Today at 17:00, I will be the proud owner of not one, but two internet connections. I’ve been a Broadstripe customer for the last few years, and the service has been absolutely terrible. Sadly, because cable companies refuse to compete with each other, Broadstripe was my only option for DOCSIS broadband. When we moved in to our house, we had Qwest DSL (now CenturyLink), but it was also terrible: at the time, we were paying for 7mbps, their highest speed, and getting maybe 3mbps on a good day despite several service calls. CenturyLink has supposedly been upgrading their COs and now offers 12mbps in our area. Broadstripe continues to offer 15mbps, but has obviously heavily over-sold their service without upgrading their network, as my throughput during peak hours has decreased over the years, and has really tanked recently.

So now I have both for a couple weeks, and I’m going to compare. Of course, no one should have to make such a decision based on how slow the connection feels, so I’ve been collecting data for a while now. Once I have the DSL service up and running tonight, I’ll put up a page with running comparisons, but here’s a look at the kind of graphing I’ve been doing with this data:

This graph shows the average bandwidth and latency (to my hosted server) for a given hour of the day over the last two weeks. That entire red line in the top graph has been sliding downwards lately. My comparisons page will also have a non-averaged graph of the last two weeks of data, which shows not only a downward trend, but a number of canyons where my throughput drops to around 2mbps. I’m very curious to see how CenturyLink does in comparison…