Poll: Your Internet Speed (Mbps down)?

[ivinsfan]

Fiber-to-the-curb or in our case the end of our driveway cut our potential speed from 50 to 5...

 

[homestead]

Fiber-to-the-curb or in our case the end of our driveway cut our potential speed from 50 to 5...

You can probably get them to run fiber all the way to the house. They ran ours 400' underground along our driveway to our house for no charge.

 

[ivinsfan]

You can probably get them to run fiber all the way to the house. They ran ours 400' underground along our driveway to our house for no charge.

Nope, everyone has it connected to their existing copper phone wire which is totally screwed up. Everyone in this area of the township already has 10 to 15 service from another wireless internet provider. So after spending all the money to upgrade service the phone company TDS hasn't gotten any new customers.

 

[target2019]

There's old fiber and new fiber.
We have old fiber (was down there when Comcast bought athome), and coax from street to home.
When Verizon came to town to lay new fiber, they ended up in partnership agreement with Comcast. No improvements, sorry.

 

[RunningBum]

I don't have a clue as to the difference between the two, all I can speak to is my own experience. We got fiber two months ago and I have been amazed at the consistency and reliability of the service. Absolutely no degradation in download speed at any time, night or day, which is a dramatic improvement over any other service we've ever had.

I've had DSL, cable, and fiber. Obviously, the answer will vary based on individual ISPs in your area. But in my experience, fiber is by far the best, not even close. We get very low latency... 3-5ms pings on speedtest.net. The bandwidth performance is extremely stable... no variation in performance during peak usage times like in the evening. It's very reliable... in our town, cable is overhead on telephone poles whereas fiber is buried... thus less likely to be affected by weather and other events. We've only had 2 or 3 outages in 13 years. Fiber is usually "symmetrical"... upload bandwidth is same as download.

IMHO, if you have fiber available in your area (not many do), you should get it, even if it costs a bit more.

BTW, I'm referring to true FTTH (fiber-to-the-home). Not fiber-to-the-neighborhood or fiber-to-the-curb, etc. I'm only familiar with Verizon/Frontier FiOS, which is FTTH.

That was my impression. Thank you for confirming. I see them burying the fiber under the road this month. They haven't reached my street but they seem to be moving well and are hitting all the side streets. I am pretty certain they are doing FTTH, but will verify.

Cable, on the other hand, is often just running above ground, often going under culverts to cross roads or driveways. Probably some is buried, but I see the lines in my back "yard", and have seen them across hiking trails in other places, and I've seen them below my house servicing those lines in an outage. I'm on a mountain and it's costly for them to bury it with all the rocks, so they don't. If they have an outage, a lot of times I think they'll just run another line. Their uptime is pretty good, but earlier this month we had an all-day outage, from mid-morning until sometime overnight. Storms don't always cause problems but sometimes do. On average I probably get an outage every couple of months.

My plan is to keep both services for a month when fiber or two and compare. I don't want to drop cable until I verify fiber is as advertised.

 

[oscar1]

So, I started a chat session with Spectrum and asked; “How is it that you will offer a 200mb, unlimited internet data plan for new customers for 24 months at $45/mo but you won’t help your existing long time customers who are paying $75/month for the exact same service?!” Response: “We are sorry sir. There are no promotional offers for existing customers in your area at this time!”

Time to move now. Heard Toast.net out of Ohio now has service in Texas at my address.

 

[RunningBum]

...I see them burying the fiber under the road this month. They haven't reached my street but they seem to be moving well and are hitting all the side streets. I am pretty certain they are doing FTTH, but will verify.

I ran into a crew yesterday while I was out for a run. They verified they will be running fiber to the house as I thought I remembered hearing from an info session last winter. Making good progress, they thought they'd finish with the road work and start connecting homes in about 2 months. I know when they make that investment they want to start getting revenue from it asap.

 

[aaronc879]

I had no idea so I did a test and it said I have 7.4mps down. That doesn't sound like much but I stream Tv shows, movies, sports pretty much any time i'm home and awake and rarely have a problem.

 

[cyber888]

I have 100 MBPS, but Speedtest reads it at 117-120 MBPS.

