Fiber "internet" has arrived

We currently have Spectrum Internet it's pretty darn fast.

AT&T ran fiber thru our city and offered us a great introductory price.
The only 'catch' - to get AT&T these days in our area you must submit to a credit check. My credit is fine but before switching to Spectrum we had AT&T/Bell South service for 40 years with never a missed payment. I told them no thanks. They can take a long walk off a short pier as far as I am concerned.

We have an excellent credit rating so no issues there I just don't like their policy of credit check before service. It's their business and they certainly have that right - it's just I disagree with that procedure. We as a safeguard have a freeze on all Credit Bureaus to prevent Identity theft - If AT&T thinks I am even going to temporarily lift the Credit Freeze for them they are sadly mistaken.

As you can tell that really got me hot under the collar.

The neighbors who did take AT&T up on their offer were satisfied with the service but say it quickly goes to Spectrums pricing after one year.

It sounds like in your area if you want fiber service it is AT&T or nothing. Gosh how I despise AT&T - I think it goes back to when they took over Bell South a wonderful phone company with great service- After AT&T took it over it quickly deteriorated to AT&T level of service and was an absolute epic nightmare to deal with.

 

ATT is not long for this world as they have a loss of more than 10 million subscribers in recent years.

 

I might be able to switch from FiOS to a township public service in a few years.

 

I've had ATT for years. It's been my only option, otherwise I'd have anything else. They are starting to run fiber now. Just as soon as I can hook up, I'm kicking ATT out the door and slamming it behind them.

 

My first house I bought they said it was hooked up for "high speed internet" in the listing but come move in day I realized they never said who they had internet through.

My apartment at the time had Verizon FiOS so I asked them if they serviced the new house but they didn't. I had Comcast in a previous apartment and I called them and they didn't either.

I tried using a couple of those online "find available ISP by address" sites and they said nada. Only option was AT&T DSL. I reluctantly called them but they didn't offer new connections despite an pylon sitting at the end of my driveway with their logo on it.

Panicking, since I'm a terminally online millennial, I started looking for any alternative. Satellite was expensive and had strict data limits.

Finally I found out about fixed wireless ISPs. Some of the established ones in the area had poor reviews but one was newer, offered unlimited data and promised reasonable speeds. I ended up going with them and was pretty happy with it. They stuck a little radio tower on my roof and pointed it at a communication tower a few miles away. I had 20mbps speeds and not terrible ping. Was even able to play online video games with friends.

When we moved to our current house my biggest deal breaker was internet availability. We were looking in a rural area not served by any WISPs. I crossed off more than a few potential places because the online checks said it was available but when I called at talked to techs it turned out they didn't serve that address (the fed/state service tools just go by census block so they're allowed to shade in the whole block even if they only serve a single address in it).

Luckily our top pick was served by a local ISP that had run fiber years prior. The previous owners had Hughes net for some reason but for $150 they ran a new line to the house and now I've got 200mbps symmetrical up & down for half what I was paying for 20/5 before.

 

Spectrum in Columbia, SC. We just recently turned in all our cable boxes and have gone to just internet and streaming services. No house phones, only cell phones and smart TVs.

 

Yeah, the anti-trust laws are not being enforced and it's quite common throughout the US to have only a single high speed option available...

 

Up here in PNW on the outskirts of town the only high speed option is the evildoers at Comcast. But fortunately, thanks the pandemic and political pressure on Comcast they have an affordable connectivity program for poor people so my Internet is $30 a month, which is paid for by this program. Of course before this I spent decades getting ripped off by them and spending more than $100 a month.

 

That is smokin!

 

I’m not sure why; I first tried our provider’s speed test, then googled telco speed test and I think that’s what I got. These are on my phone (wifi), about 5~10 times faster??

our connection is coaxial cable:

 

I'm not much of a technology guy, but this morning my computer was off-line and I reconnected using the 5G option of the wireless router and this is what I got:


and then reconnected with the normal non 5G and got this:



It's an old Netgear Nighthawk with the 3 antennas sticking up. Feels like I've had it 10 years, but I don't remember exactly. I guess there's a big difference with the 5G. Never really used that option before, but maybe I'll give it a whirl. Doubt I'll notice though.

