Router Interference?

My March 21 post about Comcast drew a surprising phone call from Comcast "Executive Offices" in Philadelphia. They had seen my post and were concerned about the fact that I may not be getting the service I should. They promised a follow-up phone call from a person who would review my account. I did get that phone call in the form of a message from a person who left her name and number. We finally connected after some telephone tag.

First I'd like to say that I was impressed and pleased to see Comcast take this step. Unfortunately, after reviewing the numbers (I had said in that post that I averaged around 5300 kbps download) I was told that my service level was where it should be and that Comcast could do nothing to improve it. In the course of the phone conversation I was told that my use of a router would have a negative impact on my experiencing their advertised download rate of 6000 kbps.

So yesterday I ran a little test. I ran a speed test 5 times with the router connected and 5 times without the router. The results surprised me. I had bought into the argument that the router would interfere with performance. It made sense to me that it would. The results of my test did not confirm this. In fact, the opposite was true.

My 5 download speeds with the router removed as measured by speedtest.net were 5250, 5231, 5324, 5255, and 5350. I thought these were amazingly consistent and averaged 5282 kbps, which is just about what I have always observed.

My 5 download speeds with the router in place as measured by speedtest.net were 5328, 5415, 5385, 5251, and 5449. These averaged 5366 kbps. As you can see, I did better with the router in place, defying all logic as I viewed it!

However, the improvement was so small that I think it can be discounted and I can conclude that, at least in my rather limited sample, the router does not interfere with performance. BTW, I ran all 10 speed tests back to back beginning at 11 AM on 3/27.

FYI, my 10 upload speeds as measured by the test were all at or within one or two of 365 kbps, with and without the router.

Now more than ever I am interested in trying to understand why I am not getting higher numbers for my download speed. I'd like to see numbers up close to the expected and advertised 6000 kbps.

The next thing I did was to leave a mesage for my new Comcast contact asking if I could swap my cable modem for the latest and greatest cable modem that Comcast provides. I expect an answer from them today. If I cannot, I may investigate buying my own modem after carefully researching the options.

I am very interested in YOUR experience with Comcast and the kind of speeds you are getting. Please let me know by clicking on "Contact the PC Doc" above right.