High-speed Internet: the real deal

What’s your Internet connection speed?

Here’s my story.

Internet speeds abroad

For years, many of us in Silicon Valley and elsewhere (like Dan Gillmor) have bemoaned the state of the broadband Internet in the United States. Here, for example, is a comparison of download speeds in various countries:

Japan  61 megabits per second
South Korea  45.6 mbps
Finland  21.7 mbps
Sweden  18.2 mbps
United States  1.97 mbps

That’s right. The U.S. averages about 2 megabits per second (the stats are a year old), or an Internet experience 30 times slower than Japan’s.

In my own household here on the northern tip of Greater Silicon Valley, my Comcast connection over the past few years has clocked in at these rates, as tested at speakeasy.net:

4.2 mbps download
0.372 mbps upload

Yes, news media, when you write about connection speeds, you need to include download and upload speeds.

Because I create and post a lot of videos, this has been painful.

The USB Connect modem I bought from AT&T last month for my frequent trips on the road — using AT&T’s cellular service rather than Comcast’s fiber cable — is even more woeful:  about 0.9 mbps download, 0.3 mbps upload.

Then, this week, I received a flyer from Comcast: "Quadruple your Internet speed plus get Basic Cable and pay less per month than you pay now! Call 1-866-798-4212." A shameless promotion to get Comcast cable into more households? Sure. But I took them up on it.

High-speed Internet: the real deal

Today, the cable guys came by. They installed basic cable (I already get DirecTV for its sports programming) onto my little-used Sony Vaio (Steve Jobs, stubbornly, refuses to allow a TV tuner card connection on the back of all Macs). And they upgraded my Internet connection.

I just tested it, and the speed is pretty sweet:

25.02 mbps download
2.6 mbps upload

In other words, 6 times faster. Finland speeds.

And I’m indeed paying less now: $42.95 a month for "Blast Internet" and basic cable.

Finally, after 20 years of using the Net, I’m a happy camper. The difference is noticeable, especially when uploading videos to Vimeo and YouTube. (The difference is less noticeable on my laptop; I just tested the connection on my 3-year-old Apple Extreme and got this: 1.01 mbps download, 1.68 mbps upload. I may have to buy an 802.11n base station.)

What’s your connection speed story?

Update:

Whoops! I was testing my Mac Pro via my 3-year-old Apple Extreme. Directly plugging the Ethernet jack into the cable modem produced even faster speeds:

32.7mbps down
2.7mbps up

But this also means that something is wrong with the connectivity on my MacBook Pro, which is getting only 1mbps download speeds. Will look into that.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.