Here in the unassuming town of Orem, UT we have a little thing called Utopia. This is the city's publicly backed fiber optic network. To the layman - that means we have fast internet here and the network is run by the city as a public utility, with carriers leasing the lines.

The carrier I use at my house is called XMission, and I'm quite certain they are the greatest ISP in the country - probably even the world. Not only do they have a technically-enabled staff on hand 24/7 via E-Mail, Phone, or even IRC (!), but all their services run on 100% renewable energy sources. Awesome, right? I have had nothing but great experiences and quick responses from their tech support team.

But that's not even the best part. The best part is the speed. 50Mbit up/down - making it the fastest residential Internet connection in the United States (so far as I am aware). The next fastest is Verizon's FiOS service (the "only" all digital, 100% fiber optic network straight to your home). I've heard FiOS is pretty awesome, but at only 30Mbit down and 15Mbit up it's a fraction of the speed of our Utopia connection. Utopia FTW!

I'm surprised you haven't seen more about this on the tech news sites. People need to know that Orem is the technological super-hub of the States! In fact, the only place with faster average internet speeds is Japan - with an average connection speed of 60Mbps.

But do we actually see these speeds? Not at first - as it turns out my wireless G router was acting as a bottleneck. I had to upgrade to an 802.11N router to get the full capabilities of our speed. Once I made the upgrade I started seeing speeds like this:

That's a screenshot from my bandwidth meter program. That's right, I'm actually uploading slightly faster than the theoretical limit of our connection (50Mbits/sec = 6.25MBytes/sec). I've also seen my download speed peak around 6MBytes/sec but what you see in the picture is more of an average.

An internet service provider who under promises and over delivers? Who would have thought it possible? That's what you get with local companies.

At these speeds I can download large files - like linux distribution or movies (legal ones) in a matter of minutes. It's pretty much the greatest thing ever.