Day One
Modem update! Last night? Karazhan. Result?
So far so good! No disconnects, period. (As opposed to once a minute.) Nice latency throughout the entire experience, and I only had one instance of weird lag, which was when I died and my character kept standing in place without the Release Spirit dialog coming up. It lasted about 2 seconds, though, and I was able to run back in before the fight finished. Other than that, it was absolute perfection. We got clear to the Opera Event, but we didn't have the right people, so we called it a night. I'll need a little more time to gather enough information, of course, but it looks like it was a modem issue after all. (Which, as I've said before, I don't blame Blizzard for, although many on the forums do. Blizzard did something that brought up a bug in the firmware, and Blizzard doesn't know what it is. It's not Blizzard's fault... It's Siemens' fault. An accident, of course, but it's Siemens' responsibility to correct the issue.)
Another test result! I was downloading Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop yesterday via Bittorrent to test out the speed and consistency. Windows XP was downloading at a brisk 150KB/s, and there was only one actual disconnect somewhere around 60% complete. The internet light kicked red and the connection stopped, and when it came back, the IP had changed and I had to pause/restart the torrent to get it working again. However, after I downloaded the ISO, I pretty much downloaded the entire Desktop image again by doing an Aptitude installation on my existing Server. That was another 600MB that did not disconnect. It did get a little slow at one time, and the download stopped for a split second, but I was able to view websites and my IP didn't change, and it was able to recover itself because I could even do anything, so that's good.
So... Personally, my instinct tells me that this modem, while not quite as responsive as my last set up... As in, it takes a split second longer to form a connection and such... It seems to be stronger. So, slower but stronger, in the sense that it takes longer to forge a connection, but the speed is consistently high. Not peak bandwidth like the old modem could muster (and then promptly crash), but enough so that if it doesn't make a habit of crashing, it can surpass the old modem simply because there's no downtime. So far, I'm officially impressed with everything, even its router function. I'm enjoying using my Ubuntu box for playing around on now without the worry of breaking something and pulling everyone offline. I'm not worried about speed anymore, so I installed the GUI again. It's been really fun.
And now... I need to read my history book.