I’ve been suffering with a crummy DSL connection for months, since the move back to CA (I’ve had to reboot the modem often, because it seems to slow down and start dropping packets periodically, with multi-second delays on pings). But yesterday, Verizon fiber finally came to the house.
This is real broadband, for the first time at home. It’s like night and day, in terms of page loads and video.
[Update a few minutes later]
No, I don’t know why the date is wrong. I did the test today. Maybe I should try a different site.
[A couple minutes later]
Bandwidthplace says that it’s about 4 Mbps up and 15 down.
That reminds me, I need to call my phone company about upgrading to at least their 7M package…
Did you go full-bore with FiOS for internet, phone, and TV, or just go with Fiber internet?
I’ve seen the AT&T version of FiOS (U-Verse) in action at my parents’ house, and I was pretty impressed by the interconnectedness of the DVRs, although I heard that the process of porting the land lines was anything but painless (one resi, one business phone line).
I’m a dozen or so miles east of where Rand lives, firmly in AT&T land, and U-Verse is still unavailable here.
I suspect racism.
Phone and internet. We had no problems with the phone line switch. We stuck with DirecTV for now, because we’re on a contract. And I’m not sure we’d save much money by switching, once the initial low rate expired. The only advantage I see is the multi-room DVR. And possibly reliability, though the dish has been pretty good since we moved to CA (we had a lot of outages with the rains in Florida).
I’m a dozen or so miles east of where Rand lives
Downey?
Downey?
Close, but a little south: NW Lakewood, right there in the corner.
It sucks because other folks in my city that are in Verisonland can get FiOS. I suppose I could look into cable, but OMG, the idea of farting around with cable cables AND the cable company doesn’t seem to make the jump from DSL to high-speed even worth the bother.
That is one of the benefits of living in the EU (some places at least). I get better download speed than that and I am not even on fiber. Still it does not beat South Korea or Japan access speeds.
In fact I know there are 3G (cellular) access plans here with more download speed than that (HSDPA+).
With fiber I would expect >= 10 MBps speeds. Which is like 8x more.
I went with fixed wireless broadband at my home some years before any wired broadband became available. I’ve been happy with it and am still using it. The only downside is having to worry more about lightning strikes on the roof mounted antenna.
Dang that nice.
I’m still on the 1.5 mbps DSL. Those upload speeds are faster than my download.
But as we say in the the networking biz. There ain’t such thing as not enough bandwidth if you got plenty of time.
Boy I *wish* FIOS were available here (Brenham, TX). I use cable, and get 3.24Mb/s up and 0.52 down. Of course my connection at work is much better (28up/27down), but my freedom to surf as I choose is somewhat constrained there:-P
I have that much speed on plain Comcast cable. Verizon must be doing something wrong, fiber must be much faster.
I’m going to correct myself somewhat, their test applet gives 6.36/3.05. But I download 935KB/s from Fedora repositories (which is gated by the USB 2.0 connection on my cable modem), which clearly means 10+ megabits/s down.
ADSL2+ is 24 Mbps down. DOCSIS (used in Cable) can have 42.88 Mbps per channel. HSDPA+ (cellphone 3.5G) can have 21 Mbps down, with a favorable wind, nearly nowhere.
I think the Japanese used to use VDSL and now use fiber.
Personally I noticed a major difference when I got always on DSL even if at 256 Kbps. From there every order of magnitude improvement is quite noticeable.
Still you got more upload speed than I do, and the download is quite respectable. Good enough to do nice quality video streaming using H.264 or VC-1 compression.
Is this where we brag about our broadband speed? 🙂
20.53 Mb/s download
2.36 Mb/s upload
ping 22 ms
Comcast Houston
Yawn. Speedtest rated me at 13.53 Mb/s, and I have a bog-standard Road Runner cable line. I strongly suspect that at least some of those testing sites have trouble distinguishing between kilobytes/second and megabits/second.
I like how Gojira brags on the great bandwidth on Europe. This reminds me of the old Fidonet days where most US nodes had 14,400 at best, while the Euros were bragging on their ISDN connections. After DSL, then cable modem came along in the US, they got really quiet for a while.
Give us time, Gojira, we’ll catch up! 🙂
…And, considering my memories of 300bps with an acoustic modem hooked up to a TTY, and 1200bps on a PC, I’m not complaining in any case. Heh. I can remember was 1200bps was normal, and 2400bps was fast, and only the Fidonet Gods could afford a 9600pbs USR Robotics Courier. The Bastards.
Come to think of it -within my own circle in Cincinnati- the first fellow with a 2400bps modem owned a C64. How embarrassing. 😉
How I miss a fast connection (when the company I worked in WA was in the same building as the NAP.) Now I have one of those cell phone USB modems. Watching video is like being water boarded.
Casey,
I remember those days as well. My very first modem handshake was a Commodore 64 using a 300bps modem to some some BBS in California. My parents were hot after they saw the Texas to Cali long distance charges on that telephone bill. I think I downloaded some walk through for a game called “The Bard’s Tale” I was trying to play.
Which reminds me of how games back in those days came on 8 double sided 5.25 floppies that you’d have to eject and flip over whenever the game instructed you too. Ah, the old days of spending 15 minutes flipping one disk after another only to find out the next to last disc got corrupted somehow and won’t load anymore, “Nooooo, I hate youuuu!”
Further south from LA, I get on average about 20 Mb/s up and 2 Mb/s down consistently with TWC (otherwise known as Dean Wormer Cable for their customer “service”). And a good selection of hi-def channels, and a cheap DVR. But I keep thinking about U-Verse just because DWC is such a collection of dickheads…