I got the same message, also from Xfinity. It does sort of make me wonder: If the FCC declared broadband to be 100/50, would I have 50mbps upload speeds this morning?
To me, this seems to be a clear positive outcome of the FCC's change: Xfinity had this capacity, the FCC raised their standards, and now all(?) Xfinity customers have increased upload speeds for zero additional cost. Seems like pretty much a best-case result of this metric increase.
Edit: Formerly 200/10, now 300/20. Email arrived 10am today.
I didn't get a message from Xfinity and a speed test showed no increase, but checking my plan on their website it said 300 mbps whereas it used to be 200 mbps. A modem reboot later and I'm getting 355 down/24 up on a speed test site, and 373 down/25 up on "what my ethernet card sees" test [1].
When the plan was 200 mbps I'd get around 240 down on speed tests. Xfinity has always been 10-20% faster for me than whatever the sticker on the plan says.
I'm not sure, unless they actually say it is, that this is in response to the FCC. In the almost 20 years I've had Xfinity I've had numerous speed bumps like this, much more often than the FCC bumps the speed in their definition. My plan went from 100 mbps to 200 mbps sometime in the last few months for example.
[1] Run netstat once a second to get the byte counts in and out per second, multiply by 8 to get bits.
What's different about this speed bump is that suddenly upload and download are closer together than was ever possible before. When we moved in a few years ago there were no options that provided >10 Mbps up but <=300 Mbps down. Now all of the sudden I'm on a 20 Mbps down plan with 300 up.
I'm skeptical that they just coincidentally matched the new minimum upload speed after years of insisting that residential plans could make do with 6.
In my experience, xfinity will often do speed increases and market them, but leave me on a "grandfathered" plan, which leaves me with the same speed as before, and usually some creeping "service fees". Eventually, as I get annoyed with the increasing service fees, I login and look at their new plans and end up enjoying a nice speed increase and a lower monthly bill.
Cox _just_ sent out a similarly-phrased email (Subject: Enjoy this gift of faster internet, <me>) saying they bumped my upload speed from 35->100mbps. I didn't expect that given the new minimum upload speed is 20mbps
Verizon bumped me to gigabit for no good reason a few years ago. I think I had only signed up for 50 initially. I clocked it at 800/800 but I'm not going to complain.
ISPs aren't statutorily required to meet the FCC's speed bare minimum. It is just that doing so lets them be counted as broadband and might qualify them for some incentives to deploy broadband to underserved areas.
Also I believe that an ISP is counted as broadband by the FCC if they have some plans available that meet the FCC's minimums. They do not have to meet them with all plans.
I mean, "we're chasing the easy carrot on the stick we coulda always given customers" instead of "we're avoiding being punished" isn't that much better a framing.
I actually just changed my modem today because I was using Comcast's modem/router combo and wanted to use my own... I'm still at about 50-60mbps. I guess I will contact them again.
I talked to them and they say I am still on the 50/20 plan... they replied saying I would need to pay more to get 100mpbs. I don't need it, so I won't.
The idea of usage caps was intensely controversial on sites like this a number of years back because it was mostly related to downloading "Linux distributions" from torrent sites. Today, with the download activity mostly driven by Netflix and other video streaming services, it's mostly untenable (within reason). In a market where so many households have an expectation of essentially unmetered video streaming I'm not sure there's much of a demand for 10-year-old bandwdith caps for $10-$20 less per month (which were probably more at the time even with the caps anyway). I don't get cable TV or landline and I pay less than I did 10 years ago.
ADDED: In a context, people develop expectations about what should be metered and what should be unmetered at least up to a point. You want a metered service where most people, at least in the US, have developed an expectation of an unmetered one. And I doubt you're asking for what actually passed for unmetered telecoms 20-30 years ago.
Data caps have always been a scam because they don't match the economics of providing service. Idle capacity goes to waste, and there is always idle capacity during off-peak hours (that's what off-peak hours are), so deterring usage during those times is wasteful and spiteful.
You could have on-peak data caps, but then you'd have people who e.g. watch an hour of streaming a day hitting them because they do so at the same time as everybody else does, and then the people clamoring about someone else torrenting "all day long" would find themselves hitting the cap, because their usage is during peak hours and what somebody else is doing after midnight or before 4PM is irrelevant.
The better solution is to simply sell connection tiers with different speeds. If you pay for 200Mbps, the network is designed to be able to provide you with 200Mbps during peak hours. Not that you have 200Mbps dedicated but rather that under typical actual aggregate load, there will be 200Mbps of capacity available for someone on your service tier to use. Meanwhile if you try to download something at 3AM, you might get 1000Mbps, because why not? Nobody else is using it. But someone who wants to pay less can buy less expensive slower service -- slower, but only during peak hours. If the person who pays for 50Mbps wants to download something at 3AM, they can get 1000Mbps too, but at 7PM they're getting 50Mbps instead of 200.
The actual reason cable ISPs like data caps is that it discourages people from using video steaming services (which eat up the cap even when used off-peak) rather than subscribing to cable TV (which does not).
capped data is ass, as someone who couldn't get uncapped until about a month ago when i moved, if someone tried to legislatively require data caps i would be on their ass trying to make them stop SO fast
>We've increased your internet speeds to show you our appreciation
I was wondering what I'd done to deserve it!