As large social media platforms like Reddit grow subject to ever increasing scrutiny over the content posted by their users, it is becoming increasingly common for these platforms to remove entire communities over concerns about the content being shared and discussed there.

Last week, Reddit struck down /r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap, a popular subreddit for buying and selling digital licenses to Microsoft products. The move coincided with the banning of a similar subreddit /r/MicrosoftServices and a number of the largest sellers on both subreddits.

Officially, the reason for the ban as declared by Reddit, is because the subreddits were being used for spam.

At first glance, this explanation might hold up under a strict interpretation of Reddit policies, since these subreddits frequently contained duplicates of the same post in order to keep the fresh and active sellers on the top of the listings.

However, the timing of the concurrent bans, after the subreddit operated undisturbed for nearly a decade, and conveniently leading up to Reddit’s anticipated stock IPO, leads some displaced community members to conclude that the move is really about distancing the platform from the activity on the subreddit, in order to avoid attracting unwanted attention from Microsoft, whose software’s EULA does not typically authorize this type of resale. The discounted prices offered by sellers on /r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap likely also cut into Microsoft’s retail software business.

Sellers, and even operators of these subreddits, were unaware of the bans and unable to prepare for their sudden impact. One former /r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap moderator, going by the Reddit username s5ean, had been selling product keys on the subreddit for almost a decade, accumulating a large base of both repeat and new customers. His livelihood was suddenly shut down on Reddit’s whim, leaving him scrambling to reconnect with past customers as his own Reddit accounts were being shut down as well.

S5ean, not deterred, created a Discord community, which he’s dubbed The New Microsoft Software Swap, where he hopes to gather together what’s left of his customer base as he figures out how to move forward from here. He plans to keep on selling his discounted licenses for Microsoft software as he works on finding new ways to reach customers.

If you are a displaced user from the /r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap community who is looking to get in touch with S5ean, his Discord can be found here: https://discord.gg/vUa8ngTGpy

Seems like I just wrote one of these articles, doesn’t it? It was only back in September 2021 when my Gigabit Pro connection received an upgrade from 2Gbps to 3Gbps, now, Comcast has officially bumped all Gigabit Pro customers up to 6Gbps!

Once I began hearing more rumors on Reddit, I investigated and found that Comcast’s support articles had been quietly upgraded to indicate that all Gigabit Pro customers would receive an upgrade to 6Gbps.

Since late last year, I have enjoyed speeds of “3Gbps+1Gbps” on my two handoffs. The service provides a 2Gbps fiber hand-off (10G fiber, rate limited to 3G), and a 1Gbps ethernet hand-off. Both circuits were able to be used simultaneously, as I demonstrated briefly at the end of my installation article.

With the upgrade in place, I now seem to have a “6Gbps+1Gbps” symmetrical service!

I wanted to see if the 10% over-provisioning typical of Comcast’s fiber in the past was still in effect, speedtest.net seemed to top out for me at around 6200Mbps, but I was occasionally seeing some higher numbers on my router.

I set out to test the connection more thoroughly, which was not an easy task. I used multi-gig servers from 4 different datacenter locations to complete some iperf tests.

I was having some trouble getting the inbound and outbound maxed out at the same time, so for the sake of the most accurate test of “what is the rate limiting set to?”, I decided to test both directions of traffic flow separately.

Interestingly, in the tests you can see that the upload (TX) test was much more stable and consistent than the download (RX) test. It’s difficult to say for sure where the fluctuations are coming from, but the servers I was testing with or the networks they are connected to may have some capacity constraints. Datacenter traffic tends to be heavy outbound, so there is likely more free available inbound bandwidth at datacenters (for me to transmit to them), resulting in a smoother test.

I may re-conduct these tests again in the future if I gain access to faster servers to test with. For the time being, the results are still very impressive, and I have to comment Comcast for pushing the envelope with this, even though I suspect the only reason they did it is to give a petty jab at AT&T who just rolled out a 5Gbps residential fiber plan themselves.

In any case, I look forward to never maxing this connection out except when trying to stress test and speed test! 😉 Even the 3Gbps connection was basically impossible to fully utilize given the limitations of the servers you’re connecting to.

6Gbps is even pushing the limitations of a lot of common computer hardware (like SATA III disk drives which have a 6Gbps interface speed). It’s crazy to think that my Internet connection is capable of transferring data faster than most consumers currently are able to read\write data to a SATA SSD.

It will definitely be a long time before these speeds are needed by any residential customer, but I’m still quite pleased to have them now!

I have been a satisfied Comcast Gigabit Pro customer for almost two years now, since my original installation in November 2019. Although the price tag is high, I have always felt that the exceptionally perfect service quality I get in return is well worth the price. Now, it seems I have even more to be excited about!

Comcast does have a history of upgrading service tiers, such as earlier this year when they universally converted the 1Gbps (1.2Gbps provisioned) cable service to a 1.2Gbps (1.4Gbps provisioned) cable service. However, it was unclear if and when an upgrade for Gigabit Pro might follow.

It all started last month with some rumors on Reddit that Comcast would be upping the speed of Gigabit Pro, adding an additional gigabit of capacity to the fiber hand-off.

Up to this point, Gigabit Pro service has sort of been a “2Gbps+1Gbps” symmetrical service. The service provides a 2Gbps fiber hand-off (10G fiber, rate limited to 2G), and a 1Gbps ethernet hand-off. Both circuits were able to be used simultaneously, as I demonstrated briefly at the end of my installation article.

With the upgrade in place, I now have a “3Gbps+1Gbps” symmetrical service!

I have tested and verified that both circuits are able to be used simultaneously, at full speed, for an extended time. A screenshot from my router follows:

This testing was not perfect, I was testing to a single multi-gig cloud server at a single Internet provider. I have no doubt that this is the reason for the slight fluctuations in achieved throughput. It may also have fluctuated a bit since I was capping everything out in both directions, which may have caused some increased TCP ACK latency and may have degraded the performance slightly.

Regardless, I believe this demonstrates clearly the additional value provided by the Gigabit Pro service tier upgrade!

At the time of this writing, Comcast has not updated all of their marketing materials, and some markets (particularly Western US) may not receive this upgrade until October or November 2021. But, if you are a Gigabit Pro subscriber, rest assured that your upgrade should be coming soon! 🙂

I hope that a price increase does not follow… but I am quite excited and pleased by my upgrade!

Update on 10/7/2021:

I finally received the official email from Comcast announcing my speed increase. 😛

Recently, I was contacted by Lon Seidman from Lon.TV on YouTube about my home network and my Gigabit Pro setup. He found me through my article here on Binary Impulse: What It Was Like Getting Comcast Gigabit Pro.

Interviewing with Lon was quite a fun experience, and I enjoyed the opportunity to both show off my setup and talk shop with him, as a prospective Gigabit Pro customer himself who is just at the start of his journey.

Not too long ago, I posted an article entitled 10Gbps Home Network Tour, detailing my setup behind the scenes and going into detail about the equipment I am running on my home network, in my home lab, and how I am taking advantage of Comcast’s multi-gigabit Internet service.

The video with Lon is a great follow-up to this post, as I got to show on video and talk about aspects of my setup that would have been too in-depth for the scope of that post, so I wanted to post it here for anyone who might stumble on my blog and maybe did not see the YouTube video. If you enjoyed my network tour article, are curious about Gigabit Pro, or just like looking at other people’s networks, then this is well worth a watch!