Shaw, my local cable company, is the provider for my Internet access and our home phone (think high-grade VOIP). I currently pay an extra $10 per month to get 10 megabit per second Internet access, but they’ve recently started offering a package the blows everything else I’ve seen away, both in price and in performance. They have a 25 megabit offering that costs $99 CAD per month – the question is, would paying for this actually enhance my day to day Internet activities? As you can imagine, I’m online day in, day out, and am typically doing ten things at once – email, FTP, streaming video/audio, you name it. So I need a lot of bandwidth – but there’s a limit that most servers will be able to kick out at a time. I’m downloading 330 MB of video files from one of my servers now, which isn’t serving up much at all late on a Sunday night, and I’m only getting 600 KB/s of total downstream bandwidth. If you do the math, that’s 0.6 megabytes per second, and my 10 megabit connection can theoretically dish up 1.25 megabytes per second. So would going for the 25 mbps connection benefit me? Not really. I see this 25 mbps offering as a stepping stone for eventual delivery of HD movies on demand. I’d be better off getting a DSL line and figuring out some way to bridge the cable and DSL connections together for added speed and redundancy. I know Robert X. Cringely did the same thing, but I have no idea how…
4 thoughts on “25 Megabit Internet Access Now Offered…”
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The search terms you want are “dual WAN router” and “multi WAN router”.
Good stuff – thanks for the tip, that term got me exactly what I was looking for.
I haven’t looked into this much at all, but I think I remember reading that a Linksys WRT54G-family router with the DD-WRT firmware can be modified to allow two WAN ports and load-balance between them. Check out the DD-WRT wiki if you’re interested. It’s by far the most feature-rich firmware I’ve found for my WRT54G.
Cool, I’ll take a look OSUKid7 – thanks!