DigitalTVDojo

Do you remember back when Napster first came out – back in the heyday of pirated music and “illegal” file sharing? Man, I do. It was also right around that time that I bought my first CD burner (it was just a coincidence, I swear).

I remember like it was yesterday, sitting in front of my computer and browsing through all the songs I could download like a kid in a candy store. (Of course, for anyone reading this in an “official” capacity, I never actually DID download any of that stuff. Honest. I just looked.)

Anyway, I remember meeting up with a few friends at a bar shortly after I first installed Napster on my computer, and I was telling them about the software and how it worked. Suitably impressed, one of my friends asked the question that pretty much everyone asked who hadn’t used it before – “How long does it take to download a song?”

The formula I used was this – each minute of a song was about 1 MB in size, and each MB took a little over two minutes to download on my 56k modem. So a four-minute song would take about eight minutes to download. I told him this, and he was pretty impressed.

Why am I talking about all this Napster/56k modem/file downloading business?

Because yesterday I downloaded an entire album (legally, I might add) in under 30 seconds.

Let me repeat…

An entire album.

In under 30 seconds.

Jesus, things have sure changed, haven’t they?

The service I used to download that album is Comcast Cable Internet, and here’s the bottom line truth about it — the thing is freaking fast no matter how you slice it.

To show you what I’m talking about, I ran a speed test on my Comcast Internet connection at bandwidthplace.com to see just how fast it was (Comcast makes some pretty bold claims, and I wanted to see how truthful they were being.)

Check out these results…

Even I was blown away by that. So now that the performance question is settled, the next thing you probably want to know about is price, right?

This is a little more complicated, since it costs different amounts depending on what type of service you get (i.e. how fast do you want it to be?) and what other Comcast packages you have like TV service or broadband phone service.

“Officially,” Comcast Internet packages start just north of $40 a month to start and it goes up from there. The best connection is around $80 a month, so it ain’t cheap.

BUT YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PAY THAT!

When we were surfing around Comcast’s website to get some stats to put in this post, we noticed something strange.

Hidden away deep inside the site, on a page no one probably ever sees, was a special promotion where you can now get Comcast high-speed Internet for $19.95. Here’s the link. At first it didn’t make any sense to us so we checked it out…twice. And it IS legit. But you have to go to this page (click on the link) to get it.

So there you have it, loyal readers. I hope that helps you make a decision.

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