Oddly enough, despite my recent posts about Need for Speed Undercover, this post really has nothing to do with it. Well, now it does since I mentioned it. And since I mentioned it, I’ll also mention that I’ve stopped playing it. Couldn’t keep my attention and some of the races were frustrating.

In any case, the real reason for speed is that we upped our Internet speed with our ISP, Embarq. Previously, we were at 3.0 mbps (Well, 1.5 but I’ll get to that), and now we’re at 5.0 mbps. Faster is gooder, yes?

So why did we up the speed? Do I need it for what I work on at home? No, not really. Do I need it for online gaming? No, not really, that’s still pretty quick and I don’t have much lag there. So why?

Netflix!

Laura and I recently signed up for Netflix, and it’s pretty cool. We have the 2 DVDs out at a time thing and they offer online streaming for free. Since we have an XBox 360, we can stream movies from Netflix over it.

When we first got the Netflix account, we were running on a slower speed, and I could never get anything above 2 bars (out of 4, kinda like a cellphone) for the picture quality. You’ve got to get to 3 or 4 bars to hit HD quality. Needless to say, this made The Office look a little less clear, and No Country For Old Men was obviously “blurry” in some spots.

So we increased the speed and watched some episodes of The Office last night. The conclusion? HD Netflix streaming totally rocks. Absolutely great. I really think online streaming is the way the future should go. No more discs, just streaming. Hopefully this happens, but we’ll have to have the Internet infrastructure for it to work.

So, what was our old speed? I ran by SpeedTest before the upgrade to see what it would register. It basically came up at 1.5 mbps download, where as we were paying for 3.0 mbps. I thought that maybe the site had a fluke or something, so I decided to wait for the 5.0 mbps to see what it would say about our connection then.

I figured if it came in at 5.0 mbps then Embarq had our account incorrectly configured. If it came in at 3.0 mbps then I would ask Embarq if they could verify we were indeed getting 5.0 mbps. And if it came in on some other odd number, like 2.5 mbps, then I would disregard its results entirely. It came in at 5.0 mbps.

So I’ve got to get ahold of Embarq and yell at them because we were probably running 1.5 mbps for quite some time, the entire life of the account since we’ve been in the new house. That may net us a decent refund.

When they upgraded the line in the DSL box outside my house, they left a connection loose too, so I had to figure out why the phones and Internet were all out… Bastards. But I fixed it because I’m The Man. Haha.