Road Runner TURBO! 15Mb down, 1Mb up
Not may people realized it, but Time Warner upgraded the speed of their broadband access from 5Mb/384Kb to 7Mb/512Kb. The speed isn’t significant, but at least they bumped up the pitiful upload speed. I think they keep it low for things like BitTorrent, and so that people don’t run servers from home, and it sure does kill it.
I had a tech out to my house yesterday to fix some intermittent cable modem issues. He ended up replacing the cable modem, and said the new one can go up to 15Mb/s. I found out the turbo package as they call it, is only $9.95 more than the standard plan. I called them up, and they’re even running a special. You can get the turbo speed for 12 months for only an additional $5.00. They also gave me a deal on my DVR, so I’m going to be saving money for the next 3 months.
As you can see, I took some speed readings at SpeedTest.net. I’m very impressed by the speed. The upload is actually much faster than they even claim. I was baffled by the download speed, but it turns out that even though my WAN port on my FVS114 is 10/100, it actually is only capable of passing through 11.5Mb of data to the LAN side. From what I’m reading, that’s actually a common problem now that FIOS is gaining popularity. I’m working on a plan of action to take advantage of the full 15Mb speed.
I did a test yesterday to see what my wireless router was putting out for my netbook. I’m getting about 15 d/l from a wireless-g router and the wired connection to my desktop is getting upwards of 23 d/l. My Wii however is pulling under 5 d/l. I believe that is just from the Wii hardware. I will be hard wiring my Wii soon to get higher transfer rates and post data on the speed test. Under 5 d/l is unacceptable if I want to stream video from my Netflix queue through my Wii.