LUS Promotion Offers Free Speed…A+ speeds

LUS is running one of its typically underpromoted promotions. This one is a lot of fun: free speed. Every internet customer is getting bumped up a full speed tier for August and September. Announced on LUS fiber’s facebook page not long ago and on their web site the promotion lets a subscriber experience a 30 meg symmetrical speed if you are paying for 10 and a 50 meg connection if you are subscribed at 30 and — wait for it: a 100 meg connection if you’ve normally got 50.

I’m paying for a 50 meg connection so I am set up to be getting a 100 meg right now. And I am. I tested it out using both SpeedTest and M-Labs—SpeedTest is the most popular of the online tests and M-Labs is the techno-policy-nerd’s favorite toy. M-Labs says I’m doing good: 93 megs down and 80 megs up with just 21 ms of latency. SpeedTest thinks I’ve got 94.5 down and 53.76 upload speeds also with 21 ms latency. And that’s to a server in Houston about 200 miles away as the crow flies. Between overhead and the vagaries of routers in multiple hops along the way those are the sorts of numbers I’d expect , being the practical sort.

Speaking of practical, you might reasonably ask what sorts of numbers you’d see when doing something practical like downloading a real file big enough to demonstrate the value of 100 megs of service. Two nights ago I downloaded Apples newest operating system: OS X 7—Lion. It weighs in at a monstrous 3.76 GB. The average US user, according to Akamai, gets 5.3 mbps of download speed. At that rate, according to Gaijin, downloading the OS would take about an hour and a half. I downloaded it in about 6.5 minutes…which works out to something in the range of 75 mbps.

All in all LUS Fiber offers astonishing speeds—SpeedTest gives my test of the system an A+ , saying that its better than 99% of Americans get. I also tested my system a couple of months ago before my free upgrade and pulled down a reading of “only” 58 megs of download. That was an A+ rating at better than 99% too.

Lafayette, we’ve got it good…better than most of us probably realize.

Lagniappe: LUS is again running its “Refer a Friend” program—if you’ve got a friend who wants some of that insane internet (or any other service) and they give you as a reference you both get 50 bucks off your LUS Fiber bills.


Lagniappe 2: If you’re on LUS Fiber contribute your stats to the discussion @ speedTest: http://www.speedtest.net/wave/0f5c1a0f979e0aeahttp://www.speedtest.net/wave/0f5c1a0f979e0aea