Glenn Fleishman writes at the very end of his latest article, Digital Discrimination, a further exploration into the bandwidth black hole that is Beacon Hill and the Central District, at Publicola:
I’m looking for insight from the neighborhood. Do you live in Beacon Hill, the C.D., or surrounding areas and have been frustrated with broadband? Comment below. Tell us what you have, what you get, and what you’ve tried to do. Are you planning to move because of this, because you can’t work at all from home or stay up on office issues? Does it affect your business? Let us know.
Drop on by, read the article, and let him know about your home or business internet situation here on the hill.
Jason,
I just read your comments to the Publicola article and I’m interested in finding more about the way and/or the tools you used to test Broadstirpe’s download speed. I recently moved to the C.D. and signed up for internet with Broadstripe. I have been disappointed and would like to have a more scientific way of proving my case to them. Thank you.
First, using a tool called mtr (Matt’s Traceroute, http://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/) I found that a server I have access to outside my workplace’s firewall was only 6-7 “hops” away. This server has 100Mbps+ connectivity to the internet. On this machine, I set up an HTTP server and created a 1 megabyte file filled with random data. I then set up an event set to run at regular intervals on my home machine to download this file and record the time taken.
Additionally, I used a tool called iperf (http://iperf.sourceforge.net/) to get raw up and down throughput measurements via both TCP and UDP. It is interesting to note that while, for the last week, I can’t get better than ~350Kbytes/sec (~2.8Mbps) via TCP download from this server, with UDP testing via iperf, I can max out the cablemodem’s capped speed of 15Mbps with only about 0.5% packet loss.
Interestingly, Comcast has been a bit flakey lately. Off and on for the past two weeks I’ve been having trouble getting HQ videos on YouTube to stream without a lot of re-buffering. If it happens again, I’ll run a speed test.
Still, I remember the torture of Millennium/Broadstripe and I’m very glad we now live just over the line into the Comcast zone. Yikes, did I really say something positive-ish about Comcast?