Faster, faster, the lights are turning red
By Mark Czerniec
December 13, 2006 9:29 AM

I was standing in my nephew's bedroom a couple of months back, waiting with my sister-in-law for a YouTube video to load before unpausing it.

"Is it this slow for you?" she asked me. I believe they're using DSL from the phone company, but I don't know the details.

I said that mine was roughly the same. My broadband provider is Road Runner from Time Warner Cable, and I use it through a wireless router. Web pages load acceptably, but I do have to pause videos until the download catches up, and as much as I love the idea of the Pandora music streaming service, it stalls often enough to be really irritating, so I abandoned it.

Last week I ran a speed test at BroadbandReports.com. The results were very disappointing: 233 kilobits per second downloading, 361 uploading. It's the download number that especially hurt.

Broadband speed was the subject of "The Net at Risk," a recent Moyers on America installment that examined this issue of network neutrality that the SaveTheInternet.com activists are fighting for. I was shocked to find out that in countries like Korea and Japan, "you can get 100 megabit services in both directions for about $40." That's the same price as Road Runner, and a megabit is 1,000 times as much information as a kilobit.

According to this Bill Moyers show, the USA was promised inexpensive, high-speed, optical fiber Internet access (the now-forgotten "information superhighway") by our telephone companies back in the 1990s, but they have never delivered. Meanwhile, places like Reykjavik and Slovenia have connections 100 times faster than we Americans do.

Ouch.

I was curious, however, about how much my wireless connection cut into my overall speed. I made a mental note to connect to my router via ethernet cable to see if there was any difference. I didn't get around to that project until this morning, and the results were astounding: 4,265 Kbps on the download, 357 going up. So the upload speed was nearly the same either way, but the download speed was 18.3 times faster than wireless. I had figured the ethernet connection would be an improvement, but I never expected this much!

Needless to say, I spent the next hour or so today disconnecting the cable modem, wireless router, and so forth from their location near my living room TV and reconfiguring everything in the spare bedroom office where I do most of my online work. This way I will still have WiFi throughout the house, but I can use the ethernet cable at my desk and get a connection that's a whopping 18 times better.

Although 4,265 Kbps is still only 4.2 percent as fast as ordinary customers are going in Tokyo and Seoul, it's huge speed-up for me. Google Earth loads images much faster, Pandora plays without interruption, and there's no waiting for YouTube videos to load.

This makes me want those Slovenia speeds all the more.