 

[Major Tom]

I'm with a lesser-known provider called DSLExtreme, and get 1.5Mbps down for a little under $37/month inc all taxes and fees. They do offer higher speeds but, in my neighborhood, it appears that my ISP doesn't have access to the fiber-optic lines. Therefore, my speed is strictly limited by the distance to the central office. In my case, that means the maximum download speed I can reliably achieve with this provider is 1.5Mbps. I could get much more speed with other providers, but 1.5Mbps works fine for me and, as a particularly frugal person, I sure do like the price. Up until a couple of months ago, it was only $26/month, and stayed that way for years. It was inevitable that I wouldn't get that screaming deal for ever.

 

[sengsational]

So, I started a chat session with Spectrum and asked; “How is it that you will offer a 200mb, unlimited internet data plan for new customers for 24 months at $45/mo but you won’t help your existing long time customers who are paying $75/month for the exact same service?!” Response: “We are sorry sir. There are no promotional offers for existing customers in your area at this time!”

The caption should be "sometimes you just have no choice". You're lucky that you DO have other options. For decades I swapped new-customer deals between AT&T and Time-Warner. The latter changed their name because it was synonymous with horrific customer service. And I was stuck with them for a while, before Google Fiber showed-up, because AT&T was starting to charge a big sign-up fee, which ruined my swapping strategy.



I'm supposed to be getting 100 up and 100 down from Google Fiber, but Speedtest.org reports 91 down and 23 up.

 

[Sunset]

So, I started a chat session with Spectrum and asked; “How is it that you will offer a 200mb, unlimited internet data plan for new customers for 24 months at $45/mo but you won’t help your existing long time customers who are paying $75/month for the exact same service?!” Response: “We are sorry sir. There are no promotional offers for existing customers in your area at this time!”

Time to move now. Heard Toast.net out of Ohio now has service in Texas at my address.

You could cancel, and your spouse could sign up as a new customer. That's what the Wow installer told me people did all the time.

 

[LRDave]

Only internet we get is 4G/LTE. Also we are not that close to a tower. I put a 4G/LTE antenna on the roof and a repeater in the house. That greatly improved the signal.

We get about 4.5-6.5 MB down. Life goes on. We still stream - Netflix, YoutubeTV, Amazon Prime... It's not ideal, but it is the only game in town for us right now.

 

[Car-Guy]

3meg DSL and 15meg cellular. Lucky to have any terrestrial based Internet service out here.


The DSL is often slower than 3meg and the cellular drops below 8 to 10meg at times too (even with a $1000 repeater/booster) since the nearest tower is 10+ miles away.

 

[RunningBum]

Originally Posted by braumeister
It means what I said. Your wifi network will only put out the speed/throughput that your least capable device can handle.

If you have a brand new laptop that handles the current standard (802.11ac (but recently renamed to WiFi 5), that's all well and good.

But if you also have connected an older device that may have been built in 2010 or so, that can only handle 802.11n (now called WiFi 4), that is what your network will provide. Your newer device will be handicapped, in other words.

Disconnect that older device and your newer laptop will be served with the best it can handle.

==============================

That doesn't sound right, and it doesn't appear to be very true, though it's not totally false.

https://www.howtogeek.com/210062/ho...r-wi-fi-network-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/

Regarding whether an 802.11b device will drag everything else down:

Quote: Imagine all your Wi-Fi devices taking turns. When it’s the 802.11b device’s turn, it communicates slowly and every other device has to wait longer for it to finish talking to the router. But, when it’s a faster device’s turn to communicate with the router, it can still communicate just as quickly. There’s just a slowdown while the new devices twiddle their thumbs, waiting longer than normal for the 802.11b device to communicate with the router. In other words, this doesn’t mean the newer devices are slowed down to 802.11b speeds.

...


The solution is switching to 5 GHz Wi-Fi. You can get a modern 802.11ac router that uses 5 GHz Wi-Fi for 802.11ac and still offers 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi your older 802.11b/g/n devices can connect to. ... Those old 802.11b devices can’t connect to 5 GHz networks — only 2.4 GHz networks. That means all 5 GHz Wi-Fi will be unsullied by all those 802.11b devices.

