Who would have thought that one of our blog readers would be married to the data engineer manager at Cox? Thanks to Joy, one of our readers (and a fellow photographer – you can see her work here), we’re enjoying fast cable Internet speeds like never before… So, after saying that I felt Cox was overpriced and slow, I feel I should follow up with what I’ve learned.

Richard, Joy’s husband and the data engineer manager, did some checking into our neighborhood cable and actually uncovered an issue that was interfering with the cable speed and reliability. After fixing that issue, he emailed me (within one day… talk about customer service!) and inquired about our speeds. It didn’t seem to make a really big difference to me, so he offered to swing by and check out our setup here at home to do some further testing/investigating.

Embarrassingly enough, it turns out that I was mistaking “KBps” for “Kbps.” Yeah, I can hear you all saying, “Hey, those look the same to me.” Actually I had forgotten, but the small “b” stanks for bits and the capital “B” stands for bytes. One byte = roughly 8 bits, so 100KBps = roughly 800Kbps. That was my issue. I was expecting upload speeds of 500KBps when I was getting around 100. Turns out my 100KBps is actually more than the expected 500Kbps that my level of cable Internet comes with.

So, besides a little helping of humble pie, we’re doing really well with our cable Internet speeds after all. And in the not-too-distant future, it sounds like we can expect to have increased burst speeds uploading, which will be very nice indeed!

Thanks, Joy & Richard, for being so proactive and helpful! I’ll tell ya, it’s really nice to have such well-connected readers! =)

Happy Thanksgiving week, everyone!