[TriLUG] Broadband Speeds

Magnus Hedemark chrish at trilug.org
Tue Oct 7 18:11:06 EDT 2003


On Tuesday 07 October 2003 10:26 am, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> Ok, so with respect to speed for TWC, what are the actual download speeds
> for Cable?  I am at a consistant 160Kb/sec (advertised at 1.5M), how does
> this compare to the other providers?  

When I lived down there and had RR I had wildly fluctuating speeds.  
Downloading from fast ftp sites I would get in the neighborhood of 2.5Mbps 
but then it could drop down to dialup speeds without warning.  I have checked 
this and the servers I was connecting to were fine, and could feed me much 
faster than RR would allow.

Now I'm on RCN (not yet available in the Triangle) and it is great.  I 
consistently get *at least* the advertised 3Mbps.  Sometimes I get more like 
4.5Mbps.  Upstream I get the advertised 800Kbps pretty regularly.

> I have heard stories of cable
> getting painfully slow around 5ish when everyone is home and surfing, is
> that the case here?  

Yes.  Even worse is when the weather turns foul, and RR would become almost 
completely unusable.

The problems seem to vary from market to market.  People in Durham seem to be 
okay for the most part.  But out in Orange County and northern Durham County 
is the pits for RR service.  The people you get on the phone are pretty 
helpless, too, and completely unable to cope with patterns of problems.  i.e. 
"My service dies every time it rains."   The jerk on the phone says something 
like "Yes, well, it says here to unplug your cable modem and plug it back in 
after waiting 30 seconds."



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