Thursday, September 24, 2015

High speed, high cost: it's Comcast!

Comcast (dba Xfinity) is giving us tons of Internet speed these days, at least in our corner of Connecticut.  They gave us a new gateway that is now provides the results shown to the right.  Our current service started out at 50 Mb/s, but has more than tripled with little price increase.

That's all good, but the downside is that they are charging something like $1 per month per megabit per second. High speed is occasionally useful for downloading big files, but we could survive on a fifth of what they are giving.  I suppose a big household where 5 people are all looking at their own HD videos would need this bandwidth.  But that's not us!

The question is whether a downgrade of our "triple play" service would put us at a more reasonable price / performance point.  We'll see.

My home LAN gets used for special ham radio work, servers, and software development, so I need to set up DHCP with some assigned addresses and tailor the network in other ways.  Since Comcast has seen fit to cripple its gateway to prevent me from doing this, I've added a proper Asus RT-N66 WiFi router that runs off the Comcast unit operating in "bridge" mode.  The Asus unit is very nice, including IPv6 service, as you see above.

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