December 14, 2006 - Shaw Broadband Extreme and Nitro Plans
Canada's fastest Internet connection is soon coming to Thunder Bay. Already available is Shaw Cable's Extreme plan which offers 10mb download speeds and 1mb upload speed. The Nitro plan will soon offer 25mb download speed. This is ideal for businesses that rely on software that works through the Internet or for gamers that can utilize the high speeds when playing online games. The regular broadband cable and ADSL speeds run at 6mb download and 0.5mb upload. After installing this service and several of my client locations, I must say that the speed is very noticable and the performance is unrivaled - their web-enabled apps run like professionally hosted websites and connecting through a system like Citrix is like logging into a computer on your network. The important value is the upload speed which limits the bandwidth at which your sever can send information to a client connection regardless of the client's download speed, both the Extreme and Nitro packages double the typical upload speed. Hopefully in the near future the backbone and equipment will support even higher upload speeds making the Internet faster than ever.

Out of curiousity, I ran a few speed tests using various servers (all tested from a client with a regular Shaw Broadband connection):

Sites hosted using a regular package from your local telephone and cable providers:
• Shaw Extreme Hosted Web Server: 121.7 kilobytes/second 973.6 kilobits/second
• ADSL Hosted Web Server: 49.1 kilobytes/second 392.8 kilobits/second

Professionally hosted sites:
• Web Server #1: 142.2 kilobytes/second 1137.6 kilobits/second
• Web Server #2: 231.9 kilobytes/second 1855.2 kilobits/second (Shaw hosted)
• Web Server #3: 160.8 kilobytes/second 1286.4 kilobits/second

By no means are these results scientific and may vary due to network traffic and other variables at time of test.