It’s been a long time since I’ve made a post and I will once again make an effort to change that. Though, it’s interesting that I use the internet and computers and do programming and all that (horrible grammar aside), but I simply cannot seem to maintain a regular pace with the whole blog thing.
Anyway, Cox Communications sucks! I’m paying for the highest tier of residential service and I am getting horrible performance!
This is a speedtest image from 10pm!
I understand that this is due to peak traffic hours and blah blah blah, but this is absurd. When I’m paying $60 a month, I expect some damn good speeds! Plus, ‘powerboost’ is a complete joke!
For those that don’t know ‘powerboost’ is a marketing term that describes bandwidth throttling. Basically, as you begin a download, your speed starts out rather high. However, as the download continues your bandwith begins to dwindle to a trickle. This keeps people who make large downloads from using all of the bandwith of the system. Marketing cleverly hides this fact by calling this phenomenon ‘Powerboost!’ Cox then claims that the poor speed at the end of your download is your actual speed. Therefore, that initial surge of delicious bandwidth is actually a feature! It’s the POWERBOOST! My main problem with this is that if you stream a lot of video, this COMPLETELY destroys common buffering algorithms. Your machine thinks, “Wow! Look at all this bandwith! I can totally start this movie early since I can just download the rest at a tremendous speed!” Unfortunatley, this is incorrect and your viewing pleasure is eventually cut short as your video meets your buffer!
So, I’m leaving Cox for the moderatley better fields of Qwest. I’m sure they’ll eventually suck as well, but such is the state of broadband in the US!
UPDATE
So now I’m on Qwest and things are … better. I still don’t feel like it’s good enough, but I’m out of options. How depressing.
