Although we all love to hate the cable companies, I need to give a hats off to Insightbb. Instead of having the mentality of our local gas stations and keeping their prices as high as they can get away with (and if you are a local gas station owner and you disagree, shoot it to service@decaturpc.com, I guarantee you will get on the blog), insightbb has removed themselves from the DSL market space by increasing bandwidth of home users to 10 megabit down and 1 megabit up with no increase in cost. To put it in perspective, DSL is 1.5 mbps down 256 kbps up, and your old insightbb cable speed was 4 mbps down and 384 kbps up. I , like most cable customers, have occasionally looked at the DSL option. There’s always the question of do I really need the extra speed at double the cost? In reality, most home users won’t see anymore download speed than they have in the past because it’s difficult to find a server that will allow you to download anything at 10 mbps. However, the increase to 1 mbps up is very significant to people like me that upload a lot of images. If you absolutely have to see the new speed in action (as I did), go to ubuntu.com and try a couple of locations and you’ll eventually get speed like this:
It is pretty impressive when you can download an entire disk image in 10 minutes or so.
After receiving the letter informing me of my bandwidth increase, I still wasn’t seeing any difference in my speeds so I went to Insightbb’s online chat and asked about it. The person asked me what model my modem was and eventually decided it was outdated and needed replaced. An insight technician called me two days later and brought me a new modem. While hooking up my new modem, the technician mentioned my old Speedstream router might not be up to snuff. I scoffed at this (I love my old router) and we headed upstairs to check the speed. Sure enough, it was still slow. I switched my old router out for a newer Linksys and zing… super speed. So if your not getting the speed increase (check it here http://74.128.14.17/), your modem or router may need updated. I would recommend hooking a machine straight to the cable modem to eliminate the modem as the bottleneck. If you get good speed, then you know you need to change out the router.
I was impressed by Insightbb’s proactive approach to eliminating DSL as a competitor by dramatically improving service at no extra cost. That said, I’m not interested in shopping for DSL right now. If in the next year insightbb decides to raise their rates, you can come back to this blog and get the decaturpc.com prognosis.
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