I’m curious what the breakdown of Internet connection speeds here is. I assume this has been done before, but I couldn’t find it, and I’m sure it changes over time anyway. I’m sure posters here aren’t representative of the Internet as a whole, but they’re probably closer than my geeky co-workers and friends.
It’s amazing how our expectations change over time. I clearly remember the day I upgraded from 2400 bps to 14.4 kbps. I was so excited! These days, speeds below 1 mbps seem like torture. On the other hand, my most recent upgrade (moving up 1 tier of cable modem service) was noticeable but far from life changing. Which upgrades were most significant to you?
A few clarifications:
[ul]
[li]I’m looking for the speed of your HOME internet connection.[/li][li]I’m talking about downstream (“download”) speed, not upstream.[/li][li]Choose the speed your ISP sells the service as, not the actual speed you get. The actual speeds are just too variable to make that meaningful.[/li][li]I know some speeds land on the border of options – I didn’t feel like doing “1-4.9999” instead of “1-5.” Use your judgement if yours falls right on the border.[/li][/ul]
Also, sorry if this is in the wrong place – it seems more like an MPSIMS, but it appears that I can’t post a poll there.
Mine is actually similar – it’s sold as 16 mbps, but I can get around 20 (and the upstream is supposed to be 2 mbps, but I can get about 4). I’m not complaining. It’s rare you actually get more than I’m paying for from the cable company…
Mine has crap upload, only 128 kbps which is killing my Xbox Live joy. I’m going to have to upgrade to the 1000 kbps option and hopefully that’ll be better.
Interesting, I guess I should have made a category for “I don’t know.” Every ISP I’ve used has made a big deal about the speed, so it was hard not to know. I suppose maybe that’s less common now, or at the base tiers.
We have an advertised 24Mbps connection for the house, shared by 4 people. Realistically, I think we get about 10Mbps overall, which is plenty, even when multiple people are streaming HD video, as happens quite often.
It’s advertised as 8mb, but since we live in a very rural area which only got adsl four years ago, we do not even get 1mb, it’s more like 700kb or something.
I upgraded from 2 to 10 mb a few weeks ago, actually. They just did some infrastructure improvements in my neighborhood, and offered the upgrade for a negligable sum.
Generally across Australia, all ISPs sell their broadband as ADSL2+ which is 24mbps, but I didn’t click the “over 20” option, because it’s a pipe dream number; I accept it as more like 18mbps.
We upgraded about 3 months ago to the new extreme 50mps service and loved it except for one annoying little trait - the only device they have for that service lost connectivity about 4x a day. Every day. Since we run our families email server behind it and the about half the time the router needed to be rebooted to reconnect the service outages were unacceptable but I do truly miss the speed.