Are ADSL upgrades really worth it?

[Maes]

As of recently, I'm pestered by telemarketers from a competing ISP (I'm using the state's telecom) to switch over to them and "upgrade" my current 8 Mbit ADSL connection to their super-duper 24 Mbit one, for pretty much the same monthly fee I'm paying now.

Of course, being an electrical engineer with no life and philosophical queries about networks, I consider this to be completely useless since:

1. Every decent comms/electric engineer knows what the fine print in ADSL residential contracts says. "Up to" 24 Mbps doesn't mean 24 Mbps constant guaranteed speed. Not even half that. Or even a fraction of that, period.
   
2. I am already getting 55% of my connection's stated speed (about 550 KB/sec with HTTP/FTP downloads) and a third of that for torrents/P2P due to throttling, which I consider good enough. "Upgrading" won't increase those figures. It's not like when I upgraded from 1 to 8 Mbps (the 1 Mbps connection was always maxed out BTW).
   
3. Switching to another company involves an incredible amount of paperwork, bureaucracy, and a "dark" period of unknown length where you're left with no connection whatsoever. It could be 1 day, 3 days, or a month, there's no telling.
   
4. A friend of mine using the provider in question and paying for "24 Mbps" actually gets a 12 Mbps signal at the end of his phone line (the modem/router says so) and the signal attenuation is so bad that he never exceeded 120 KB/sec.
   

Comments, please.

[AirRaid]

Probably not worth it. If your current connection is only pulling ~4Mbit off your "max 8 mbit" line, then upgrading isnt really going to help. You need to be really close to your local telephone exhange to really hit the top end speeds of the big ADSL packages.

Unless you're unhappy with the service/aupport you're currently getting, I wouldn't switch.

[fraggle]

Line speed is basically completely irrelevant nowadays. It depends completely on your ISP and what upstream traffic rate it provides.

[Zaldron]

Agree with fraggle, only switch if it provides a bonus to your upstream.

[Csonicgo]

fraggle said:

Line speed is basically completely irrelevant nowadays. It depends completely on your ISP and what upstream traffic rate it provides.

The problem is, ISPs have been pooh-poohing Upstream performance for years. Some don't even mention it. And they don't because the performance and speed of Most ISPs upstream sucks gargantuan balls in this day and age. I can't confirm this, but just on my observations - Charter just recently uncapped uploading after years of a speedcap of less than 1 MBPS. I couldn't upload anything, nor play popular games with a lot of players playing lest I get ping in the 250-300 range, which is, for a lack of better words, nowadays unacceptable.

I don't even wanna know how local ISPs are faring with this. probably even worse. But, hey, at least those kinds usually don't speedcap you because you download a lot.