It never ceases to amaze me just how much interest is paid to the Push-Me Pull-Me of the spinner versus the weaver, oh, that's an allusion to the Industrial Revolution.

Grazie

"This won't really be valuable a lot of people until broadband upload speeds increase significantly, and plans come down in cost equally significantly"
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Not sure if that will happen.

A US federal court recently ruled that the Federal Communications Commission’s 2010 regulations enforcing net neutrality overstepped its legal authority.

Under net neutrality, internet service providers (ISPs) are barred from speeding up or slowing down certain websites, while leaving others alone. More relevantly, ISPs cannot take payments from a company in exchange for speeding up how its site loads or slowing down the speed of competitors’ sites.

Also Time Warner and Comcast will probably get the OK to merge reducing even further the number of corporations controlling the media.

John

"barred from speeding up or slowing down certain websites, while leaving others alone. More relevantly, ISPs cannot take payments from a company in exchange for speeding up how its site loads or slowing down the speed of competitors’ sites."

I don't see that as related. The issue is the 'last mile' price and speed. In general the speed does keep going up, while the price compared to inflation falls. When i first signed up for TimeWarner about 12 years ago i was paying $80/month for business class service at 1.5Mbps/384Kbps. Now i still pay $80/month (which is a price drop due to inflation) and i have 19Mbps/2.4Mps speed, which is about 10 times faster.

Still though, i can't see paying Google for a drive cloud, when i can cut myself a much better deal for 12x the space at effectively zero cost, on my own server.

"In general the speed does keep going up, while the price compared to inflation falls. When i first signed up for TimeWarner about 12 years ago i was paying $80/month for business class service at 1.5Mbps/384Kbps. Now i still pay $80/month (which is a price drop due to inflation) and i have 19Mbps/2.4Mps speed, which is about 10 times faster."
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Right now Time Warner is advertising internet at $14.99 a month as a new price and not a special. The disclaimer at the bottom of the TV ad is too small to read and disappears too fast. So I called. They said that it is for a new lower speed internet at 2Mbps. I would call that deceptive advertising. I have the standard 15Mbps slowed down from an earlier level of 19Mbps to offer a "Turbo internet" option at a higher cost.

In this month's Consumer Reports (May 2014), which I have subscribed to for the past 40 plus years, there is an article called "Untangling the bundle" regarding "cable TV, internet, and phone" packages. Let me quote some excerpts from their research.

In the previous six years that Consumer Reports National Research Center has conducted customer satisfaction surveys on in home telecommunications services, providers have consistently rated below average among services we cover...............(They discuss the history of Cable TV Service and then)....

Consumer Reports then goes into the original and a recent court ruling (January 2014) I mentioned above and the merger and explains how "troubling signs are on the horizon for consumers" and that according to consumers, "broadband internet is the most important information pipeline coming into people's homes" They have a separate section on page 24 entitled "Rethinking the rules of the internet".

From that section: "It (the court ruling) threw ISP's into a regulatory limbo, because for the time being, the FCC seems to have no clear authority to stop traffic blocking or discrimination. At press time, the matter was only getting murkier. Netflix called out several ISPs for slowing down it's video streams, then announced that it would be voluntarily paying Comcast for faster access to that cable provider's customers. ...........Whatever happens, keeping ISPs from meddling with internet service seems to be a high priority for consumers"

In the comparison charts for "Internet Service" WOW and Verizon FIOS" were number's 1 and 2 for value, reliability, and speed. Time Warner (which I also have) was rated number 20.

Where I live, local politicians have effectively blocked Verizon FIOS from providing service to compete with Time Warner. I was told that by one of the members of the Town Board who lives behind me, and also by a rep from Verizon. That would explain why they have reduced the speed of the internet unless you pay through the nose. Lack of corporate competition is ALWAYS bad for the consumer.

