New Year, new Internet, new rack, new toys

So during recent local changes we had the following updates:

Time Warner (now Spectrum) introduced "Spectrum Pricing" and (more importantly for geeks) "Maxx Internet" with speeds of 300Mbps down and 20Mbps up in what they refer to as Northeast Wisconsin (NEW). The standard speed was upped a little itself, from 50Mbps to 60Mbps, but with the asymmetric upstream it's less than ideal for many high-end technology users. More importantly, for us remote IT workers, it is less appealing than a different offer I ran across due to factors regarding asymmetric speed and remote access with large files.

AT&T in the Fox Valley (NEW) area has a very (very) limited deployment of AT&T Fiber (formerly AT&T GigaPower) Internet. The speeds are truly wonderful for a tech user, 1Gbps - symmetric. Now let us be realistic for a second, even though it pains us a bit. This is a home service, therefore there is no real SLA, and AT&T takes great pains on their page to point out it is typically 940Mbps and (more importantly) not guaranteed. I can respect this, as AT&T is not overpromising up front, as long as they get close to their magic 940Mbps number on a consistent basis. The bonus? It's US$80/month, which isn't much more than the Time Warner 60Mbps. Again, we are talking about an extremely limited deployment.

Not that raw speed is the only thing we have to worry about on the network. No we have other factors like jitter, packet loss, and overall latency as well. All of these factors, along with speed, dictate the overall quality of the connection. I will be conducting a series of speed tests on both the Time Warner (Spectrum) and AT&T Fiber connections as a comparison. This should not be considered a "fair" test in a direct comparison sense. They are two wholly different services, with completely different speed profiles. My aim is not to embarrass Time Warner (Spectrum), it is simply to show the differences between access that is less than 100Mbps versus internet at 1000Mbps.

We shall see if the Internet Gods smile upon me during the installation.

Jesse J. Derks