Comments on: Mercury News Columnist Calls Out Broadband for Slow Upload Speed, Blames Cable/Telco Duopoly

By: Ron Dafoe

Ron Dafoe — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:00:18 +0000

I guess you were a lucky one. A couple of years (forgot how many) after introduction we were put down to 2-3Mb/s connection speed. It wasn’t until Frontier rolled out their DSL service that RR eventually put their service back to what it was at the begining – not in one fell swoop, but Frontier and TW one upped each other for a time, until we got back to the original speed. After that, the only speed boost that was rolled out here was turbo.

By: Brian R

Brian R — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:28:40 +0000

I have been a subscriber with Road Runner since the mid 90′s in one of the 3 original test sites. There were improvements in the first few years in the service. Unfortunately things have been stagnant for many more years. Why am I still limited to 52 KB/s upload speed? Service should get better over time not stay the same. For spending more than $5,000 on internet service of the years I think I should have a faster upload speed…

By: Primus

Primus — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:07:57 +0000

As we’ve seen, what RR delivers will vary with the amount of competition they have. Here in Hawaii, where RR has a robust DSL competitor from the local telco, the standard home RR plan is 5mbps down/1mbps up. You can get the Turbo plan, but that only bumps you to 8mbps down.

Also interestingly enough, RR here started playing bursty games a couple months ago, so you no longer get accurate results from bandwidth testing sites. I know I’m still only getting 5mbps down, as my BitTorrent speeds still reflect that, but any bandwidth tester shows me as getting between 10-12mbps speeds.

By: Dave Hancock

Dave Hancock — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:43:38 +0000

Apparently the key here is COMPETITION. We were at our daughter’s house this weekend in Maryland (DC area). FiOS is available there, but our daughter has Comcrap (Comcast). They were suspicious of their Internet connection on an old computer so I ran a speed test via my laptop through WiFi (g). Got 15Mbps down and 3Mbps up!

By: Smith6612

Smith6612 — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:34:36 +0000

Heh, I remember back before December when my Verizon line ran at 128kbps (16KB/s). I could only upload roughly 60MB an hour. That meant that since my Frontier line ran at 3Mbps/384kbps, that line was uploading gigabytes a night at times, from my HD gaming videos, to backups of my files, to just normal usage of the line (ACKs, pings, etc). Now the Verizon line uploads at 1Mbps/384kbps, even though I can easilly get 3Mbps/768kbps service on it, I’m waiting for FiOS where I can get a huge boost and hopefully symmetrical speeds in the process (which they’re doing 25Mbps/25Mbps, and 35Mbps/35Mbps at the moment as reported by people at DSL Reports). I still have to do uploads overnight at times, such as my HD gaming videos taking 2 and a half hours to upload to FileFront, and then the same amount of time to YouTube as well. Sure, I can get Roadrunner which will give me 15Mbps (Powerboosted)/2Mbps, but seeing as though my area is still DOCSIS 1.1 from the Adelphia days and my neighborhood is still having speed problems, I’d much rather be with the DSL.

I can say though, that the boost in upload did in fact make the Verizon line more snappy when it comes down to loading things up, and the extra upload allows me to be able to upload and download at the same time, with each path running at nearly full speed and with decent latency.

But yes, everyone needs more upload. I cringe if I see people still running at 128kbps or worse upload (and these are the same people who ask me for assistance as to why their pictures take so long to send via e-mail). I’d say for at least the most basic plans, 384kbps is good enough, but then the middle-basic plans of 768kbps would be good, and then the middle plans would have 1.5Mbps (T1 speeds) and the higher plans be breaking 2Mbps+

By: BrionS

BrionS — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:16:22 +0000

While I’m not fan of Time Warner, it should be stated that Standard Road Runner is 384Kbps upstream, but Road Runner Turbo (for an addition $10/mo premium) bumps that up to approximately 1Mbps upstream bandwidth.

In the time I had Turbo I never achieved a full 1Mbps upload speed, but got into the mid-900s which is still more than twice as fast and helped the transfer speeds of large files from my machine to any remote host.

Eventually I decided that the extra $120/year was not worth the upload speed alone and my download speed (with the introduction of PowerBoost to every subscriber) no longer provided a significant distinction between Standard and Turbo.