The interwebs will get you through college, bro. And you can play some lag-free games whilst pretending to do your assignments!

Isn't that what life is all about?

What? That's like saying that more people would get diarrhea if laxatives were distributed to all Americans...of course it will happen.

Perhaps that's not the best analogy.

A disagree? really? Then I assume that means someone believes bandwidth always fixes everything.

Here is an extreme example, try packing 10000 50gb bluray disks in the back of a pickup truck and deliver them an hour away. Your bandwidth would be about 130,000Mbps, but you latency is 3,600,000ms

That's kinda what has happened in my area. See, I have Comcast. Comcast is in fact already acting on this FCC thing as we speak. They're rebranding as Xfinity and pushing better cable and higher internet speeds (supposed to be up to 100mbps by the end of the year). Well for right now they're just doing it in major cities (from what I read on a press release they did). So of course they're hitting places like Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Atlanta. Just hitting those really major ones there to start off right now....but the funny thing was, amidst those major cities that they're using as a start point, they also started with Chattanooga, TN to lump into that first wave of their rebranding. Now I don't actually live in Chattanooga, but I live in the surrounding area, so we're affected by this (sort of metropolitan area). Anyways, just recently our electric company TVA installed fiber optics throughout the city and some of the outlying areas. This apparently had a semi-crippling effect on Comcast in the area (judging by what I learned talking to some Comcast technicians). Leads me to further believe it hurt them bad because they placed our minor city of Chattanooga into that first wave of cities to boost internet service (the fiber optics that TVA used and the service they provide is pushing 100mbps already).

Anyways, just thought it was funny seeing Comcast having it handed to them. But the main point here is: yes this plan is real and it's already in effect even by Comcast in certain areas. And from everything I've heard, they've mandated that the speeds be up to 100mbps (that's 100 times faster than the advertised speed from Comcast now), before the year is out.

On that note, anybody know a reliable place to test internet speed connection? I go to SpeedTest.net and it says my download is 6.9mbps down and 3.84mbps down. BandwidthPlace says 3.24mbps up and 4.08mbps down. Speakeasy tells me I've got 7.4mbps down and 3.18mbps down. And another site says 0.6mbps down and 2.16mbps up. Results from each site are about as different as they can be. I don't get it.

The speed test results are highly dependent on where the test server is located. And it's not just geographic location, it also depends how much stuff is between you and the server. Just because you have 100Mbps from your ISP doesn't mean you will get that end to end. In fact you rarely will as many servers will cap your bandwidth.

If you run a speed test against a server at your ISP then you will likely get great speeds. Once you get outside your ISP you are contending for bandwidth with everyone else.