I have considered buying my own modem but I keep dragging my feet. We pay to "rent" the Comcast equipment every month but a good modem is pricey. I figure it's a tradeoff since if the modem craps out they will just swap it out with a new one. Also if I buy one the troubleshooting will always be on me.
My son te My son tells me that the download speed is the most important for general net browsing or streaming. If below 5 mbps it is slow as.. good is 8mbps, 11 excellent. Just tested my speed and it is a woeful 1mbps. Since we had NBN Optical Fibre I have had nothing but net problems. I lose net connection more now than I ever did with the old ADSL format.
A new router made all the difference in the world. Plus, I don't know if it helped but I also switched out the Ethernet cable for a cat-8 cable.
I have no idea what my Internet download and upload speeds are, but they're more than fast enough for me even if they're the slowest you can get!
It looks like the last time I checked mine was back when this thread first started, and we had Comcast. For the last several years, we have had AT&T with their low-income service (which is the slowest speeds that they offer), and I can see that it is much slower than the comcast connection was doing.
Yvonne--is that on an Apple device or a PC? For some reason, my Apple devices have much better speeds than my Dell laptops. It doesn't make much difference in the grand scheme, but I think it's strange.
My PC shows a much slower Internet speed than my Macs. While I can see that the PC might be slower, I would think the connection speed should be the same.
That is from my iPad, @Beth Gallagher . We have the very slowest connection that AT&T offers. It is for low income and only costs $10 a month. It is not actually a whole lot worse than when we had Comcast and paid a whole lot more. AT&T is the only provider here that has a plan for seniors. Comcast also has a low income plan, but it is only for people with school age children. Each provider is supposed to offer a low income plan, but they can offer whatever service and to whatever customers that they want to offer their plan to. It works for us, and we can watch movies or youtube videos or whatever else we want to do, so for us, it is a good trade off.
I have often wondered who on earth needs the speeds that Comcast is always bragging about with their more pricey services. I suppose gamers or software developers, but the typical residential customer doesn't need or care about anything but what you stated. Of course a house full of people and attached devices, all of them gaming, streaming, etc. would be a different story I suppose.