My Internet speed test bucks Qwest’s claims
Posted by Patrick on 2 Sep 2008
Would have loved to stick this in the sidebar, but of course IE7 can’t resize and display it properly even though Firefox 3.0 has no problem. I’ll have to try it in Chrome soon.
Qwest is advertising their new “fiber-optic Internet service” in my neighborhood, citing that their “blazing fast” 12Mbps connection is “more than twice as fast” as cable. Normally I wouldn’t care – propaganda is propaganda. But, I decided to put them to the test and see it for myself.
Results? After the jump.
–OR–
If you’re keeping score, that’s over 3MB/s and is double what they are offering and touting as twice as fast as what I’ve got. So, is it twice as fast as some OTHER cable provider in this area? Maybe it’s twice as fast as their shitty DSL service that I always hear people complaining about – that they only have it because “it’s cheaper and I don’t use the Internet enough to justify paying for cable”. Now that they’re within $5 of each other after introductory rates are considered, which one is “better”?
For those who don’t know, when a service says it’s “fiber optic Internet” that means that you still have to run the same 75Ohm coax from the terminal into your house that you would use for cable. It’s truly an HFC architecture (wikipedia) for data, the same as cable uses for the video you watch on TV. FttH (wikipedia) is the only true-fiber solution, and I’m here to tell you all that it doesn’t *exist here in Denver.
