I’ve been having random, extended periods of slowness on my (metro detroit) Comcast internet since last weekend. it’ll be fine for a bit, then I’ll get a length of time where sites will take forever to load, and downloads will be glacial at best.
Yes, regularly for the past several years.
Yes, for the last six months or so.
I use to notice frequent slowdowns every couple of weeks, but then I figured out that my wireless dongle wasn’t set at an appropriate angle. It must have been picking up interference from my desktop case, or blocked by a wall or something. Ever since I changed it’s position I haven’t noticed any slowdowns.
Not here.
But Comcast covers a LOT of area, so I’m not sure the answers you get here are really a good indicator either way. You’re better off asking people specific to your region.
Yes, for the last couple of weeks, but I’m not sure whether I’m imagining it. Boston area.
I get slow loading pages or pages that occasionally don’t load at all, and the problem seems to be lost packets. Considering that Comcast has already been caught intentionally faking connection resets in order to reduce traffic I suspect that the packet loss is intentional, which really pisses me off.
Unfortunately, I live in an area where my choice is Comcast or nobody. There used to be another ISP (which we had) but Comcast bought them out. If another ISP would spring up in my area I’d switch in a heartbeat.
I’ve had these symptoms for quite some time, though, so it’s not like the OP’s situation where it has only just recently started.
There’s also a bottleneck on the system which I’ve managed to pin down to the connection between the last node on Comcast’s internal network and the first AT&T node that it connects to, which appears to be Comcast’s main path out to the internet as a whole (at least in my area). When I start getting delays on everything and not just the packet loss nonsense, I can usually trace it to this bottleneck.
My company has had some issues where Comcast customers suddenly can’t log into our website. We’ve tracked it down to the “smart packet detection” on the modems that they are rolling out. Every customer that has called us with this issue has either just switched to Comcast from a different ISP or they recently (within the last couple of months) had a visit from Comcast where their cable modem was replaced. The modem that has given us the most trouble is the SMC8014 (although a couple of other models have the same “feature”)
Now that we’ve tracked it down, we’ve been able to have the users contact Comcast and ask that the smart packet detection be turned off. I am not confident that it won’t get turned back on though.
Anyway, you might try having them turn that off to see if it fixes the slow-downs you are seeing.
For the last few weeks I have had short periods of outages - several times a day. I have not yet determined if it is my cable modem or Comcast. Since I hate Comcast with a passion, I will blame them until I am sure.
It’s almost certainly local.
I’ve had Comcast for about two years now. Chicagoland. While I can fault them for a bunch of other things, their internet service has been damn near flawless. Hell, I even think it got a bit faster for me in 2011.
/let’s not talk about the ridiculous price they charge for cable
//or the terrible, terrible POS cable box they make me use
///or how much they keep trying to get me to pay for a DVR
I’m having trouble reading your post. Type really fast so it will look normal speed to the rest of us.
I’m in the same area as you, jz78817, and yes. I’ve had Comcast internet for about 5 years now, and am pretty used to consistent bandwidth over long periods. But over the last week or so, it’s been noticeably spotty and pokey, every so often. It seems to have gone back to normal now, but when this happens, I usually pull the battery from my modem to hard reboot it. This usually seems to do the trick for some reason. 
I’m having problems (Boston area FWIW) however, my computer is a dinosur!
You may also want to check at Broadband Reports (dot) Com
If you go into their forums they have people who actually work for the cable and DSL internet providers and they can give you insight if something is off in your area
I’ve had comcast broadband for 5-6 years now in 2 different apartments.
Hellz yes, there are periods of slowness. Not often, but they happen a couple of times a year, and almost always on a weekend. I’m not into streaming on-line games to know if they coincide with major game releases or anything like that. Otherwise I simply suspect Comcast of incompetence in doing system upgrades and hardware changes as being the more likely cause.
And not very coincidentally, one just started about 10 minutes ago.
Not getting images, not being able to connect to pages, etc.
Trying to run www.speedtest.net and it has been trying to connect for the upload test for several minutes.
1.72 download, 0.04 upload are the results that finally came back.
Last week when I ran it, the down speeds were over 22.
Yes, for the last few days, it will cut out for no apparent reason for 5-10 minutes at a time. I’m in South Jersey though. I wouldn’t assume the issues are related.