So my internet service (Time Warner Road Runner) has been acting up lately and I’ve been starting to frown upon my faithful ISP of the last 9 years. My connection has been dropping a few times a day, and especially while trying to stream a Netflix movie over my Xbox. I received a promotional letter from Time Warner to trade my modem for a “Speed Boost” modem. I figured it sounded good since I’ve had this same modem since getting Road Runner in 2000!
When I showed up at the counter, the representative laughed at my modem, held it up to show her co-workers and they made a big fuss laughing at it. She asked if it was still working and I said “kind of”. She continued to tell me she was surprised it even worked because it was recalled 3-years ago. Thanks Time Warner for keeping up with the hardware you gave me.
So I was excited to get home and hopefully have a reliable connection. The first thing I did of course, being a techy-guy, was go to speedtest.net, a great common site I frequent to test my bandwidth speed. I had regularly got 3-5MB and sometimes topped out at 6MB which I was pretty happy with. If only I knew what I’d been missing.
After plugging in the new modem and running a test there, here are my results.
Yea, consistently getting 30-32MB a second now. I couldn’t believe it and kept testing just to be sure I wasn’t dreaming. Even with farther servers in CA, I was still well over 25MB.
I had to perform a real-world test so went to Apple.com to download a large movie trailer. A 50MB quicktime movie downloaded in 49 seconds. A little over 1MB/sec in a real-world test. I’m am now loving Time Warner again.
