The only reason you got those artifically higher speeds was due to the file size being small enough to not be throttle by Comcast. If you were to download or upload larger file sizes, or something that is continious, it would throttle back. That is what happens when I ftp to our redirect server, after about the 6-8 MB of transfer, it begins to throttle down until its is 25% of the speed. That is something that is consistant and repeatable, whether its ftp, http or whatever. If I could go with something other than Comcast, I would. I hope this company comes to my area, it can't be too soon. FT Worth has it, and I talk to people who use it and they adore it.

I pay $46 a month with Comcast, and this is the result that I have gotten just 2 minutes ago:

Download: 29.5 Mb/s
Upload: 1.8 Mb/s

Proof ... http://www.speedtest.net/result/264940358.png

Hah, we get like an average of 18 here for 42 bucks through Comcrap.

Dunno if you meant that as an example of good or bad pricing, but...

I'd kill for that here.

For high speed it's Qwest @ $60 for 12Mbps, $115 for 20Mbps, or Comcast @ $150 for 50Mbps.

This news story copy along with Qwest's marketing copy are deceptive. Qwest is not promising 20 Mbps or 12 Mpbs speeds. It is promising a maximum of these speeds with actual performance speeds of about half those numbers. How do I know? I subscribed to one of the plans and it only met half the speed "promised" by Qwest. When I contacted customer support, I was told with a laugh that these were only "target speeds" that were rarely actually met, and my money was refunded to me. Check the fine print, and you will discover that they do no guarantee these speeds or ANY speed to you.

Nor does anyone else. All stated speeds are max.

DSL is worse, of course, because the farther you get from the DSLAM, the more *impossible* it gets to achieve those speeds.

For folks near the DSLAM, the speeds match posted. I have the 12mbit plan for our contractor's network. (they'd actually bumped us up to 9mbit over the winter at some point after replacing our DSL modem out of the blue)

every time I've tested my bandwidth on comcast and time warner (business) I have gotten @ or above advertised bandwidth.

It's more reliable than DSL the farther down the line you go.

DSL gets horrible the farther away from the DSLAM you are. Cable tends not to degrade as badly as DSL does.

The trade-off is that DSL isn't shared, at least not as Cable is, and thus most DSL providers have not yet felt the need to implement "traffic management" techniques.

Prices listed in article are promotional.

Quantum (after 12 months) is ~$114.

Titanium (after 12 months) is ~$64.

896k up on both plans.

The pricing doesn't seem all that bad considering, but the upstream speeds really suck.

Qwest is billing these upgrades as being "the fastest DSL service from a major US phone company," rather than more accurately billing it as "not quite as fast as FTTH."

If it was FTTH, it wouldn't be DSL. ;)

It *is*, in fact, the fastest DSL service considering their competition (you are referring to Verizon, right?) is fiber, not DSL.)

Link to qwest broken, Tim.

Mod this down when you get it fixed. ;)

http://www.qwest.com

No, really?

Kansas, rural smaller town, ATT - SBC phone only offer dialup, and our wireless is 50.00 a month for 256/128 kbps. called affiliate for Sprint. In Kansas Tornados blow and the Internet SUKS.

What do you need all that speed for anyway? I guess if they are trying to curb file sharing then the speeds should be restricted. I can understand if you are business or hosting stuff but for normal home user I think 3 meg is fine.

The extra speed is great for movies on demand and gaming. Also, more people are telecommuting and the speed is necessary.
Personally, I'd like 10Mbits down and 1Mbit up and I'd be plenty happy as long as the price is reasonable.

I don't like Qwest as a company but 20Mbps is sure faster than what Cox offers here. Probably can only get that speed from our local newsgroup provider though.

£104 for 20Mbps internet? wow thats a rip off.
In the UK, O2 offer 20Mbps unlimited ADSL for £15 ($29) Virgin offer 20Mbps unlimited cable for £37 ($73) and Be Unlimited offer 24Mbps ADSL for £18 ($35) why are they charging so much for this?

My Rogers Cable(Canada) bill is almost $75/month for 10Mb/s Down 1Mb/s Up :(

"why are they charging so much for this?"

Welcome to capitalism. When everyone is already charging an arm and a leg, you bump your speed a little, so you can call your services the fastest available, while at the same time pretending there's competition in your market segment. Normally "competition" works to lower prices, but in America it works in the opposite direction. Not to mention their economy has gone down the toilet and their dollar is worthless, so everyone is trying to grab more of it.

Not to mention their economy has gone down the toilet and their dollar is worthless, so everyone is trying to grab more of it.

*rolling on the floor laughing*

You guys really crack me up.

"economy has gone down the toilet"

*laughing*

Ooh, that's rich. I'm going to come back to your post every time I start feeling less amused today, just for a quick pick-me-up. I get a great deal of entertainment from people who cannot tell the difference between slower growth and "in the toilet".

I have Mediacom in Iowa with the 15Mbit down 1Mbit up and actually get those speeds even during peak hours. Its only $60/mo too so I am happy. Wish Verizon would come her ewith their FIOS but with Qwest being the main phone company in the state I dont ever see it happening.

Qwest, the new Comcast. I could care less about the inbound pipe. It's the outbound that they screw you on. What good does 20 megs "In" do when they give you 384 K "OUT" like RR in Kansas City. They've been price fixing for years in our area, with a crap outbound and poor routing for gamers.

Why do you need so much upstream bandwidth? Even if you have several people playing, I've never heard of a game that requires anywhere near 384K or above. I find most people who whine and complain about their outbound speed are the guys who download hundreds of gigabytes of pirated material from torrent sites and need a lot of upstream bandwidth to upload hundreds of gigabytes in return to keep their ratios in check.

i only have 384k up and while true i can play most games i can not host them. on the games i can host, i cant enable voice chat. that's the reason a gamer would need better upstream.

I do believe hosting a game server is against the ToS of most ISPs. ;)

So get a hosting account at $20-$30 month. You don't need to host games from your home net.

Hosting a dedicated server 24/7 might be, but not the occasional Quake server with your friends...

Read 'em. Most of them state running a server is against ToS. They never mention "unless it's only once in a while", or "unless it's only for a few hours".

;)

And of course South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana are left to the wayside as usual with poor telephone service from this company along with poor everything else from Qwest in these states.

Qwest, wake up, the people in your left out state list deserve good service also, stop doddering around. If your upgrade services go any slower, you would be in off position.

Thank God, I have high speed cable telephone and television and internet and not at their inflated prices either.

Qwest is loosing in South Dakota and probably North Dakota also, as the Cable companies offer more for less with higher speeds. That is why Qwest is trying to sell several markets out in these state or at least did try a year ago.

I need a minimum of 512k up for 2 people to play battlefield 2. If I had 1 meg up I could have 4 or 5.

One thing you might consider if you are serious about having a nice gaming server is to use Amazon's EC2. Check it out at http://aws.amazon.com I've tested the line at about 6 - 8 Megabytes per second up and down when multi-threading. You could host as many clients as the processor on the server could handle at that point. The server would probably cost up to about $75 / month for your own private server. The upload/download speeds are always consistent and I haven't been able to really max it out yet.