Ah, now we're cooking with gas.

That's my speedtest.net result after changing out my old DOCSIS 2.0 Comcast-supplied modem and my ancient Zyxel G-2000Plus V2 router that claimed to be 10/100 capable and wasn't.  Here's what I was getting before:

The upload is capped at around 5Mbps* so I'm not concerned about the fact that it was .01Mbps faster on the last test I did before changing out the equipment.  I'm more impressed that the download speed went up 222%.

The new equipment is an ARRIS / Motorola SurfBoard SB6141 DOCSIS 3.0 modem and a Cisco/Linksys E3200 wireless-N gigabit router.  At first I was hoping that all I'd have to do is change out the modem, but as it turned out the new modem didn't recognize that the old router was 10/100 capable, and kept treating it more or less like a 10.  I personally think that the old modem wasn't REALLY 100Mbps capable, but since I never used the four-port switch on it for anything other than to connect to an 8-port gigabit switch, I never noticed a problem until it was obvious I ought to be getting faster speeds.  And since the router was 7 years or more old, it was time for a change.

I was a little pissed off that you can't seem to buy a plain old home/office router anymore without the wireless crap, unless you want to pay big bucks for a small business-class router that by the way does VPN (and most of those get shit reviews until you're spending $300 or more).  Because of the location of the router (our house is shaped kind of like an inverted tau, with the modem at the top of the short leg of the tau), I use a wireless-N access point located right in the middle of the house instead.  So it's just a waste of money for me to buy a router with wireless capability.  Oh well.  The industry knows best.  (The hell it does.)

I was a LOT pissed off, on the other hand, that Comcast KNEW I had a DOCSIS 2.0 modem that won't handle their current speed plans, but didn't TELL me that all I needed to do was replace the modem to GET those speeds.  And my wife was just on the phone with them a couple of months ago negotiating for a better deal when the sales rep offhandedly said "well, you're already getting the 25Mbps in this plan."  I said, "She said what?"

So as usual I procrastinated and didn't do anything about it till the other day.  I'm trying to decide if I'm going to give them the rented modem back to save another $7 a month or if I'm going to keep it as a spare.

Just for giggles, here's what I get on my workstation at work.  We're self-bottlenecked at 100Mbps due to our router, which doesn't support gigabit networking, but we're in a colo where we could get gigabit speeds if we wanted to spend the money on a new router.  This isn't bad, we must not be saturating the line this morning.  (Oh, ignore the "~1100 mi" distance thing.  For some reason speedtest.net thinks my workstation is somewhere in southeastern Kansas this morning; I had to change servers so I could get a proper test to DC.)

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* I have always thought this was stupid, but not as stupid as the reasons they give for not providing the same upload speed as download speed.  The most prevalent seems to be "It's harder to push data up the pipe than to pull it down."  Bullshit.  Our up is their down.  We do that every day at work, with gigabit speeds (in the European office; as noted farther down, we self-bottleneck at the US office).  If we didn't, we'd be out of business.  The real reason they throttle uploads for home users is that they don't want you running servers on residential service.