…actually announces something good. Again. Time Warner is giving its subscribers a new year’s gift of enhanced downstream speed for their broadband customers, an increase of 2Mbit for most folks, including me. This is great and much appreciated, but since I’m an irritable fellow I’ll once again ask: Where is my fucking upstream bandwidth!!! This is the second time in the past couple of years Time Warner has increased my downstream, but without the attendant upstream bandwidth it’s increasingly less useful to me, since most of my use of downstream use is limited by my available upstream due to the way P2P apps like Direct Connect and BitTorrent work. I subscribed to Time Warner’s product over 5 years ago and my upstream is substantially less now than it was when I started.

Repeat after me: content companies should not be in the access business. They’re conflicted. Keep your fingers crossed that Verizon’s Fiber to the Premises efforts work out.

(and lest anyone think I’m simply a pirate using my bandwidth to scarf content illegally, I’ll point out that increasingly the legal content I acquire is coming to me via P2P apps, especially bit torrent. I haven’t downloaded a game mod or patch that hasn’t used bit torrent in several months now. Time warmer could increase my downstream 1000 fold and I wouldn’t get the files any faster, whereas if they would only double my upstream, I would get them twice as fast. See the problem?)