I do a lot of bandwidth speed tests, and I don’t really know why. I even know that Comcast optimizes for sites like speedtest.net to make sure your report shows you are getting what you paid for (at least on that site.) And yet, I still run the tests.
A while back, I started noticing that I was getting more than the 50Mbps down 10Mbps up that I paid for. In fact, my downstream bandwidth was more than twice that! I figured it was a fluke and it would go back down immediately, but it hasn’t. In fact, I found some news articles saying that Comcast was rolling this out across the country. Yay!
As much as I’m thrilled to be getting about 120/10 service for the same price, there aren’t many occasions where I make use of the extra download speed. I’d rather double my upload speed for doing cloud backups and uploading videos to YouTube, but I’ll take what I can get. The extra speed does come in handy for the video games that I download via Steam or on the Xbox One.
It’s a good thing they did this speed boost because it’s just enough to stay ahead of my Verizon phone. There’s one part of Bellevue where I can get over 90 Mbps down and 10 up on my cell phone. That blows my mind.
P.S. Insert old timer quote here about remembering 9600bps modems.
P.P.S. 123Mbps is about 15 megabytes per second, a CD every 46 seconds, a DVD every 5.3 minutes, or eleven 3.5″ floppy disks per second.
P.P.P.S. This post should be good for a chuckle in the future when everything is so fast we don’t even think about it anymore.