This morning I received an e-mail. (If Jo is reading this she might want to stop reading now. I know it winds her up.) It was from Telewest and said:

Dear Customer,

We’re pleased to tell you that we have upgraded your speed from 1Mb to up to 4Mb. We have also increased your upstream speed to up to 384k from 128k.

I am impressed. They said they would do it, but I really expected our area to be one of the last to roll it out.

The bad news is that I checked the speed here a few times and consistantly get results of about 230kbps upstream and about 2M downstream, so it is faster than it was but not the whole 4 megs. It seems churlish to complain when its all still the same price. I think I shall leave it a couple of days to settle in and then ask about it.

2M is fast enough really, even 1M was fast enough, but its the principle. Actually, the upstream speed will have the biggest effect on me when I am putting files on my website with ftp or transferring photos to Flickr.

As for traffic, I am using Statcounter to measure visits here. As a free service it only keeps details of the last 100 visits. This is not normally a problem as I don’t get much traffic, and that doesn’t bother me. Yesterday there was a bit of a surge, with 130 hits yesterday and another 50 already today. Looking at the analysis (of the last 100 hits) 67% come via Pootergeek and they come from all over the world.

I guess I ought to be jealous of the implications – that he has a huge regular readership – but in reality I don’t think I could stand the pressure. Not at my age 🙂