Digital Common Sense

This evening I find myself in an interesting, and uncommon position. As many of you might remember, it wasn’t that long ago when I lived in rural Vermont and was tied to the idiosyncracies of DirecPC satellite Internet service as the only option to dial-up. Well, yes, there was always the dedicated T-1 approach too.

This evening I’m dual-broadbanded with both Comcast cable service and Qwest DSL. I’ve had the cable for over a year now and overall don’t really have major complaints. Comcast is sometimes the target of network nastiness that causes performance problems, but in general, no complaints.

Qwest DSL, was easy to set up. Came with a WiFi enabled DSL modem, and is noticeably faster. Twice as fast by feel. I haven’t done benchmarking yet, but it’s definitely faster and cleaner. Sure I got a ton of MSN add-on garbage that I’ll go back and delete, but the core service underneath (which is all I really want…gimme a pipe) looks pretty darn fine at this point.

I’ll run both in parallel for a month and be doing some comparison benchmarking. Then we’ll see. There’s a fair chance I’ll keep both and maintain dual network redundancy, but I’m not convinced I really want to do that just yet. Other factors and projects on the radar scope will help influence that decision.

Filed by Ken at 8:37 pm under General, Technology