After being on business for a few days, I returned home to have yet another piece of marketing mail from Charter… My favorite local broadband monopoly. However, this time it was good news!
We are pleased to inform you that Charter has upgraded your High-Speed Internet Max service download speed from 16 Mbps to 20 Mbps – at no additional cost. This speed upgrade is part of Charter’s ongoing effort to provide you the fastest and most reliable Internet speeds available. This means your favorite music, videos, and files can download up to 25% faster than before!
I really can’t find fault with that, now can I? Granted – most of the sites that I visit can’t pulp out that much information. Only sites like Microsoft (when I’m grabbing new ISO images) and fully peg out that connection. It’s finally happened, however… My own connection to the Internet (even if it is a neighborhood shared line) is faster than most upstream providers. Web browsing isn’t any faster… But large file downloads from multiple sites at the same time really do fly.
When I started posting my bandwidth tests back in September of 2007, I was getting 5 Mbps service… That was up from the 3 Mbps service I had previous to that. I was pretty happy (and only paying something like $25 a month…) I tested my work speed and was pulling in close to 12 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up. Seemed “fast” – but with everybody at work surfing rather than being productive, I’m sure it was a bit sluggish. 6 months later and I bumped up to 10 Mbps service, with 16 Mbps service coming another 5 months later.
So what does another 7 months get me? Sweet 20 Mbps service:
Dave’s a happy person for sure!! Score one point for Charter… Even if they are hassling people with bandwidth caps… Time to go see how much of this 20 Mbps I can sustain… However, to be fair – my 95th Percentile usage for the last few months is only around 5.5 Mbps.
I love my graphs! LOL! (And yes – I know I have a gap in week 6… Pesky SNMP!!)
We’re hoping to drop Charter here in the next month thanks to them jacking our bill up another $60/month. And I thought we were already paying too much for their service BEFORE. We’re looking into AT&T. Hopefully they have made their way out here by now.
Truly… if AT&T offered DSL faster than 3 Mbps, I’d consider it. They called a few months ago to offer me an “authorized deal” if I switched… And then they said that anything faster than 3 Mbps isn’t needed and is essentially “wasted”. I took another 5 minutes out of my day to educate them why somebody would want faster service. And then I asked them “When is U-verse going to be made available in my area?” She replied back “Huh? What’s that?”
Sadly – I’m not really interested in a $55 a month Internet bill but working from home it’s pretty much required. Why did Charter raise your bill $60 a month? Usually they’re pretty good about resetting their combo packages.
See…we are being charged $47 for internet! Argh..we are so being ripped off. I know we have a speed way less than you do. AT&T is not out where we are yet. They are available by the Rec Plex..but not 3 miles down the road. Blah.