What is your internet speed like?

[abefroman329]

I wonder if there is anything preventing expansion in certain areas?

Could be as simple as "there aren't enough potential subscribers to cover the cost the expansion."  My parents bought a new-construction home in suburban Atlanta in the early 90s, and the local cable company wouldn't connect the subdivision until X% of the houses were completed and occupied.

[kphoger]

I work for a contract vendor that does its bread-and-butter work with Cox and Spectrum/Charter.

At my house we have a plan from Cox that is billed as 100/5 Mbps.  When we first subscribed, I think it was 15 Mbps download, but of course they keep increasing the speeds every couple of years.  This is the second-lowest plan that Cox offers, and it's all we need.  We stream video, and my eldest son does online gaming, and we don't have any issues.  The higher-tier plans are really for serious gamers and people who need to upload a lot of data.  Otherwise, in my opinion, the lower-tier plans are fine for most people.

Modems these days have a lot of downstream channels and multiple upstream channels, so that's rarely a bottleneck concern.  For example, my modem is DOCSIS 3.1, with 32x8 channel bonding:  that can easily handle gigabit speeds, so I'm obviously not worried about it bogging down my plan's measly internet speed.

The router is where it's really at for most people.  If you're using multiple devices simultaneously and having lag issues, then it's a good idea to have a dual-band router and tie specific devices to one band or the other.  With recent advances (meshing), however, that's becoming less of an option, because newer devices are designed to constantly hunt for the best signal band and switch back and forth between them to optimize service;  usually that's fine, but it would be nice to have the option to force-stop that process if warranted.  Our modem is a rental from Cox, and it has a really good built-in router.

As for actual speed, I don't really care.  I'm not voting in this poll, because I never actually test my internet speed.  If we have issues, the first thing I check for is packet loss.  Most times, the interruption is because service fluctuates between 0% packet loss and 100% packet loss.  This means there's probably a network issue, a mainline issue, or something wrong with our service drop;  it isn't anything in our house that's causing it.  Only rarely do we have small yet persistent packet loss and, the last time I remember having that, the mainline tech ended up tracing the problem all the way back to the headend.  If my wife calls with issues, and I'm at work, I can also check for area outages that might be affecting service.

[seicer]

I was really surprised at the disparity of service in West Virginia, which is where I spend a considerable amount of time. My girlfriend lives 10 minutes on the wrong side of Beckley and can only get Frontier internet, so their speeds are in the 2-5 Mbps range. Unusable.

Before Altice bought it, Optimum was Suddenlink, and had great local customer service, and offered some of the fastest speeds in the state. While they still have higher speeds than most providers, they are constantly being dragged by the state for their unreliability and poor customer service that's now been outsourced - the company isn't even based in the US.

On the flip side, I was going through most of the long valleys in Pendleton County in some of the most sparsely populated areas of the state... and they were served by gigabit fiber connections. The proximity to D.C. helps as there are a lot of transplants and "work from home" folks who have more recently located to the area.

[MikieTimT]

ISP is OzarksGo.

Gigabit fiber up and down.  Tests with wired connection to router are 934Mbps down and 941Mbps up, which is pretty close to maximum speed available over Gigabit Ethernet.

Pretty reasonable at $79.99/month.  Perks of having our electric cooperative own the poles and get into the Internet game without a profit motive.

[epzik8]

104/57 on a Netgear. It has a tendency to drop to one bar on my laptop.

[doorknob60]

CenturyLink Gigabit Fiber plan. For $65/mo, that's about as good as you can hope for in the US. Not looking forward to possibly giving this up if I ever move, though the local cable company has gotten a lot better in recent years, if I move locally to somewhere without fiber.

[jlam]

This is how it is all the time:



I have great loading speed though

[zachary_amaryllis]

This is how it is all the time:



I have great loading speed though

Hughesnet, tho I am in 'throttled' mode right now. It's either that, Viasat, or Starlink. Starlink costs too much to put in.

Code Select Expand


Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Testing from Unknown (67.44.160.215)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by Vistabeam (Gering, NE) [1297.50 km]: 1012.327 ms

Testing download speed.......Download: 2.06 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed.........Upload: 3.16 Mbit/s


[tigerwings]

205 Mbps down, 5.5 up.

Suckeye cable, Western Lucas County, OH.

Paying more than twice the price for broadband than I did for gigabit service in NorCal.

[formulanone]

At a decent hotel this week outside Detroit. Internet speeds are about what I expect, after pushing about 50 photos to Flickr.

4.5-5.5 MB/s downstream and 3.0-4.0 MB/s upstream, though large file downloads seem to get pushed down to a mere 700-750 KB/s. It's enough to get work done, and it's nice that upload speeds are at least half of download speeds, because some hotels really throttle that back to like 10-20% of download speed.

Interestingly, at home I sometimes get faster upload speeds than download speeds. But it's like 100/100, with my work VPN choking it back to about a third of that number. Seems to handle everything our family needs.

[kalvado]

At a decent hotel this week outside Detroit. Internet speeds are about what I expect, after pushing about 50 photos to Flickr.

4.5-5.5 MB/s downstream and 3.0-4.0 MB/s upstream, though large file downloads seem to get pushed down to a mere 700-750 KB/s. It's enough to get work done, and it's nice that upload speeds are at least half of download speeds, because some hotels really throttle that back to like 10-20% of upload speed.

Interestingly, at home I sometimes get faster upload speeds than download speeds. But it's like 100/100, with my work VPN choking it back to about a third of that number. Seems to handle everything our family needs.

Asymmetric speed with slow upload is often a feature of DOCSIS, internet through TV cable. Fiber is getting out there, but looks like general understanding of the situation is that there will be no resources to build it up to phone network scale, or even cable tv scale. 5G will probably be the best bet in many areas.

[JREwing78]

My city has no less that 4 fiber-to-the-home providers vying for a slice of the market. Just waiting for the first one to reach back out and sign me up!

Spectrum (Charter) has 300/10, 600/20, and 1000/40 tiers. AT&T barely reaches 50Mbps down and 10 up; they're working to replace with fiber.

[ZLoth]

This is much better than the ADSL that I had in Sacramento, CA which had 15Mbps down/1MBps up. Also, it's nice for my employer to pay for my Internet each month. And, yes, that nice upload speed is important to me, especially when I upload backups to a offsite cloud storage at 1 AM while I'm sleeping. When I moved in, AT&T was still laying down the fiber, so I was with Spectrum Internet which had Gigabit down/35 Mbps upload, and it was more expensive than AT&T by $30. When they refused to price match, I switched.