While researching something else I was curious about, ran across this article. Seems like internet companies want you to take it for granted you are getting the internet speeds you are paying for, but then are you?
A comcast customer created a bot, to monitor his computer and anytime it went way below his advertised speed he was supposed to have, it sent a tweet to comcast telling them their speeds are bull shit. They advertise it and you pay for it, but you don't necessarily get that speed. His bot monitors his internet speed from comcast every hour of the day, to make sure he is getting what he was paying for.
Most Comcast customers know that the speeds you pay for with the company are a very, very loose speed promise. But most Comcast customers haven't taken their complaints to the next level like Redditor AlekseyP has.
Aleksev used some rudimentary coding knowledge to rig up a program on their Raspberry Pi. It runs an hourly speed check. If the speeds go way below the advertised level (150 megabytes per second download, 10 mbps upload), it sends a tweet to Comcast. The threshhold was set at anything below 50 mbps. The bot itself has had to send Comcast a message 16 times for low speeds since it was set up in October, including marking times speeds crawled below 2 mbps on New Years Eve.
"Comcast has noticed and every time I tweet they will reply asking for my account number and address...usually hours after the speeds have returned to normal values," AleksevP wrote. "I have chosen not to provide them my account or address because I do not want to singled out as a customer; all their customers deserve the speeds they advertise, not just the ones who are able to call them out on their BS."
Seems like Comcast isn’t really giving everyone the speeds they are paying for. They count on people not realizing it.