Actually, I'm getting a whole 243k theoretical, and about 180k actual speed at the moment; more like the multi channel ISDN I had in Ireland in 2001.
My ISP (Qwest choice - not regular Qwest, an entirely different division, with different tech support, different billing systems, different everything really) is currently experiencing a major regional failure. Apparently the have a trunk cut and a router failure, and it's knocked out Qwest choice customer in all of Chandler, Glendale, Scottsdale, and parts of Tempe and Phoenix.
Joy.
So I am currently enjoying the thrilling speeds and convenience of access provided by EDGE-G2, through my smartphone.
Though my phone is capable of 3.5G speeds over UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA, my mobile provider is unfortunately not; at least not until either later in 2008, when in theory they will be rolling out 14Mbit/sec download speeds (to crush AT&T and Verizons offerings).
Coincidentally this is set to show up right around the time the next generation iPod is supposed to also show up, sporting 3.5g hardware.
Unfortunately, Qwest couldn't give me a firm estimate as to how long the outage would be. It's already been three hours, and they expect at least another 3, maybe as much as 8.
I say again, joy.
Normally this isn't too big deal. I can certainly live without the internet for a few hours. The problem is, I work from home, and all my work is done over the VPN into the office. No internet, rather obviously no VPN. No VPN, no work. No work bad.
Further, the VPN client and the phones internet connection do not get along. It works over a 3g/3.5g connection,. but there's something about the way edge works that just makes the Crisco 3000 concentrators VPN client go insane. I've tried it with many different VPNs, on several different systems, and I can never seem to get it to work properly for more than a few minutes at a time.
Did I mention I couldn't wait until t-mobile gets 3/3.5G? It's almost enough to make me want to switch to AT&T (we're GSM people)... almost, but not quite.
UPDATE: Looks like we went back up around 3am.
Of course in reviewing my firewall logs to figure that out, I discover that I'm being constantly portscanned from ports 135 to 65535, from sources 130.13.0.0 - 130.13.255.254; with some extra special hits on typical vuln ports. Storm worm botnet probably; but the fact that they've compromised an entire class B... oy.
So I call up the abuse admin at Qwest, and they don't even know about this netblock. It's some old local Denver thing from when Qwest was MUCH smaller, and it's not even supposed to be routed right now. They don't know what's going on, or who's responsible for it.
I'd say "wow, that makes me so confident in Qwest" except I didn't have any confidence to begin with.
