Got your Road Runner speed upgrade to 10mb yet?

Always nice to get a speed boost. My friends at Oceanic gave me the “inside scoop” that their network upgrade is almost complete. A quick check to speedtest.net confirmed that my Hawaii Road Runner Broadband connection is cranking at 10mb down and 1mb up.

My download speed as measured by speedtest.net

We usually take these kinds of things for granted but allow me to contrast this to the not-so-distant past. I recall in 1993, just before the commercial Internet was just taking hold in Hawaii, UH had one of the few Internet connections. I recall being told that the entire UH campus, including all the community colleges share a single T-1 connection. A T-1 is 1.5mb/sec.

So in less than 2 decades, we’ve gone from 1.5mb to serve an entire University and its colleges to 6x the speed going to a single home.

Now, lets talk price. I recall in 2000 when my company CyberCom purchased a T-1 line for its business, the price was about $800/mo. Today, only 5 years later, I get 6x the download speed and about 2/3 the upload speed for 1/20th the cost.

The only word I have for that is: Amazing!