XMission Gives UTOPIA Customers a Free Speed Bump

If you’re using XMission on UTOPIA, you probably noticed a nice little bonus last night: all 50Mbps customers got a bump up to the full 100Mbps for no extra charge. There’s a few people left to be switched, but it should be done within a couple of days, tops.

One thing to note is that if you aren’t seeing those speeds, you may need to upgrade your router. Most routers, even newer ones, don’t include a 1Gbps WAN port which often serves as a bottleneck. Older 802.11 a/b/g routers also create choke points on the wireless side. All said, that’s a pretty nice problem to have, isn’t it?

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5 Responses to XMission Gives UTOPIA Customers a Free Speed Bump

  1. Pete says:

    So is this a permanent thing and did the bill get lowered for those already at 100 maps?

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  3. Kristie says:

    You don’t mean the Utopia-installed optic cable to ethernet box, do you? I have a wireless-N router and am still seeing only 30mpbs even with the speed boost.

    • Jesse says:

      Your router (or, more accurately, your wireless signal) is most likely the bottleneck. Most wireless cards can only do a throughput of 35-40% of the connected speed. If you’re getting a connection to your router of around 85Mbps, 30Mbps is the best you’re likely to do.

      Note that not all 802.11n routers are created equal. Most of the cheap ones only support 2.4GHz. Same with the cards. If you’re in a crowded area, that can drop the speed back quite a bit from the 150Mbps theoretical maximum. You’d want to consider upgrading your router to one that supports MIMO (at least 2×2) and 5GHz to get a 300Mbps connection. Even then, it would require ideal circumstances to peak at 100Mbps wirelessly. 802.11ac gets closer (a peak of 1.3Gbps connections), but it’s still experimental and requires a lot of new hardware.

      Now you’re probably figuring out why I’m sour on wireless as a real broadband solution.

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