT&T…). My biggest concern with the triple play was the need to do anything special with the phone service. I couldn’t change the physical phones in the house due to the elderly members of our household…it would be a tad to difficult for them to adapt to a change in how something as basic as how the phone works. Luckily, the latest generation of cable modems provides the dial tone for the IP Phone Service. You run a phone line from the cable modem to your closest phone jack and your done. So I didn’t have to change anything with the phones inside the house (except remove the line filters that are required when you have DSL). Even better, the cable modem has a built in battery that can provide you 12 hours of phone access should you loose power (or more if you buy and install the second battery option).

More importantly (for me at least) was the increased bandwidth for internet access. My downloads went from 600K/sec on my old AT&T DSL line (my speed kept degrading since AT&T bought SBC) to about 3000K/sec (3mb/sec). The last time I ran a speed test I had about 3.2mb/sec. Just now when I ran another speed test using the same service and test site, I saw 20mb/sec! A 6x increase in download speed!

Now my upload speed hasn’t increased at all. Which, for most people isn’t much of a problem since most of what they do online is download (reading web pages, downloading email, etc.). It would be nice if I could get a bit faster speed, but only due to my photography and needing to upload large images to my website.

All in all, I’m very happy with the this new increase in service. If you have Comcast, you might want to run a speed test yourself (or just watch how fast web pages load now).

(Oh, and the HD television broadcasts that we now get on our expanded Cable…Wow! Now I can see the true quality behind my HDTV.)