Tuesday, May 30, 2017

A LOT faster now!

For the past few months, Comcast has been gently reminding me that I need to replace my old modem with their newer one, for better performance, but I was sticking with the "if it ain't broke" approach. After they started warning me that the old modem will stop working soon, I gave up, and ordered their replacement modem "20 minute self-install" package. It arrived a few days ago, but I knew I'd be losing my Internet access during the installation, so I've been procrastinating on doing the switch. It's been my experience, that other people's time estimates aren't usually true for me, and my home network setup is a little more complicated than most, so I waited for a quiet evening, with nothing else going on. That happened last night, and sure enough, it didn't go perfectly, but it wasn't very difficult, either.

I used the Speed Test app on my phone, to check my Wi-Fi network throughput, before and after the upgrade, and wow! Download speed went from 20 Mbps, to 238 Mbps. Just...wow. I'm thinking that my future app updates and Foreflight map downloads are probably going to take a lot less time.

I remember back in the 1990s, coming up with a rule of thumb of 20 MB/Hr download speed for a 56K dialup connection. Today, I updated a 300 MB app on my phone through the house Wi-Fi, and instead of 15 hours, it took less than ten seconds. Times sure have changed!