A bit of our life, in words.

Pam’s birthday was today! HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Her “big gift” was a new cell phone, the little Pantech C3. It’s so tiny! Hopefully this will solve the problem with battery life we had with other (2) cell phones (they were old).

So about the future… while browsing www.digg.com, I came across something, and for some reason did a speed test of my Internet connection. I’ve always gone to www.speakeasy.com/speedtest to do my testing, but this particular link led me to www.speedtest.net.

For some reason, it showed me as getting over 15000kbps (15Mbps) (almost 2MB/s) downstream. I thought this must be an error, cause my connection should be about 5000Kbps (5Mbps) (about 600KB/s). So I went over to speakeasy where I normally do testing, and sure enough… I’m getting almost 2MB/s download speeds!

It must be a glitch (I’ll say a prayer tonight that it’s not), and it sometimes goes down to about 8000Kbps (8Mbps). But… it’s really nice; and my upload speed hasn’t changed any.

But, shouldn’t we have this kind of speed already? I mean, obviously they can do it. VerizonFIOS is dishing out 30Mbps already. You can get a 15Mbps download and 2Mbps upload for $50/month. But that’s still not great. Japan is dishing out 100Mbps connections for $36/month (and a free phone line if you want it!). Or double the speed to 200Mbps for about $40/month.  Shoot, you can get a 1Gbps line in some parts of Japan for about $160/month. Makes the “standard” 3Mbps or 5Mbps offered by Comcast and Time Warner look puny; and for MORE money than other faster options?! I haven’t even mentioned the 1.5Mbps offered by our local phone company for DSL… for similar prices as the VerizonFIOS… can we say “blah“?

And don’t get me started about where Net Neutrality is headed…