I have found it to be a significant improvement, 25% overall bandwidth improvement upstream and downstream. Current stats indicated:
3.7 megabits per second
Communications 3.7 megabits per second
Storage 453.9 kilobytes per second
1MB file download 2.3 seconds
Subjective rating Awesome
provided by: http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/
Stats posted effective Mar 23 | 12:00pm
I got 2.5Mbit/s on the non-extreme but that's really subjective as it depends on unreliable internet traffic. To test speed you need to download something from a shaw server so that you remove the internet from the equation. I believe shaw still has a tucows mirror but I haven't been there in a while. A good test for us in edmonton is too download something from the UofA because we don't have to leave the shaw backbone to get to the UofA network.
To further state this point, I got 3741 Kbps from Speakeasy (dslreports) and on good days I have seen over 6000 Kbps. One of the other sites gave me 450Kps today.
A few weeks ago I downloaded WinXP64 RC2 at over 800 KBps that's well over 6Mbps.
So that brings me to having extreme versus not having extreme. I have looked into it and this is what I have found out. This is somewhat AFAIK as it does involve answers from 3rd parties and shaw marketing (both of which can be very unreliable sources)
1) Shaw can't cap the bandwidth old CyberSurfer Wave modems. Thus it is possible for someone to obtain as good or better download speeds than someone with extreme. I have seen this in action.
2) The Upload speed on extreme is definitely higher than non-extreme. I never see much over 550 Kbps up and people with extreme have broken 1000 Kbps up. Great for people serving up bittorrents or webservers.
3) Residential Extreme customers have a 50GB transfer limit per month. Non-Extreme customers have no stated limit but it is implied that it is less than 50GB (rumor has it it's 20GB). Anyone constantly hitting the 20-50GB range on the non-extreme are going receive recommendations to upgrade to Extreme or lower their bandwidth usage.
4) My boss asked shaw what the advantages Extreme provided and they said that basically that extreme users are going to receive more consistant high bandwidth than the non-extreme customers. Unlike regular cable server where some neighbourhoods are over saturated with users (and/or abusers), the extreme networks are going to kept a ratio where there is at least 5Mbit/s bandwidth available per customer. I have heard rumors that the DOCSIS modems are even capped at 5Mpbs to help with this.
So for me who currently lives in a community without much cable bandwidth use, I have no plans to switch to Extreme. Especially since AFAIK know it would require me to buy a new modem. However I am moving in may and if my connection slows down as a result, I probably would switch to extreme later this year.
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