12Mbps

[Jonathan]

Woo. I am breaking through the single digit barrier. Fiber is not available at my new apartment but the DSLs are now ADSL so I went with that. How lame is that? and only 896kps upload.

Anyhoo, what're you rockin atm? Apparently my service is $50/mo with no hidden fees and no bundling, which sounds pretty good to me...

[VLSmooth]

Grandfathered Verizon FiOS plan, 30 mbit down, 5 mbit up for $54.95.

It would suck losing it

[quantus]

Only 6mbps down, 768kbps up for $25/mo through AT&T. It's their "Elite" service...

It's funny how AT&T has this article:
http://www.att-services.net/att-interne ... ading.html

If you're currently shopping for a high speed Internet service provider, then the upload speed is something you should consider. ... Sometimes it is difficult to find out what a provider's speed is, because some providers think people aren't concerned about upload speeds.

Notice how they don't post their upload speeds for DSL or Uverse. Therefore, AT&T thinks their customers must not care about upload speeds.

I kinda want clearwire or some other 4G service and a clearspot-like device that lasts longer than 3-4 hours per charge... Then I can dump home phone, home internet and cell phone for 4G and an iPod touch with some voip software. I know there are some drawbacks like coverage area, but it's a migration that's going to happen over time anyway unless there continue to be bandwidth hungry apps out there that the vast majority of the population start using. 4G is probably fast enough to support a single HD stream like Uverse already. Heck, even phone numbers are going to be a thing of the past in another decade or two.

Oh, another interesting trend to note is that connections are tending to get more and more asynchronous. We were at parity with modems, then the original incarnations of DSL were around 2 or 4 to 1, and now we're getting 6 or 8 or even 12 to 1. It's getting a bit silly and really forcing a migration to thin clients.

[Jonathan]

Clear in my area is 4Mbps for mobile, 6Mbps for home. I am happy with the coverage of Clear, but faster is more better. I don't have TV or home phone. I wish Clear had some higher speed plans, cuz they do has advantages.

I really wanted fiber. Qwest has put some down in the city center, but evidently not in my building.

Edit: bytes -> bits

[Jonathan]

Clear does get 3 or 400 kbps up, which does drag a bit when I'm uploading photos.

[George]

I had 5/2 FIOS when I moved here, and a while back, they forced me to move to 10/?. I figured it was a rip off, because I'd never seen any source or combination of sources that could achieve 5. The best I ever did with torrents, even after the upgrade was 500kBps. But a couple weeks ago, I got back on emusic, and according to task manager, I was actually getting close to 10Mbps just downloading one mp3 at a time from their server.

[Jonathan]

Streaming video and mmorpg updates are my high speed usage models. Going to get the dsl working and report back on throughput.

[Jonathan]

750MB install @ 1.2 megabytes per second? Why, yes, thank you.

[Jonathan]

Up:down is silly. But forcing thin client I don't get.

[George]

With FIOS, things actually got a lot closer to synchronous, at least in the low end packages (5/2), compared to the cable service I had before.

[quantus]

Up:down is silly. But forcing thin client I don't get.

If you limit upload speed, then you're going to want to store most of your data in the "cloud" and start pushing data up as quick as possible so you don't get a backup and have to do large slow uploads that take a lot of time. If you create a doc using google docs, you can just point to a url for a picture or some other content you want to embed (have google go get it) and send your doc to someone else, instead of downloading a picture, putting it into your doc and then upload the doc later. If you're using personal pictures, yeah, it still needs to be uploaded once first, but then you can use your pictures multiple times for little additional bandwidth. If you think pictures aren't so bad, then replace with video or some other large file content.

[Jonathan]

Pulled down 100 MB from Ubuntu's servers at 1MB/s, but the next 100MB is coming in at perhaps a fifth of that. Not sure what happened there... throttling?

[Jonathan]

Grabbed the last 30MB at 1MB/s again. Weird.

[Jonathan]

1.2 MB/s from Steam. How fast is Steam over fiber?

[VLSmooth]

I usually get a little over 3 megabytes per second.

[Jonathan]

Okay, for the summer my connection has been shit.



This is some bullshit. I can't get fiber downtown. My options are Clear or Comcast. Or yell at Qwest (Now CenturyLink (TM)!)

[quantus]

I got U-verse finally and have 12Mbit down. Could've gone higher, but I'm far enough from the box that it could start to limit my simultaneous HDTV viewing/recording. I think I only have a max 25-35Mbit pipe. There's fiber to the area's junction box which allows them to basically do fast-dsl over a short distance to provide the last-mile connection at better than normal dsl speeds. Doing this also cuts out the 3rd party providers since they don't have to give them access to reselling this service for some reason.

I dislike AT&T, but it was strictly the same price or cheaper now that I can officially drop traditional land line phone service in favor of VoIP for essentially free through an OBI-100 and google voice. Also, they were giving a ton of money back for switching via gift cards (~$250).

[Jason]

Do you get caller id with that setup?

[quantus]

Yes, I do get caller ID, at least the phone number is listed and the phones say the number out loud. I believe if the number is in my google voice contacts, then google voice will somehow update the info with the name too, but I haven't tried this yet to confirm and I could just be making that up.

The real issue with this setup is that 911 doesn't currently work. I have to subscribe to another VoIP provider for a couple bucks a month to get 911 service working, but I can subordinate this service to google voice for all other calls so I don't have to pay for minutes or anything other than the basic service.