How Fast is Mediacom’s 1G service?

Our family has had CenturyLink internet services at the house for a while and they are reliable but the speed hasn’t been that great. It’s advertised at 60mb and normally I’d see 30-25 over ethernet, and ~10-15 over wifi. Sometimes that lagged even lower. Since we don’t have cable and all of our TVs and devices use the wifi it got pretty sluggish when everyone was home and one of the kids fired up Netflix while Jami and I were using Spotify in the kitchen. At any point in time Jami might have been syncing a huge load of new high res photos to the servers in the house or somewhere externally. I ended up running ethernet through parts of the house to try and combat it with mediocre results given the time invested.

As usage peaked with CenturyLink the modem would just stop working. This was a pretty tough thing for the kids (and me) if Elliott was in the middle of his big bridge scene and because I downloaded a file from box the internet ceased to work. Our network configuration didn’t gracefully handle internal traffic either so those big uploads for Jami’s art projects would fail even if the transfer was in the house.

Since moving from San Francisco I’ve long missed the connection I had there. It was advertised at 100mb and I got 100mb. Des Moines just hasn’t had that type of option for residential users that was available until Mediacom released the 1G plan.

Our office has incredibly fast internet because we sit on a fiber loop. I do not sit on a fiber loop at home and that has been painfully obvious!

Prior to the switch and right after I ran some basic speed tests and figured I’d post them so others could use them. All of the tests are done using the LinkSys Velop system. I didn’t notice an appreciable drop over a private or corporate VPN with either service so I didn’t take the time to post the speed numbers over VPN. I ended up going with the Velop over a few other options because of the MU-MIMO support and added control for each device. Thus far it appears to be working really well.

The set ups weren’t completely perfect comparisons. I was using a pair of Apple Airport Extreme’s initially as opposed to the LinkSys setup. I also used the google speed test as opposed to the speedtest.net one I used for the Mediacom connection. The wired Mediacom connection test is provided by Speedtest as well through the Velop admin. Minor nuances, but I thought worth mentioning.

the CenturyLink connection:

Wired:

Over Wifi:

On the Mediacom 1G connection:

Wired:

I’ll note that I did see it get up to ~630 at one point. I didn’t screenshot it though assuming I’d just keep seeing higher numbers and when I tried it again… I did not 🙂

Over Wifi:

Cost wise Mediacom is a little more expensive but not by much. By the time I was done moving stuff around I was able to significantly improve the performance to almost 500mb over wifi. Sitting about 6ft away from a child node connected without ethernet.

The Mediacom installer informed that there was a problem with my throughput and it’d be “super slow” until a service technician came back out. I’m sure there are also some things I could pay more attention to in the configuration but time will tell.

At this point I removed a number of wires just to clean stuff up because I hardly care about optimizing with this much speed. Based on the initial feedback from the installer, whenever the Mediacom service occurs on the line I’d assume the speed will end up going up.

All in all though, I’d call it the real deal. It’s worth noting that Mediacom has caps as opposed to CenturyLink which might be an important consideration for you. My family uses 1080p as opposed to 4K TVs and when we’re consuming a ton of bandwidth it’s in bursts. I also can’t speak to what I thought I was experiencing as throttles with CenturyLink compared to Mediacom because I haven’t had it for that long.

This isn’t a perfect experiment but if anyone has questions from Mediacom or CenturyLink please let me know. I’m sure anyone out there in the world could post different numbers but these are reflective of reality in my house.