, 2 min read

Surfing the internet with 100 MBit/s

This week I upgraded again, this time from 50 MBit/s to 100 MBit/s. My internet service provider is Unitymedia with whom I had positive experience since 2009, see Unitymedia experience. They phoned me mid of November and asked whether I would be interested in upgrading from 50 to 100, it would cost 2 euros more per month. I said yes. Here we go. I pay 35 euros per month for 100 MBit/s and a telephone flat rate within whole Germany.

During last week apparently Unitymedia switched me to the higher speed, leading to a single connection failure while I was online. The rest was painless. Of course, my home equipment must now be upgraded to fully support the speed, i.e., my FritzBox 7170 is no longer capable of handling this high-speed, so I substituted this with a new Gigabit router (TL-WR1043ND).

In Cisco Cablemodem Signal to Noise Ratio I provided the values for the case of 50 MBit/s. Below you'll find the values for 100 MBit/s. Power level has decreased a little bit, while signal-to-noise ratio remained as good as before. BTW, modem is at 192.168.100.1. CiscoEPC3208-100

This was the old speed with 50 MBit/s, as measured by speedtest.unitymedia.de (dead link) -- now use T-Online speedtest. Speed was probably limited by the FritzBox 7170 router. UnitymediaSpeed1

This is the new speed measured directly at the modem without any switches between laptop and DPC3208 modem: Unitymedia100M1

Do I personally notice the difference between slow 50 MBit/s and fast 100 MBit/s in everydays surfing? A little bit, but no wow-effect. I guess that I now surf faster than many websites can actually deliver their content to me.