I was just thinking a little more about this. If it were true, you'd see the slowdown in a speed test. So either it's not true, or it's so uncommon that virtually no one sees it, and providers don't even mention this possibility as a possible cause of slow internet.

 

[robnplunder]

I've just switched from AT&T's 16 mbps to Xfinity 60 mbps. At 16 mbps, running 2 HD streams was ok most of the time. Some combination of slower PC & live streaming won't work very well - buffering, halting, etc.. Running 3 HD streaaming would get into more issues. Running a 4k streaming simply won't work - halting and buffering are just too bad to watch anything.

At 60 mbps, running a 4k stream works barely. Multiple HD streams run ok.

I expected things to run about 3 times better when switched from 16 mbps to 60 mbps. In reality, it seems to be just "slightly" better. I could have stuck with 16 mbps to be honest. But Xfinity 60 mbps is 1/2 the price of AT&T's 16 mbps so I pulled the trigger to switch. I may eventually go to 150 mbps and also get something like Google wifi.

 

[DrRoy]

At 20-25 we see no problems.

 

[braumeister]

I expected things to run about 3 times better when switched from 16 mbps to 60 mbps. In reality, it seems to be just "slightly" better.

Have you checked to see if you're really getting that higher speed consistently?

Internet Speed Test

 

[Totoro]

I only use my mobile phone, with 4G. Gets me 40 mbps, plenty for all my needs. Under $40 a month with unlimited calls and unlimited data use.

 

[MichaelB]

Regarding fiber vs broadband, there are 2 differences not mentioned earlier.

One is broadband is a shared network, while fiber is dedicated. With broadband we share the total capacity of the line with neighbors and everyone else on that leg of the connection, and the speed depends on how many users are online. It can vary greatly, especially during peak times, such as afte school. Fiber, on the other hand, is individual, so neighboring traffic has no impact.

The second difference is fiber speeds are symmetrical, broadband are not. Broadband download speeds, which everyone in this thread is discussing, are much faster, while broadband upload speeds are much slower. The ISP has to limit speed somewhere to prevent congestion. For example, ours is 30 mbps down / 6 mbps up. Fiber speeds are typically the same both ways, there is no advantage or need by the ISP to limit.

Slower upload speeds have little impact on things like browsing and streaming, but have significant effect on things like video calls.

Fiber is definitely a better option, it’s more robust consistent and reliable.

 

[neihn]

xfinity is monopoly in my neighborhood in Florida, so for a 25 mbits down and 2 mbits up, we pay $50, the next upgrade for 150/10 mbits is $80.

I just can't wait for 5G to happen.

 

[Buckeye]

So, I started a chat session with Spectrum and asked; “How is it that you will offer a 200mb, unlimited internet data plan for new customers for 24 months at $45/mo but you won’t help your existing long time customers who are paying $75/month for the exact same service?!” Response: “We are sorry sir. There are no promotional offers for existing customers in your area at this time!”

Time to move now. Heard Toast.net out of Ohio now has service in Texas at my address.

We still get internet from Spectrum (100 mbs for $65.99, no real competition) but, like you, all the existing customers got screwed over compared to new customers for cable service after they purchased Brighthouse. That's why we are now YouTubeTV customers. I told the Spectrum rep who called that I wouldn't use their service again even if it was free after the way they treated existing customers. They don't call me anymore.

 

[gregpe]

Very fast cable

472.2 mbps download
11.8 mbps upload

 

[Michael Moore]

We're on gigabit fiber from Sonic.net a NorCal-based ISP. When I check it is usually about 950-960mbps up and down. The cost is about the same or slightly less than what I paid Earthlink for years for not particularly reliable 1-3mbps DSL. If I have to contact support, that phone call is picked up here, not in India, and I've never had the typical "I'm sorry sir, but I must repeat the same script the last three people you talked to already went through" Earthlink response. But then other than a couple of questions when I first started the service I've not had to contact Sonic support.

The days of "the fog is in, I wonder if the DSL/phone is down?" are definitely a thing of the past.

 

[robnplunder]

Have you checked to see if you're really getting that higher speed consistently?

Internet Speed Test

I've got about 40 mbps, sometimes worse. It is all over the map but still better than AT&T's 16 mbps.