A number of years ago, well before MPECS Inc. was conceived, we had an ISP connection that was cable based and was extremely fast for the day. Then along came Shaw.
Since things went sour back then Shaw has come _a long way_ to bringing both their services and their customer service levels up. Since we have a few clients that are fortunate enough to have cable access in their businesses we have had our fair share of working with Shaw over the years. Thus we were able to see the improvement in their services and customer service firsthand.
So, as of today we switched out our home 3Mbit DSL connection for a Shaw Extreme 15Mbit connection and boy oh boy is there a tangible difference in the way our Internet runs here:
That is 1.29MB/Second with the rate bouncing up and down between 1.56MB/Sec and 1.24MB/Sec. The download is a test download of Windows XP Mode from Microsoft.
This is a Call of Duty: United Offensive demo game download from Activision.com:
This one bounced around between 2.30MB/Sec down through 1.84MB/Sec with it settling in at close to the 2MB/Sec mark.
Now, this is all fine and dandy since the time here is just around when kids will be coming home from school. Since cable Internet is a shared pipe, the real test of the new setup will be to run the above download tests during “peak” usage times to see if we still have those speeds.
With speeds like this, ADSL service seems almost stone age at 6Mbit . . . though one of our local DSL providers has just started offering 15Mbit speeds.
And one more thing, with a Windows Home Server sitting on our network beside our old SBS 2003 R2 box there are no issues with Shaw’s dynamic IP as our homeserver.com DNS has already changed to the new IP address.
Our home network is a prime candidate for Microsoft’s new SBS 2011 Essentials “Aurora” product when it RTMs. This is because our local Outlook clients here connect to our company’s Exchange servers instead of the local SBS 2003 R2 Exchange 2003 to keep things simple. Monique and I share calendars, task lists, contacts, and more via Outlook and Public Folders.
We will probably end up running SBS 2011 Essentials on one of HP’s new MicrosServers or maybe building a small box to run the OS. We have not had any time to test the product in its beta form yet.
UPDATE: I managed to finger fumble publish the post in WLW.
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.
