This morning I noticed about a 10-minute outage in my Internet service.  I was wondering if the migration to Comcast had taken place.  I quickly checked my hostname and in fact it was now a Comcast hostname.  I was excited because my 6mbit account was supposed to be upgraded to an 8mbit account.  I quickly went to Speakeasy and did a speed test, I was amazed to see that I was now downloading at 11666 kbits per second.  For those of you who do not know much about how Internet speeds are calculated, that is about 1.4 Megabytes per second.  This is about double the speed that I was at before.

I was a bit disappointed however when I found out that the upload speed would not be increased.  I am still stuck at 768 kbits per second (96 KB/s).  I work from home so the upload boost really would have helped.  Uploads are slow when they are large files on this connection.  I called in and talked to the business services to see if they offered anything faster than the residential.  I was amazed to find out that the top business account was only 8mbit down with 1mbit up and was priced at $160 per month.  Correct me if I am wrong but the only difference between my residential and the business account is in the upload speed.  The top business account offers 232 kbits more upload than the residential.  To me the padded features are not worth the extra cost difference when all I need is the increase in upload speed.  I am paying about $100 less than that now for the residential.  I asked the woman if they could bump me up on the residential and charge me extra as I do not need the email addresses, and other padded features that the business accounts get.  She stated that there was no way they could do that.  I hope she did not mean it was impossible but rather their billing system wouldn’t allow for it yet.

I love the download speed but they need to pump the upload speed about twice as fast as they currently have it set to.  That would really make working from home comfortable.