 

my wired pc is markedly slower, compared to phone with wifi:



I have seen numbers for the pc around 400, and no recent hardware changes. Who knows...

 

I was getting 800 Mbps download speeds last November on Comcast cable when I reported intermittent problems to the company. They found and isolated a noisy cable connection from my neighbor and the problem went away.

Come mid December we get a notice from Comcast proudly announcing that we have been upgraded to a faster service at no additional charge. The notice said that we now get up to 800 Mbps. Now I pretty consistently get 1/2 that speed.

This morning's results.
Speedtest by Ookla

Server: Evalse - Fremont, CA (id = 44050)
ISP: Comcast Cable
Latency: 9.53 ms (2.02 ms jitter)
Download: 378.51 Mbps (data used: 379.6 MB)
Upload: 5.96 Mbps (data used: 2.8 MB)


Oh well, it's better than nothing.

 

I should have taken a screenshot of the 3.x Mbps download, 1.x Mbps upload rates of my old Centurylink ADSL connection, which had been perfectly reliable before the Pandemic, then started crumbling. I did sign up for their long-advertised Gigabit service, but only after scheduling and paying for installation did they 'discover' that it doesn't actually reach my street. You're fired!

The only other land service here was Comcast. As much as everybody hates them, that was still the best available option.

 

Does Ookla Speed Test like one others are posting show anything about the bandwidth?

I have been perfectly happy with our coax cable speed for the last 18 years. I don't think they have any fiber infrastructure in my area yet. It works fine most of the time. But the problem becomes apparent when we have families visiting us.

We get connecting issues when we have over 50 devices. Even without visitors, we have now approached 30 or so devices on our router regularly.

 

The bandwidth is dependent on the slowest link in your network.The speed as shown in the previous post is the bandwidth for my connection THROUGH the internet. The machine under test is able to push in excess of 800 Mbps over a hardwired gigabit network connection.

The print-out below is for my DSL, connected by 100Mbps ethernet to the DSL modem. There is a known problem with the phone line due to flooded utility boxes for the DSL line. There is a heavy hum on the line that is causing interference. Note the 10% packet loss. That's crossed lines.

This is the result of running speedtest through my DSL
Server: Haviland Broadband - Haviland, KS (id: 17295)
ISP: AT&T Internet Services
Idle Latency: 191.25 ms (jitter: 625.58ms, low: 97.90ms, high: 2294.13ms)
Download: 1.29 Mbps (data used: 1.4 MB)
698.90 ms (jitter: 215.57ms, low: 472.17ms, high: 2324.90ms)
Upload: 0.33 Mbps (data used: 525.6 kB)
3006.01 ms (jitter: 99.36ms, low: 657.90ms, high: 5378.60ms)
Packet Loss: 10.8%

 

Thanks for the explanation. So, if all 50 devices on my WiFi try the Speed Test at the same time, is the result much worse than trying the test by just one device?

 

That is correct, SK. The ookla speed tests establish a connection from your test system to a server on the internet that has agreed to participate in speed testing. Then your system sends data as fast as it can to the other end. They send statistics back and forth as the test continues. The rate is probably restricted by the cable modem, the wireless router, the congestion of your neighbors using the same 2.4 MHz band and the congestion of sharing dozens of links between your ISP and the speedtest server.

If there are a dozen laptops in your network streaming 4k Youtube videos, the bottlenecks add up. The bandwidth of an 2.4 Ghz band channel is around 40 Mbps. The bandwidth of a 5Ghz connection is 80 PER CHANNEL. Some wireless protocols use multiple channels to boost the throughput. I have one server on my net that is sucking data across my network at the rate of 517 Mbps .

At least, that's what the router says.

So, long story short... If you have 10 laptops all running speed test, each will suck as much data as fast your local network will allow and they are likely to show 1/10th of the speed that they would show if it was only one laptop on your network.