[ikeboy]

>All Internet traffic has more download than upload (for the end-consumer). This is literally why ISPs offer faster download speeds in end-consumer packages than upload speeds - they know that consumers will need to download more than they upload.

Yes, but they also have commercial customers that send out lots of data. Netflix is an outlier all by itself, outweighing the connection.

[msandford]

> Yes, but they also have commercial customers that send out lots of data.

Who?

From what I can tell even their commercial offerings are heavily asymmetric to downloading: http://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet/plans...

Download / Upload (in Mbps)

16 / 3

50 / 10

75 / 15

100 / 20

150 / 20

So who are these companies that use Comcast to send a lot?

[wmf]

That's business cable, but Comcast also has business fiber that's symmetric up to 10 Gbps. http://business.comcast.com/ethernet/products/dedicated-inte...

[ikeboy]

That's not for businesses running websites, that's for using the internet in a business. http://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet/web-h... is relevant, although it doesn't give speeds. But presumably anyone who buys that is sending more data out of comcast than they are receiving.

And as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'd like to see a chart of data in and out excluding Netflix and large companies. If the problem only affects them or other large companies (like Youtube, Apple, Microsoft, etc, which all pay for direct connections), but not small websites, then I think that would support my argument.

[msandford]

The plans listed on that page are:

Storage / Transfer / Price

10MB / 100MB / Free

300GB / Unlimited / $20

400GB / Unlimited / $40

500GB / Unlimited / $80

You must realize that these are absolutely NOT true commercial offerings. They don't even list what your commit bandwidth is!

Also you can't run your own applications there! Do you really think Netflix runs off of a shared server like this? They're a HUGE AWS customer running many thousands of VMs. How do you access control things, how do you deploy your code, how do you do basically ANYTHING with this offering from Comcast? I suspect that you don't.

Here are some legitimate commercial offerings: http://www.hostgator.com/dedicated

If you notice, they have a page dedicated to their network. What familiar names do we find on this page? Cogent and Level3! http://www.hostgator.com/network

Notice that there is no mention ANYWHERE of ANY COMPANY that might even a LITTLE BIT be considered a consumer ISP. Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cox, etc, none of them are mentioned.

[ikeboy]

>Notice that there is no mention ANYWHERE of ANY COMPANY that might even a LITTLE BIT be considered a consumer ISP. Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cox, etc, none of them are mentioned.

From the page:

>We utilize a wide array of network carriers including Level 3, nLayer, Comcast, Cogent Communications, and Hurricane Electric.

Take that back?

[msandford]

You've got me dead to rights on that one, of course, so I have no problems taking it back. I'm not going to change the above comment where I misspoke because I did write that, and I did think it was correct at the time.

I think it is telling, however, that Comcast's logo isn't anywhere on the bottom of the page with all their partner logos. And I think it is also telling that it's only Comcast and not all the consumer ISPs.