Prince

I moved into a new place, and city as well, and was looking to switch from Earthlink to Roadrunner. Not because I had had problems with the former (which I had not), but because I had read that Roadrunner increased the bandwidth of their standard cable setups, while Earthlink hadn't bothered, and I knew I'd be paying the same.

But when I threatened to leave Earthlink, they promised to upgrade my bandwidth from 2 Mbits to 5 Mbits, and give six months half price. So I figured what the hey.

But how can I be sure they really upgraded my speed? Do you know of a relatively trustworthy way of checking your cable bandwidth? I ran the speed test a few times at http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/ but the results varied so much that I am not putting much stock on that particular test (results from 2.1 Mbits to 5.4 Mbits on consecutive tests).

Not that the connection is slow or anything.

I tried downloading some betas from Microsoft (because usually M$'s servers are fast to download from and I thought I'd get accurate results) but I didn't notice any difference. I was downloading 3 files, each at around 190 kbps.

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IsuGuy

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

They let you test from servers in various locations of the country and seem to be fairly consistent

Prince

Since I'm in TX, I tried the Dallas one.



Tried Seattle too, about the same, little difference. Downstream seems ok, upstream is the usual low. Good thing I'm not thinking about running a TFC server or anything.

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Plaid13

that is pretty much the standard upload speed =( hopefully sometime in the next few years some big jump in technolagy will showup and we will all get real fast bandwidth both up and down. My download is about 8700kbps according to that site and i would love to be able to trade in half that download bandwidth to triple the upload. being able to host game servers or file servers would be nice.

IsuGuy

Technology is not whats keeping your from having more upload speed. The fact you want to run servers from home, like everyone else, is the reason you dont get more upstream speed. They have to have some reason to charge double to triple for a "business" cable modem.

d4in

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Plaid13

yeah well the jump in tech im talking about would be like widespread use of fiberoptics. Stuff like everything being changed to fiberoptics phone tv internet and all that.