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The article I linked is a PR piece. Don’t get technical details from it. I linked to it just to show how they’re proud of their bullshit. Here’s some better in

The article I linked is a PR piece. Don’t get technical details from it. I linked to it just to show how they’re proud of their bullshit. Here’s some better info: https://www.dslreports.com/faq/14520 https://www.dslreports.com/faq/14520 Relevant quote: “PowerBoost provides bursts for the first 20 MB downloading and the first 10 MB uploading of a file respectively on select Comcast High-Speed Internet services.” Surely you admit that there is no sensible technical reason for a magic 20MB per-file limit on this.

rayiner 7y ago
I can think of one important technical reason: you can do a magic per-file limit without having global knowledge about network conditions. Imagine you're an edge router or switch. It's easy to do rate limiting--you just use a token bucket to drop packets above the rate the user pays for. It's also easy to just push packets into the core network as fast as you can, and let congestion control deeper in the network even things out. Neither of those gets you the behavior you want, which is that even when the relevant route is at capacity, a user who starts a new connection will temporarily get a disproportionate share of the capacity compared to users who are doing downloading or streaming. A per-connection boost with a set limit approximates that behavior. Send packets as fast as you can for the first 20MB, then rate limit to the purchased bandwidth. By contrast, how do you implement your proposal? You could dynamically allow each connection to pump packets as fast as it can unless the network was congested, in which case you transition to allowing each user a burst. But you don't really know the network is congested, especially at the edge, and particularly at layer 2, where this rate-limiting tends to happen.
- mikeash 7y ago
  Ok, so this is a highly intelligent and definitely user centric improvement to their network, and the only reason nobody else does it is because Comcast patented it. And the fact that the limit matches the amount of data used by popular speed testing services at the time is a total coincidence. Cool, hooray for Comcast! I sure wish Verizon would take some lessons from them!
  - rayiner 7y ago
    It would be one thing if it just helped on speed tests. But it also produced real-world benefits for things like web page downloads, MP3 downloads, PDF downloads, etc. It was an easy to implement hack that delivered real benefits for users. I don't see how it warrants so much sarcasm. Again, I think this goes back to forgetting that networks involve real systems engineering. This is real infrastructure--some guy stringing wires on a poll or stuffing Ethernet switches onto a rack. If you're approaching it from the mindset that it's some abstraction where you can just turn a dial and give everyone a pony, yeah, I understand your position.
    - mikeash 7y ago
      You apparently didn’t know about this thing before now, but you’re sure it helped with all this stuff? Why, because Comcast said so? It warrants sarcasm because it was transparently obvious bullshit when it was announced, Comcast did some PR to spin it, and you’re falling for their PR hook, line, and sinker. If this really was such a great thing for users then it would be commonplace, instead of being used by a single company that also happens to be one of the most hated companies in the country (and justifiably so). You can’t just turn a dial and give everyone a pony, yet somehow non-Comcast providers manage to give better service. My FiOS connection is rock solid and delivers what it says with no speed testing games. Do you think I should ask Verizon to implement PowerBoost?
      - rayiner 7y ago
        > You apparently didn’t know about this thing before now, but you’re sure it helped with all this stuff? Why, because Comcast said so? No, because the benefits of getting a boost above rated speed for the first 20MB is obvious, as compared to giving everyone slightly higher speeds all the time. > It warrants sarcasm because it was transparently obvious bullshit when it was announced, Comcast did some PR to spin it, and you’re falling for their PR hook, line, and sinker. You haven’t explained why it doesn’t help real world use cases, or given me a technical explanation for how your proposed alternative could be implemented. > If this really was such a great thing for users then it would be commonplace instead of being used by a single company that also happens to be one of the most hated companies in the country (and justifiably so). “Comcast sucks therefore this must be bad” isn’t a valid argument. I spent an entire year on 4G LTE to avoid having to deal with Comcast’s customer service in Wilmington. That has nothing to do with the technical merits of PowerBoost. > You can’t just turn a dial and give everyone a pony, yet somehow non-Comcast providers manage to give better service. My FiOS connection is rock solid and delivers what it says with no speed testing games. Do you think I should ask Verizon to implement PowerBoost? FiOS has an underutilized network. For its history, it has struggled to get 30% uptake rate within its footprint. My apartment in Baltimore had FiOS and Comcast. I was the only one on my entire floor to ever subscribe to FiOS since the building was built 4-5 years before. I found out because apparently the ONT was never set up correctly. That’s great for customer experience, not so great for making money. And the making money part is important. Google pulled out of Fiber because it couldn’t make money. Verizon halted FiOS expansion. Comcast, as awful as it’s customer service might be, continues to make money and upgrade its network in an incremental way. Last time I had Comcast was probably 2007, in Atlanta. It was 20 Mbps with PowerBoost. Today they offer gigabit in my neighborhood. (I subscribe to Comcast’s fiber service, so I don’t use it, but many people choose it over FiOS.) Very few technology products have improved so much over that time period. Some, like OS X, have gotten worse. And that improvement didn’t happen by magic. You don’t just swap in a new CPU and double the speed. You pay linemen to go out and string fiber to split nodes. You pay them to take out amplifiers. You pay guys to swap gigabit switches for 10G switches and 10G switches for 100G switches. All that takes gobs of money. Comcast’s annual capex is hundreds of dollars a per per subscriber. Is PowerBoost a trick that wouldn’t be necessary if you just dramatically over-provisioned the network? Sure. Is it nothing more than some PR stunt? Only if it doesn’t work technically, and you’ve provided no evidence of that.

