Damn, I'm jealous. Had Charter back in MN, obviously speeds weren't like that back then though. Right now I actually have two services hooked up side by side for comparison's sake. U-Verse gets 25mbit down and 3mbit up, speed tests show better than 95% of those ratings pretty consistently. Time Warner Road Runner is like 18Mbit down and 1.8Mbit up, though it fluctuates considerably more, I don't even remember what the advertised package is. They have some burst mode that's utterly useless, and as far as I can tell is designed so speed tests give much better results than you get in practice.
Anyway, I'm going to cancel U-Verse. The throughput is as good as I can get around here, but sadly the pings are unacceptable. With their half-assed fiber implementation they automatically add 12ms or so of latency thanks to the interleaving that takes place at the node where the fiber gets pushed through your god damned telephone lines. Not only that but the routing is ridiculous. With Time Warner I get a 9ms ping to my work server. With U-Verse it's 31ms or so. When I do a traceroute I can plainly see that they decided to bound basically all my traffic up to LA from San Diego, even if it's destined for San Diego. It's not a huge deal for work, but for gaming it's terrible. And the routing doesn't seem to get much better for other places. I tested the Call of Duty 4 server list, with Road Runner I'll get plenty of 30-50ms pings, with U-Verse I'll get one or two in the 75 range and the rest are over 100.
God I hope Verizon or someone encroaches into San Diego County.
