About a month ago, I complained about Time Warner’s anemic upstream bandwidth cap on home cable modem service.  (512k!  Oh, the humanity!)

Well, a phone call to Time Warner and $10 a month later, my cap has been increased to 2 Mb.  They call this their “Turbo” plan.  (Turbo == fast, right?)

The asymmetry of my speedtest result below is still laughable, but the improvement in upstream AND downstream performance is very noticeable.  Now my uploads to Flickr don’t completely saturate the connection and more than one person can actually use the network without hosing everyone else.

I still suspect that my upstream bandwidth puts a cap on the actual download performance I can achieve.  I haven’t been able to find a rule of thumb to calculate how much upstream bandwidth is required to support a 20+ Mb/s download.

Surely there is a relationship between data coming down the pipe and the acknowledgements (or other handshaking packets) that are sent back?