This is VERY likely unrelated to the settings of his machine in this case and may infact be an external "to the users" issue. I am in the Wylie area east of Dallas and COMCAST over the past few days has been absolute shit regarding stability, consistency and especially speed. According to comcast they do not currently have a known issue and think it is 'local' (user problem) but this is obsurd. A major outage happened about a month ago in the Garland area that crippled enough 'important' users (business) that they resolved it. After that things were back on track and smooth/fast until a few days ago when things started going bad again, somewhere. I have the 6mpbs/768K package and when comcast is working, I get the full speed confirmed using this site + dslreports + university sites. Right now though it's puking along at a chunking 1.3mpbs +/-50% variance! Sickening.
Comcast doesn't seem to care that we don't get the speeds we pay for. They only seem to care that they can ping the modem using MAC so they can say "well it appears you have internet connectivity! Guess you must have some local problem!"
To me, that answer is SO FAR beyond acceptable I can't describe it. I look at it in these terms. If I went and bought myself a Porsche and realized the top speed of the car was about the same as a Pinto I would expect the dealer to either fix the broken Porsche or sell the cars at the price of a Pinto. Right now, I'm paying for a Porsche ($70/m!) but am driving a busted Pinto with black smoke pouring out the pipes...
Comcast needs to address this crap. They seem to have no known way of determining where bottlenecks/problems are happening until something major finally happens that gets their "business customers" pissed off and barking at their door about performance issues.
As an engineer I can invision M A N Y ways they could implement methods of tracing these issues better. For instance, having simple TCP server/client software written that specifically bursts/packs a data pipe with large streams (50+mbps) and monitors all aspects. The client/server modules could be placed throughout the country at major hubs. Sounds simple enough, and I've written enough TCP code to know that it actually is as simple as it sounds. Having this could allow further isolation of potential particular 'paths/routes/hops" problems that don't otherwise immediately show up on their doorstep in the form of a business saying "HEY, umm, wth? Fix this!"
Just my 2cents (left over from the $70/m sent to Comcast).