Actually, my ISP’s advertising is an unambiguous 100 megabits per second. Perhaps they’re using the small m because it looks better or perhaps I’m misremembering whether it’s supposed to be a big m or a small m. At any rate (sorry about the pun), the connection actually is superfast and South Korea loves to bill itself as both the most wired country in the world and the home of the superfast internet connection.
Not always the case, RogueRacer. Although the OP limited the inquiry to cable users, I’ll throw this in for purposes of comparison. I’m on satellite (very rural here) as the only option to dial-up and I’ll get 500Kbps downloads and 200 up on a good day. To add insult to injury, it costs $130 a month. Thankfully, it’s a business expense.
Yeah, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Seoul a few times to meet S. Korean engineers, and they’re world class and pioneering in lots of areas. I’m not surprised S. Korea has good internet infrastructure.
More unit abuse from these fucktards who offer:
· 200mb Web Space
· 2GB Data Transfer
WTF am I going to squeeze into 20% of a single bit? It makes the promised 2GB data transfer a bit superfluous.
Comcast, while suffering horrendously in the customer support area, absolutely shine when it comes to download speeds in my area. I was originally paying $42 per month for around 500k downloads. I now get downloads at 700k as an average, higher if the server on the other side is willing.
That’s the premium you pay for wanting broadband while enjoying country living. 
Funny how times are now though. This is something that my GF and I are seriously struggling with in regards to getting a different house. Is it worth giving up broadband to live in the country?
I have to admit that I’m a little jealous of the speeds being tossed around here too. I guess it comes with living in a small town with the nearest city having a population over 100,000 more than 100 miles away. We are far from the bleeding edge of technology.
I live in a city of about 200,000, and this is the speed I’ve been getting the past couple days:
Your download speed : 2343 kbps or 292.8 KB/sec.
Your upload speed : 356 kbps or 44.5 KB/sec.
And if one wants to be the only one in the room to use those terms… knock yourself out. Maybe it’s different in the UK, but between seven IT jobs and one job in the broadcast news industry, I’ve NEVER heard those terms being used, even though you are technically correct.
Bottom-of-the-line RoadRunner from Bright House Tampa Bay, I get 4732 Kb down and 359 Kb up – about 591.5 KB down and 44.9 KB up. Not bad for $40 / month.
I hate you guys… ( 40th and Plum dial-up… )
It is a trade-off, no doubt, but worth it, at least IMHO. My ISP is Starband, and their NOC is near Atlanta, GA. I’m in rural Arizona, so my connection to the web runs from the dish outside my house, about 25,000 miles up to Telestar then back down to Atlanta, then into the land-based infrastructure. Often, like today, when there are severe weather disturbances along the Atlantic seaboard, I lose the downlink to Atlanta, so I have to have a dial-up account as a backup. Talk about culture shock!
The good part of all this, as you surmised, is that I work out of an in-home studio. I commute about 30 feet down the hall every day, even stopping off at my wife’s office to give her a kiss on the way. My work involves tranferring files (FTP) fairly regularly, my last batch being 1.1GB of PDFs (64 separate files). I work under deadline, so at crunch time it’s not unusual for me to have two FTP clients on two workstations uploading alternate files from the same directory, one connected via satellite and the other by land-line. The destination is a pre-press server down in Phoenix, about 100 miles south of here. The satellite fires off about five files to each one that dribbles through the dial-up, but it gets the job done.
Considering that it wasn’t that long ago that I would have spent the entire day driving a box full of 17 x 22 art boards into the city, fighting traffic in and out, then hurrying to be at the head of the pack winding back up the mountain, this reasonable facsimile of broadband has contributed greatly to my enjoyment of my work and to my overall lifestyle. Could it get any better? Well, according to Qwest, we’re scheduled for fiber optic sometime near the end of Hillary’s second term.