As some of you know, I recently downgraded my cable service from RoadRunner to RoadRunner Lite in an effort to free up some cash flow for my debt reduction efforts. The difference in price turned out to be about $10/mo between the services (well, alot more with all the other services I dropped, but the difference between these two was only about $10/mo), but the difference in service turned out to be, noticibly, nada.

For those who don’t know, cable Internet is basically a shared bandwidth service. When you connect, your speed of connection is largely determined on how many people in your neighborhood are connected as well. There are no guarantees about the speeds of download and upload that you can actually achieve, because the outside forces (your neighbors) are outside of the cable company’s control. If there’s heavy usage on the line in your neighborhood, your speeds drop. This is opposed to a DSL connection that is a dedicated pipe between you and the switching station, guaranteeing you a certain amount of bandwidth, irrelevant of your neighbors usage.

If you’re not getting your peak speeds when you have a high-speed package (3,7, and 10mbits as offered by TWC) then you’re paying for nothing more than the opportunity to have your modem capped at those higher speeds. I.e., you can get 1.5 mbits download, but your cable modem will SUPPORT 10 mbits. And you know what that means, right? That you’ll still get 1.5 mbits download if your modem was capped at the lower costing 7 mbits package, and you’ll still get 1.5 mbits download if your modem was capped at the even lower costing 3 mbits package.

Essentially that’s what I realized about my service. While I was paying for the regular 3 mbits down, I wasn’t getting it. I was CAPABLE of getting it, but the lines between me and the cable company weren’t going to support it, at least not in my neighborhood. So when I dropped to their absolute lowest costing package, I noticed no difference at all on my download speeds.

Also remember, that Internet speeds are also capped out at the maximum speed between you and the host you are connecting to. If the websites your visiting are hosted on a computer with a 1 mbit connection to the Internet, it doesn’t matter that you have a blazing fast 10 mbit connection between you and your cable company, the fastest download you can possibly achieve from that host is 1 mbit.

So, I scaled down to a 768k connection.

Now, where I did notice a difference is the upstream. I regularly connect to my home box from work and download files to my work PC. During this transfer, you are capped at your cable modem’s upstream speed, which I did see go down. Not enough to make me upgrade, but it was a noticeable difference. However, for most cable users your upstream is generally irrelevant.

In related news, The Consumerist recently ran an article detailing how the bigger bottle of Act Mouthwash wasn’t just a bigger bottle of the same product as the regular size bottle, but a downgraded version of it. You can check this story out here.

And, just for another personal touch, the bigger jar of the store brand crunchy peanut butter that my daughter’s like is actually more expensive, price per ounce, than the smaller jars. It pays to check those PPU labels on the shelves.

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