Comcast took over from Time Warner in the Houston cable TV market. One of the things they've recently done was to bump up our internet download speed from 5Mbps to 6Mbps. I do a lot of video conferencing in iChat, and was hoping the upload speed would increase from 384 Kbps, but it didn't.

I then found out I could upgrade my service to 8Mbps down, 768Kbps up, so I changed my service over the weekend. The upload speed increased, but the download speed didn't change. I ended up having to swap out my old cable modem. The new one's less than half the size of the old one.

Before the change, I was getting speeds of 4,500 kbps down, 350 kbps up at Speakeasy Speed Test. After the network upgrade I was getting 5,500 down/350 up. When I upgraded my service I started getting 5,500 down/720 up. After swapping out the modem I'm now getting 22,000 down, 1,900 up

I'm not the only one getting faster speeds, Dwight Silverman has written about it in his Tech Blog at the Houston Chronicle. Apparently Comcast is also rolling out something called PowerBoost that gives you access to untapped capacity.

Here's an iChat with my folks and my brother. My parents are on DSL in Mexico, my brother on cable in Wisconsin. Normally when we'd have a 3-way chat the picture quality for all involved would be about the same as the image of my parents. Now my brother's image doesn't change in quality.

For grins, I invited my buddy Bryan in for a 4-way chat. He's on cable in Corpus Christi, a couple hundred miles south of Houston. Before the faster speeds, 4-way video was pretty futile.