awesome internet

warning: nerd time, followed by a brief intermission and then by hammer time

I love spending an hour and a half on the phone, 45 of which is spent on hold, talking to 3 different levels of Time Warner robots about why my internet connection is as slow as my little cousin who rides the haha bus to school. (politically correct?) When my internet connection is 1.9kbps download and it then goes up to 2.1kbp, they try to say “looks like it’s better, that is in the range of what we off…” My laughter cut him off. Road Runner and Earthlink offer, aka advertise, speeds of 10kbps download, which is already laughable compared to Fios, which isn’t offered in Manhattan. All I’m looking for is maybe, jsut maybe half of what they offer. Give me a solid 5kbps, although terrible, I can actually operate fine with it.

His suggestion of turning on ‘cookies’ and clearing my cache although amusing as a solution doesn’t change the number on the speed test. Worst part about it all, after waiting 20 min on hold at the end, the tech comes back on the line and tells me “we’re actually having problems with our computers and our servers and we are unable to continue to help you at this time” I made sure to SIGHHH as loud as I could for him. He felt so bad he offered me to call back in an hour and go through the entire process again.

• The average broadband download speed in the US is only 1.9 megabits per second, compared to 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea, 18 Mbps in Sweden, 17 Mpbs in France, and 7 Mbps in Canada, according to the Communication Workers of America.
• Meanwhile, in Japan, Researchers break internet speed record