Time Warner’s EarthLink Internet Loses the Race
I currently subscribe to the EarthLink High Speed Internet service from Time Warner Cable of New York and New Jersey.
I’d like to point out the irony of that service’s name: High Speed
For starters, let me tell you how I ended up with this particular service.
I used to be subscribed to TWC’s Road Runner High Speed Online service. I called last week telling them that I was going to cancel my service, but before I did that, I wanted to see if they could offer me better upload speeds. After waiting on hold for a few minutes, I was told that they could switch me from Road Runner to EarthLink and reduce my month charge to $29.99 per month for 12 months.
My first reaction was to think this was a bad deal. Essentially, I was going to be getting the same service from a different provider, but my issue of slow upload speeds remained unresolved. After a minute, it occurred to me that the ratio of speed to price was improving in my favor. Not quite a great victory, but a small step that didn’t leave me any worse off.
The service advertises, “Speeds of up to 10 Mbps downstream and up to 512 Kbps upstream.” I frequently run speed tests, and they generally come in at 90% of these advertised rates. The download speeds are not fantastic, but at least they’re usable for most websites and streaming video. The upload speeds, however, are completely useless for anything other than sending an email or making and HTTP request. Come to think of it, these speeds have hardly increased at all in the many years since I first subscribed to a high speed internet service.
The web has grown to include so many rich and interactive sites that facilitate social networking and the sharing of photos, audio, and video. But while the amount of content and interaction has grown exponentially, bandwidth has stayed locked in at speeds that are only 1 order of magnitude faster than the last dial up modem I had in the mid 1990s, in the case of uploading.
How are we supposed to share photos and videos when it takes me almost 2 hours to upload 80 pictures to Flickr from my family get-together last weekend? How are we supposed to use Skype Video calls when the image quality must be severely limited by unreasonably small upload caps?
Clearly the marketplace is leaving a huge gap for someone to come and offer even modestly better service. I hear great things about Verizon FIOS and can’t wait for the day it’s available at my apartment. The most frustrating part is that I get similar upload speeds on both my cell phone and my “high speed” internet connection while the peer bandwidth sharing agreements amongst the big ISPs essentially reduces their bandwidth cost to zero.
It’s a good thing that, when I called and threatened to cancel, they didn’t know that FIOS wasn’t available in my building. But hey, at least I’m saving $15 a month, albeit on crappy service.
