Mar 3rd, 2009
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Hidden Bandwidth Upgrade?
For my Hawai’i readers, especially the ones who use RoadRunner, it’s happened before, and it might be happening again: picking up on a Tweet from one of my buddies on O’ahu, I did a power cycle on my cable modem at home and found a tremendous speed increase–I’m talking maybe triple the previous download speed (upload speed remained about the same)!
I know my bill hasn’t increased, and I can’t find any mention of this anywhere on a news Web site or on the official Hawai’i RoadRunner Web site. I found one reference to it that indicates an increase in speed, but not if there’d be an increase in cost associated with it.
Is this temporary? Is this permanent? Is this just because of the area in which we both live? I don’t know if anyone knows, but it’s welcome. Perhaps more importantly–why is this such a secret?
I’m not exactly a fan of Time Warner cable, but it sure seems to me it would be great public relations for them to let its users know that for no increase in price, it’s giving them faster service. But for whatever reason, they haven’t. Similarly, Verizon FIOS doesn’t give existing customers on its “old” bandwidth tiers the newer bandwidth tiers (which are faster) unless the customers explicitly ask–what is called on Wikipedia an “Honor, not Offer” policy.
Why?
In any case, if you’re in the same state I am, give the power cycling a try! It might be a free way to triple (or more!) your speed.
[...] by to let us in on a little secret. Ryan notices an increase in speed shares it with us in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Hidden Bandwidth Upgrade? posted over at Uncommon Cents. I think you may be right, Ryan. And here I thought my little [...]