So, as the previous post probably makes clear, we’ve switched ISPs. Gone are the $50/month days of Earthlink (yeah, we know; we’ve just been paying the bill for five years without bothering to check other deals). Welcome to the $25/month days of SBC, with better than twice the bandwidth (3Mbps down, .5 up).

The sudden influx of speed made us wonder what the next step might be. For 15 years or more, we’ve thought of the T1 as the holy grail of bandwidth, but we realized we didn’t actually know how fast it was. Turns out, “T1 speed” is about half what we’re getting from SBC, but it’s symmetric (1.54Mbps both ways). As Mike pointed out, time was that a T1 made you an ISP (well, you’d also need a modem bank and a shitload of inbound lines); now, a T1 means 10-year-olds laugh at you.

Ah, life in the future.