Goodbye DSL. Hello Cable.

I would have never imagined I'd give up on the small guys and get Internet service from a large faceless cooperation. Yet I did.

Yesterday, I canceled my Sonic DSL connection (5.0M/768k down/up) which has served me very well over the last 3 years. The line was stable and I rarely had to call tech support (I only remember doing it once). I investigated ADSL2 and other wired options, but apparently the only high-speed providers in my neighborhood are Comcast and AT&T U-verse.

Now I'm getting Internet service from Comcast Business through a discounted group plan at work. I'm paying slightly more per month for a whopping 22M/5M down/up. Since this is Comcast Business (and not consumer Comcast), there are no download caps on the account, and it comes with a static IP and explicit permission to run servers. Also, the tech support experience when calling them is surprisingly pleasant. The person you talk to, can actually help and doesn't have to assume you did something wrong. Mistakes I make myself, I usually notice and fix myself...

The 10x improvement for upload bandwidth is quite noticable when browsing pictures on the family Web site. Browser pre-fetching used to regularly clogged up the DSL upload bandwidth.

Installation of service was quick and fairly uneventful, though it took them a day to "tune the network" so that I got the full advertised speed.

ns.goodcoffee.net is hosted on the new IP, though with a 2 week TTL. Interestingly, the DNS gtld-servers are still handing out the old IP address. As a consequence many DNS servers will have the old IP cached for another 2 weeks. That's not the end of the world since my secondary DNS provider (RollerNet) is reasonably stable, so I'll fully rely on them during the transition period.