I’ve moved my SamKnows FCC broadband testing unit from one location to another in the middle of the month. The first location had one of the best home Internet plans available from BrightHouse networks (now Spectrum after the Charter purchase), the “Lighting 200” plan. The new location has the best available AT&T U-Verse plan, limited by the distance from a central office and older wires. AT&T did set me up with a bonded pair (using 2 phone lines, or 4 wires to provide better service).   The U-Verse plan is much slower, on both downlink and uplink, but is perfectly serviceable. The graphs below do show the stark contrast in available bandwidth.

I am going to miss the 24 up / 200 down of BrightHouse, but the 5 up / 30 down on U-Verse is still enough bandwidth for most needs.

The quality of the service has also gone down slightly, with slightly higher rates of packet loss and slightly higher latencies.

The extra 12 ms of latency isn’t much to worry about, but it is a definite change. The jump from almost no packet loss to 0.5 to 1 percent packet loss is annoying, and you can see that even on the worst day Spectrum / BrightHouse   is better than AT&T U-Verse on an average day.