Several colleagues have mentioned that we were selected to participate in a new Covad Blogger Relations program. And things have begun to move.

Today Covad came out and installed a shiny Cisco 1721 router and the end termination to the T1 circuit that Qwest installed here a week or two ago. So right now, I'm the sole user of a dedicated T1 to the Internet. I'll write more about the experience over the weekend. I'll also do some comparison testing with DSL and cable modem, since I have both. I'll post all the comparison stuff here.

What's quite noticeable to me isn't necessarily the speed. I sometimes get really good downlink speed on the cable. Sometimes, but less so on the DSL. But both are contention-based network designs. It's the nature of those architectures. That means, after school, in the evenings and at peak usage times, the real throughput drops. Sometimes it's painfully obvious.

What I noticed immediately with a dedicate T1 is the consistency of performance. Guaranteed bandwidth and throughput with no contention issues assures a very consistent quality of service. So far, that's making for an awesome user experience.

I'll be doing some VoIP specific testing over the Covad services as they ripple through here for testing, but for the moment, I'll go for raw performance comparisons first.


Technorati Tags: Covad Blogger Relatiions, Covad, T1, dedicated T1, network performance.