John

More bandwidth is great if we can use it. I have the TW $14.99 service and the highest down load speeds i get from one of my "benchmark" websites is about 700K. I've never hit a site that goes higher than that.

http://i648.photobucket.com/albums/uu208/bk-vegas/downloadspeed_zps270d67c4.png
Yes, this is strictly for benchmark/testing purposes... that's the story I'm sticking to ((:

Now if I had multiple PCs that download at the same time, the utilization will go up but I'm only using 1 or 2 PCs at a time and have never used more than 1meg.

The speedtest.net baseline on my $14.99 service is about 3.2mbp down /1.2 up. So you may want to test and if you're not getting the minimum bandwidth, definitely call them up and let them know.

For what it's worth, I'm consistently getting 28.5 Mbps down / 6 Mbps up for $55 from Comcast here in Albuquerque. 28.5 Mbps is acceptably quick but 6 Mbps up is just marginally useful. (10 years ago, the same $55 got me 3 Mbps down / 768 Kbps up, so at least it's heading in the right direction.)

Verizon FIOS, Wilmington, Delaware. $55/month. From my laptop, Wireless N.



...Jerry

Byron, something is definitely wrong with your connection. I regularly get 15 to 19Mbps downloads from most sites i visit.

For around $50 a month.

Century Link recently ran fiber to my neighborhood, they claim they will be offering 100 Mbps up/down "soon". I told them to give me a call when that happens.

"Byron, something is definitely wrong with your connection. I regularly get 15 to 19Mbps downloads from most sites i visit."
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Kelly,

Byron was responding to my post above where I described the heavily advertised (deceptive) Time Warner offer of internet at $14.99 a month as a regular price for "high speed internet".

If you read my rather lengthy response to your post above you will see that Byron actually read it and was replying that he took Time Warner up on that offer I described, and is confirming that it WAS a grossly slower internet which one would not know unless one called and asked them as I did.

John

A bit of a tangent comment on online storage in general -- and it also shows that I'm behind the times....

--- Why on Earth would I want to upload work, files, etc. of mine to some server who-knows-where that someone somewhere could hack ? Call me old fashioned and paranoid, but I'd rather have everything on local drives, etc. - including backups of said work. At least I know then its safe. I'm sure cloud computing has many advantages, but for me it's just not worth the risk. Even simple PDF converter cloud generators... how does one know someone isn't keeping a copy somewhere unbeknownst to the user?

And local drive-to-drive speeds are much faster too...

As I said, I'm not in the with-it crowd on this.
Call me a Luddite. :)

And of course you don't have to pay for the hard drive you bought every month. Cloud storage is cloud cuckoo land as far as I'm concerned.

Soniclight, I couldn't agree with you more. The "cloud" is aptly labeled. Once you putting anything up there, you have no idea who is looking at it, copying it, and if the cloud "crashes" due to a lighting strike, well......

My 2cents worth

TomG

@Kit and Tom G

I thought my view was going to be an aberration here, shunned for sacrilege...
Nice to know I'm not alone.

"And of course you don't have to pay for the hard drive you bought every month.."
Indeed. For that price one can buy a shiny, new hold-it-in-your-hands real HD every month.

Cloud computing is probably useful for big companies who have really high-tech and expensive laser-beams, temperature change and pressure plate protected server rooms -- essentially just company network extended online.

But for the basic consumer or even small companies, something like Google Drive or any other of these general cloud parking lots just seem too risky to me. Just like SD drives still have not overtaken the overall hard drive market yet due to their downsides, cloud computing, its security and other aspects still seem to have a way to go before one could consider them safe and totally reliable.

In the mean time, I'll stick to being out-of-fashion rather than out-of-luck. :)

Maybe I'm not getting something here too. Cloud storage is more geared towards smaller file storage. Has anyone tried to download a gig of data from the cloud?

I can transfer tens of gigs across drives in less than 10 minutes.

I have an app that updates regularly and the updates are 2gigs or more. It takes hours depending of the time of day. So I generally try to do the updates late at night. The first 3gig took about 6hours. Not practical for the files sizes us video jocks are accustomed to dealing with.

Maybe I'm taking this out of context or someone can shed some light on the max download speeds these cloud services provide for large files. (: