So the guy replaced the cable modem. I told him to look at that first before checking the lines for signal quality (my friend Greg had an older cable modem and it had very similar problems). So he saw my five year old modem and got me a new one after I steered him into the thought. It probably helped that he saw my office first and asked a couple questions about what I did; we even ended up talking about Linux after it was all in place. He especially liked the command line history of bash... :-). The new cable modem works like a champ.
He had me run MSN's speed test app. It says I'm getting 1519.6 kbps. I've run it a couple times over the last half hour and that's about what it always says.
I decided to test it using something besides their JavaScript thing. I created a one MB file (true megabytes, not HDD megs) and scp'ed it to and from 27.org and toro. Here's what I got:
| 27.org | toro | |
| upload: | 34 seconds | 34 seconds |
| download: | 3 seconds | 4 seconds |