With zippy Comcast, I upgrade my networks

Today's Pioneer Press business section has my first-person take on Comcast's new 50-megabit-per-second Internet service. My colleague Les Suzukamo has a companion piece on the biz/telecom aspects of this.

I still have the superfast Net service set up in a testing capacity at my downtown condo, and I'm greatly enjoying it.

I had to frantically upgrade my tech infrastructure in order to properly harness all this extra bandwidth, though. This involved creating new wired and wireless networks using the latest, fastest technologies so data wouldn't run into a bottleneck while whizzing around my residence:

Wireless. I set aside my older, slower Wi-Fi router and installed an Apple AirPort Extreme, which uses the speedier 802.11n. For the best performance, I switched it from the 2.4-GHz spectrum to the 5-GHz spectrum (802.11n only).

Wired. I was using older D-Link powerline adapters, but I decided to try newer Linksys models that promise up 100 meabits-per-second over home power lines. This, and the AirPort, gave me two fast data "pipes" around my condo.