Gig speed

I left work early yesterday to meet up with the Comcast installer who was actually a few minutes EARLY for the three o’clock appointment, something that I don’t believe ever happened before.  The installer was great guy by the name of Clinton who was very friendly and had good energy, again, something I am not used to when dealing with Comcast.  The install of my new gig internet with an Xfi gateway went smoothly.

Clinton asked me the SSID and passcode for my old WIFI and configured Xfi with the same.  He claimed that by doing this I would not need to reconfigure my existing wifi devices.  I told him that has not been my experience in the past.  He assured me it should work.  Of course, it didn’t.  Cindy and I spent about a half hour going around the house reconnecting about a dozen different wifi devices.

I had to do other stuff as well to make the Xfi box play nice with my local network.  The speed of the new set up is indeed awesome.  I got 950+ mb per sec on a download test and over 40 mb per sec going up.  The fatter download pipe is nice but to be honest I am more excited about the fatter upload stream which is nearly four times more than previously.  It should help dramatically cut down on the time it takes to upload YouTube content.

The WIFi performance and range was better than my old ASUS set up as well.  Really the only negative is Xfi dumbs down your configuration options, significantly limiting customization for stuff like port forwarding.  I don’t have nearly the options that I would with a conventional wifi router but I think I can get by with what options I have available.  I look forward to life in the fast lane from here on out, with no data cap.