Bandwidth Woes

I've been noticing some oddities with the Road Runner cable internet connection here in Dallas, and those oddities have somewhat manifested themselves in the results of the 48 tests I've run over the past few weeks at SpeedTest.net. They're quite literally all over the map.

The best connection I've found is to a server in Newark, NJ. The connection routes via Chicago over the Telia net and achieves a respectable 23.49 Mbps average download speed.

Strangely, as the servers get closer to the Dallas area, the downstream bandwidth appears to minimize. The download speed from Wichita, KS, is about 23.0 Mbps, and the average download speed from servers here in Dallas is in the 16-17 Mbps range.

All across the US, the ping times are pretty reasonable, in the 40-100 ms range.

At the horrible end of the test results is, unsurprisingly, Accra, Ghana. Now, Ghana actually has pretty good internet connectivity in general, and they consistently beat the USA in average national broadband speed by a wide margin (2-3 Mbps in the USA vs. 7-8 Mbps in Ghana). However, the SpeedTest host there can really only deliver about 0.71 Mbps. It's amusing for amusement's sake, really, and not a reflection on Ghana as a whole.

The really depressing thing about all these SpeedTest tests I've been performing is upload speed. The cable connection here seems to have an upstream cap of about 0.5 Mbps. Note that's even lower than the downstream speed from Accra. It's pretty terrible, and it really limits my ability to do certain things on the internet, like use my work VPN at decent speeds. At least I'm not serving up web pages locally anymore.