Bell was scheduled to suspend my Sympatico DSL service at midnight, so I decided I’d stay up and wait for it to happen so I could connect my new Thomson SpeedTouch 516 DSL modem up in preparation for my TekSavvy DSL service to be activated in the morning. So I figured I’d get some last minute email and websurfing in and then settled into playing Call of Duty 4 online on my PS3. In other words, what I do almost every night. My plan was to play until I lost connection, then install the new DSL modem, then go to bed and reconfigure my router to connect to Teksavvy in the morning. Midnight rolled by and I was still taking out tangos. One o’clock AM came and went and I was still defending democracy from terrorists. By around 2:15 am, I decided that my tour of duty might never end, and called it quits for the night, Sympatico Internet connection still operational. In the back of my mind, I worried that Bell’s delay in disconnecting me was going to delay the activation of the new TekSavvy connection.

Looks like those worries were unfounded since when I got up this morning at 7:00 am, I found my AirPort Extreme router’s connection light flashing amber, indicating a connection problem. I connected the SpeedTouch modem to the phone line and was happy to see the DSL and Internet status lights turn solid green. A few minutes later, I had my AirPort Extreme reconfigured with the TekSavvy settings and was connected to the Internet with our new static IP. A quick trip to my domain registrar’s self-serve website to reconfigure the artofgeek.com domain to point to our new IP and disable dynamic DNS and I was done. Then it was just a matter of waiting for the change to propagate to Internet DNS servers around the world and we were back in business. Total downtime was under 6 hours.

First impressions? My web surfing seems a bit faster, and my wife said the same thing when I asked her if she noticed a difference, but the difference isn’t immense from the limited amount of time I had to test it. There’s not much else to say at this point. It’s an internet connection, and it’s working. If you have any questions about our transition or the service, post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

As you can see, the download speeds seem pretty consistent around 4,270kbps. The upload speeds vary more, but solidly between 500-600kbps. I only wish I had done these same tests with my Sympatico connection while I still had a chance. Keep in mind these speeds may vary depending on the time of day. I’m fairly impressed since right now is near peak hours for internet usage (between 9-10pm). I’ll run the tests again at different times of day to see if it stays consistently fast or not.