Recently I noticed a huge drop in my cable download speeds. At work we started to do a simple test - Go to the start button, select run... and type cmd. This should open a good old fashioned DOS prompt.
From work we were pinging www.yahoo.com and at time seeing over 2000 milliseconds (ms) per ping. That's two seconds folks also known as a lifetime in computer land. So I got curious and ran this test from home and guess what?
Nope, it was much less than 2000 ms in fact it was returning pings below the 200 ms range. Not bad when compare to the work experience. Right?, well not exactly this is still pretty horrible for my Cable Service considering I have the top level service that one can get from Time Warner.
What should one see from this ping test? Anywhere from 20ms - 60ms would be acceptable. Now after these tests I decided that I wanted to discover who was eating up my bandwidth, the neighbors?!?
That's when I found this article on Cable's dirty little secret which points out that the explosion of new applications on the web including HDTV, Video on Demand, Online Gaming, Virtual Worlds and more are all eating up the bandwidth to my once super fast cable. During one recent download of a large file I noted that the download speed ranged from 900KB to 9KB.
It seems that the Cable industry is running out of bandwidth. This is a bad scene because I detest Verizon's customer service but I just might need to get Fios [A fiber to the premises (FTTP) telecommunications service offered by Verizon, the first major US carrier to offer broadband Internet access] service. Well its a seesaw battle between the cable and telephone companies and at the moment Cable is down - stay tuned for further details and keep your eye on your download speeds.
For more on why we can expect Cables speeds to continue to be unreliable check out link
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