rayiner 7y ago

I can think of one important technical reason: you can do a magic per-file limit without having global knowledge about network conditions. Imagine you're an edge router or switch. It's easy to do rate limiting--you just use a token bucket to drop packets above the rate the user pays for. It's also easy to just push packets into the core network as fast as you can, and let congestion control deeper in the network even things out. Neither of those gets you the behavior you want, which is that even when the relevant route is at capacity, a user who starts a new connection will temporarily get a disproportionate share of the capacity compared to users who are doing downloading or streaming. A per-connection boost with a set limit approximates that behavior. Send packets as fast as you can for the first 20MB, then rate limit to the purchased bandwidth. By contrast, how do you implement your proposal? You could dynamically allow each connection to pump packets as fast as it can unless the network was congested, in which case you transition to allowing each user a burst. But you don't really know the network is congested, especially at the edge, and particularly at layer 2, where this rate-limiting tends to happen.

mikeash 7y ago
Ok, so this is a highly intelligent and definitely user centric improvement to their network, and the only reason nobody else does it is because Comcast patented it. And the fact that the limit matches the amount of data used by popular speed testing services at the time is a total coincidence. Cool, hooray for Comcast! I sure wish Verizon would take some lessons from them!
- rayiner 7y ago
  It would be one thing if it just helped on speed tests. But it also produced real-world benefits for things like web page downloads, MP3 downloads, PDF downloads, etc. It was an easy to implement hack that delivered real benefits for users. I don't see how it warrants so much sarcasm. Again, I think this goes back to forgetting that networks involve real systems engineering. This is real infrastructure--some guy stringing wires on a poll or stuffing Ethernet switches onto a rack. If you're approaching it from the mindset that it's some abstraction where you can just turn a dial and give everyone a pony, yeah, I understand your position.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    You apparently didn’t know about this thing before now, but you’re sure it helped with all this stuff? Why, because Comcast said so? It warrants sarcasm because it was transparently obvious bullshit when it was announced, Comcast did some PR to spin it, and you’re falling for their PR hook, line, and sinker. If this really was such a great thing for users then it would be commonplace, instead of being used by a single company that also happens to be one of the most hated companies in the country (and justifiably so). You can’t just turn a dial and give everyone a pony, yet somehow non-Comcast providers manage to give better service. My FiOS connection is rock solid and delivers what it says with no speed testing games. Do you think I should ask Verizon to implement PowerBoost?
    - rayiner 7y ago
      > You apparently didn’t know about this thing before now, but you’re sure it helped with all this stuff? Why, because Comcast said so? No, because the benefits of getting a boost above rated speed for the first 20MB is obvious, as compared to giving everyone slightly higher speeds all the time. > It warrants sarcasm because it was transparently obvious bullshit when it was announced, Comcast did some PR to spin it, and you’re falling for their PR hook, line, and sinker. You haven’t explained why it doesn’t help real world use cases, or given me a technical explanation for how your proposed alternative could be implemented. > If this really was such a great thing for users then it would be commonplace instead of being used by a single company that also happens to be one of the most hated companies in the country (and justifiably so). “Comcast sucks therefore this must be bad” isn’t a valid argument. I spent an entire year on 4G LTE to avoid having to deal with Comcast’s customer service in Wilmington. That has nothing to do with the technical merits of PowerBoost. > You can’t just turn a dial and give everyone a pony, yet somehow non-Comcast providers manage to give better service. My FiOS connection is rock solid and delivers what it says with no speed testing games. Do you think I should ask Verizon to implement PowerBoost? FiOS has an underutilized network. For its history, it has struggled to get 30% uptake rate within its footprint. My apartment in Baltimore had FiOS and Comcast. I was the only one on my entire floor to ever subscribe to FiOS since the building was built 4-5 years before. I found out because apparently the ONT was never set up correctly. That’s great for customer experience, not so great for making money. And the making money part is important. Google pulled out of Fiber because it couldn’t make money. Verizon halted FiOS expansion. Comcast, as awful as it’s customer service might be, continues to make money and upgrade its network in an incremental way. Last time I had Comcast was probably 2007, in Atlanta. It was 20 Mbps with PowerBoost. Today they offer gigabit in my neighborhood. (I subscribe to Comcast’s fiber service, so I don’t use it, but many people choose it over FiOS.) Very few technology products have improved so much over that time period. Some, like OS X, have gotten worse. And that improvement didn’t happen by magic. You don’t just swap in a new CPU and double the speed. You pay linemen to go out and string fiber to split nodes. You pay them to take out amplifiers. You pay guys to swap gigabit switches for 10G switches and 10G switches for 100G switches. All that takes gobs of money. Comcast’s annual capex is hundreds of dollars a per per subscriber. Is PowerBoost a trick that wouldn’t be necessary if you just dramatically over-provisioned the network? Sure. Is it nothing more than some PR stunt? Only if it doesn’t work technically, and you’ve provided no evidence of that.