A Comcast customer who is dissatisfied with Internet speeds set up a Raspberry Pi to automatically tweet at Comcast each time speeds are much lower than advertised.
"I pay for 150Mbps down and 10Mbps up," Reddit user AlekseyP wrote over the weekend. "The Raspberry Pi runs a series of speed tests every hour and stores the data. Whenever the down[load] speed is below 50Mbps the Pi uses a Twitter API to send an automatic tweet to Comcast listing the speeds. I know some people might say I should not be complaining about 50Mbps down, but when they advertise 150 and I get 10-30 I am unsatisfied."
AlekseyP made the Twitter bot's code available on Pastebin. "I am by no means some fancy programmer so there is no need to point out that my code is ugly or could be better," the Redditor wrote. AlekseyP set the tweeting threshold at 50Mbps in part because the Raspberry Pi's Ethernet port tops out at 100Mbps.
The Twitter account controlled by the bot has tweeted speed test results 16 times in the past three months, often getting replies from Comcast customer service.
Speeds were at their worst on New Year's Day when they dropped to 2Mbps:
Hey @Comcast why is my internet speed 2down\9up when I pay for 150down\10up in Washington DC? @ComcastCares @xfinity #comcast #speedtest
— AComcast User (@A_Comcast_User) January 1, 2016
"Plenty of the drops were during hours when we were not home or everyone was asleep," AlekseyP wrote.
Of course, no consumer broadband service hits advertised speeds 100 percent of the time for all customers. Speeds are generally advertised as "up to" a certain Mbps. Comcast says on its website that "Actual speeds vary and are not guaranteed."
If AlekseyP's Raspberry Pi has been running hourly speed tests and only found lower-than 50Mbps speeds 16 times in three months, that would mean actual speeds are 50Mbps or above more than 99 percent of the time.