Jeff's Connected Corner

Windows Server System news and real-world info

8Mbps Upgrade - Better…Stronger…Faster

I don't know about the rest of you out there, but I've been doing the 'online' thing since we measured speed in baud.  I fondly remember the days of my local BBS at 1200 baud, then CompuServe at 14.4kbps, and finally the wide open Internet at 56kbps.  Heck, one time I even experimented with an ISP that supported bonding two dial-up lines together.  Anything for a 'fatter pipe' as the saying goes.

Today my surfing got another bump in speed - to 8Mbps down/512Kbps up.  I live in an area serviced by Time Warner's Road Runner cable modem service, and they recently dropped the price of their Turbo package.  So now for around $45 per month I have some serious bandwidth.  It's not Fiber or GigE... but I'm sure that's only a matter of time.

Aside from the low price (only $10 more than the standard 5Mbps service) I opted for the upgrade to bump my upload speed to 512Kbps.  My wife is a huge fan of uploading digital photos to the Target/Yahoo photo service, and with a 7MP digital camera... the pics are quite large.  Plus, I've become addicted to Orb, which allows me to access all my Windows XP Media Center content when I'm away from home.  Both the Yahoo photo uploads and remote Orb streaming really benefit from the improved upstream bandwidth.

Here's a before & after view of my connection courtesy of SpeedTest.net:

Before (5Mbps/384Kbps)

After (8Mbps/512Kbps)

What's everyone else running/paying for home Internet these days?  Did you ever think we'd have so much bandwidth for such little money (relatively speaking anyway)?  Cheers!

Only published comments... Oct 14 2006, 10:12 PM by Jeff

Comments

 

Rand said:

Currently paying $43 Canadian for 10Mbps down/640Kbps up not the best but it's reasonably good and Cogeco has treated me exceptionally well as a customer so I don't feel any reason to change ISP's. I'm mildly envious of Swedes, they seem to get dramatically greater bandwidth much cheaper then is available in North America. Looking back I was always relatively optimistic about the rate of development of technology in general, so I can't honestly say having a 10Mbps connection is something wholly beyond my expectations though admittedly I didn't expect it quite so soon. Needless to say it would be incredibly frustrating to try and subsist on a 56K connection now (Ah, they days when that seemed a huge leap in speed!) even for basic web sufing without anything else. For comparisons sake, using the same server you chose on SpeedTest: 6467 kb/s download/475 kb/s upload/55 ms latency. Chicago, IL ~ 550 mi. Not directly comparable as we tested at different times, no way to measure server congestion, we're of slightly different distances from Chicago etc. Download is a fair bit lower then yours, despite being the greater bandwidth claims. Upload speed was identical, again despite greater claimed speeds courtesy of Cogeco. Latency is pretty similar.
October 14, 2006 11:06 PM
 

Josh Phillips said:

your latency went up though....that isn't good.

October 15, 2006 12:52 PM
 

Jeff said:

Josh - yes, latency did go up... although my testing isn't exactly scientific.  I'll keep an eye on it over the next week and see if additional tests also show 50ms+ latency.  What's yours?

October 15, 2006 3:53 PM
 

Patrick said:

Yes, we Swedes are very lucky to get fast internet access cheap. :-) Right now I pay 42$ for 100Mbs down/10Mbps up and thats a normal price here. Many apartments in the citys have ethernet (TP) and most of the country is covered by ADSL 24Mbps (for about 33$). Now I'm looking forward to 1Gbps in my livingroom. :-)
October 16, 2006 12:46 AM
 

Zac said:

You should ask for premium road runner. It was $45 but it got dropped to only $15 extra now. I think it's 10mbps now too because regular got upped to 8.
October 17, 2006 10:46 AM
 

Jeff said:

Zac - maybe you live in a different TW market, because mine offers two levels of service.  

1.) Standard Road Runner is up to 5.0 Mbps

2.) Road Runner Turbo Charged is up to 8.0 Mbps

Is the 'standard' package in your market 8Mbps?  If so, then I'm not so happy about my upgrade :(

October 17, 2006 11:43 AM
 

Zac said:

Yea, I learned yesterday that there is a RR Light for $25. I didn't get the details of the package. I had RR standard 5mbps with the Premium addon which brought it to 8mbps. it was $50 and $45 respectivly. A few months back they dropped the price to $45 and $15, and upped the standard to 8mbps and primium to 10mbps. So there was a nice price drop and a performance increase. I wasn't expecting that. I'm in Daytona Beach, FL.
October 17, 2006 1:30 PM

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About Jeff

Jeff Centimano is a Windows Server MVP based in Fairway, KS (USA). In addition to blogging and freelance technical writing for Microsoft, Jeff leads the KC-MEC User Group (kcmec.org) and assists with various site duties here at WindowsConnected.com. Jeff has been in the IT industry since 1994 and is currently a Solutions Architect at EMC Global Services.
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