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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
>We've increased your internet speeds to show you our appreciation
I was wondering what I'd done to deserve it!