How fast is that high-speed connection?

Yes please, bring your laptop! (Heaven forbid you fully check out.) You can get online faster now than you could even a year or two ago. But, leave your hometown expectations behind. News of St. John recently reported that as many as 40 percent of villas now offer some kind of Wi-Fi connection. That is unquestionably great news, but in reality, here’s what you can expect:

Ackley Communications just informed its customers they were being upgraded from a 2.5 megabit download speed to 3.8 megabits. Choice Communications, which is the dominant broadband provider on St. John offers a basic package that is 1.9 megabits down, with their most popular service giving 2.6 megabits down. Those numbers are in a perfect world on a perfect day, and we’ve never had a connection even close that good. (Compare those top speed downloads to a typical stateside service, say Comcast, which provides as much as 12 megabits downstream.)

 In reality, the very, very best you can expect is something about 30 percent as fast as you’re probably used to. But that’s still a whole lot better than it was a couple of years ago. So go ahead. Let work ruin an otherwise perfect week.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 12:05 am and is filed under General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.