even if that post was bad, look at the next line – a “kitty with rectal problems…”

after a couple months at the new house, i finally had some time to get into the garage and dig out the dsl modem and my wireless router. i thought i was being slick by keeping it all together in this one box as we moved so i could quickly get the network up at our new house. it backfired when that box got moved in first and then a garage full of junk got moved in afterwards.

anyway, i dusted off the equipment and plugged it in only to find our dsl service through sonic.net to be super slow. granted, we’re about 4800 ft away from the CO in downtown irvington but my initial testing was only around 384kbps. weak. our previous house, a much older one and and about the same distance from the same CO would routinely get 4-5mbps. ridiculous. after a flurry of calls with att and sonic, they agreed to release me from my contract since i could not justify paying 40 a month for 384kbps service. sonic is otherwise an excellent isp and i use them for a few work accounts, including a 4xT1 line to our main office in palo alto. i think this is more of an att dsl problem and so i’ll just have to wait till homes in the bay area start to get fios.

i finally submitted and got in bed with comcast. they are running DOCSIS 1.1 service now, so it’s a little better than in the old days of pooled bandwidth and browsing your neighbors computers in the ‘network neighborhood’. the installation was quick and easy. here’s my first speed test:

you’re reading that right: 23 MEGABITS down and 2.5 MEGABITS up.

my first internet connection ever was a 2400bps dial-up to aimnet, courtesy of minh long. download speeds reached 3.3 kilobytes per second. the measurement above says 23,326 kilobytes per second, which is 7,068x faster than my first connection. this is amazing, although still slower than a few colleagues who are either living overseas or have fios service domestically.

i’m not necessarily needing that much bandwidth, but i do need something more than the 384kbps that att could offer.