Speed is the name of the game for Internet service providers. Competitors are continually raising the stakes by advertising higher and higher connection speeds.
Comcast generally provides 6 Mbps as their regular speed. (Don’t worry about how fast this really is for purposes of this story.) But, in the past year or two, they has been promoting “PowerBoost” which is an “extra burst of speed — up to 12 Mbps — when downloading large files.” On their website, Comcast suggests some great uses for PowerBoost:
Music, videos, online games – whenever you’re downloading something big, PowerBoost kicks right in. Imagine you’re downloading a 10 MB file, like three MP3 songs. It would take about 53 seconds with a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection. Compare that to 6.6 seconds with Comcast High-Speed Internet with PowerBoost.
Do you really get twice the regular speed with PowerBoost? Yes and no. To read their advertising, one would think that whenever you download a large file, you get the benefit of PowerBoost so the file will be delivered in half the time. Not so fast says our trusty mouse, because of a little-noticed disclosure in their footnote:
*MOUSE PRINT:
“PowerBoost provides a brief burst of download speed above the customer’s provisioned download speed for the first 10MB of a file. It then reverts to the provisioned speed for the remainder of the download.”Â
Who knew that PowerBoost only lasts for approximately seven seconds?
For example, if you want to download the trial version of Microsoft’s game “Halo”, which is 134 megs, only the first 10 megs will be delivered to you at the advertised “double speed”, and the remaining 124 megs will be at regular speed.
While smaller “large” files will indeed benefit from SpeedBoost, for most really large downloads, the promise of SpeedBoost is a speed bust. And that’s not Comcastic.
