Bother, said Pooh, as he connected at 19.9kbps

Remember when 56k was great.  You'd connect at 19.9k and hit the disconnect button until you got one of those magical "high speed" connections so you wouldn't have to sit around waiting for stuff to load?

 Comcast has been bugging me for about three months to upgrade my modem to Docsis3.0.  It is faster.  It is better.  It will make me waffles every morning.

OK, I may have made up that last part.  But I did a speed test because I was wondering what the big deal is.  I own my modem and it is working fine so I hate to have to go spend $100 on something I don't need when I could use it for something I'd rather have.  Here are the results:

I think that's pretty darn fast.  Just a quick calculation tells me that 9.69 MEGAbytes is one hundred and seventy three times as fast as the old standard of 5.6 KILObytes.  Comcast, however, is not happy.  They want me to be faster.  They want it badly enough that they are sending me weekly emails telling me how much better my life would be if only I would upgrade.  That's a speed increase of 35% per year on average and now they are telling me that it isn't good enough.

What are they getting out of this?  Presumably happier customers.  They don't make money off the modem I buy, my bill hasn't gone up, and they are not requiring me to purchase any service upgrades.  I, however, will have better service for a small upfront investment.

Don't tell me that capitalism doesn't work.