I totally love fiber. Everything is so much faster than regular cable and this is essential for doing remote work.
Do you guys/gals prefer AT&T, Comcast, or Google for Fiber Internet?
Are there any others who provide Fiber?
You mean you have a choice in the matter?
Quote from: Scott5114 on October 28, 2022, 11:10:10 PM
You mean you have a choice in the matter?
You'd be amazed at some of the places in this nation that have both a fiber AND a cable internet system. You'd be further amazed at some of the rural telephone cooperatives that are now doing fiber: https://www.itc-web.com/services/residential.
VZ Fios. Having had both Comcast and Verizon, it's amazing the reliability difference between the two.
I have likewise found FIOS to be exceptionally reliable with the exception of their "Quantum Gateway" G1100 router. A Google search revealed that the problems I was having with it constantly dropping wifi were very common, but my problem was that I have an older FIOS installation that uses the existing coaxial cables in the house, so I have to have a router that will take coax instead of Ethernet coming from the wall. So I put the G1100 router in bridge mode and connected a Netgear Orbi system to act as the router. Problem solved and it's rock-solid. A little expensive, sure, but since I telecommute and we get our TV service via YouTube TV and some other streaming services, the additional cost was worth it.
Many Telcos are rolling out FTTH upgrades. CenturyLink/Lumen, Windstream, Frontier, Consolidated, TDS, to name a few. Fiber is just so much better than xDSL technologies over twisted pair copper, for a whole host of reasons.
Altice USA, which bought Cablevision and SuddenLink, is really the only Cableco that has a commitment to FTTH upgrades so far, as Comcast, Charter, Cox, etc think there is life yet in further HFC coax plant upgrades - that position sounds eerily similar to the Telcos the last 20 years, doubling down on xDSL, but we shall see
i've got Verizon FiOS and like it. Upstate NY cities generally have a choice between cable and fiber.
My only issue is that Verizon's bundles between FiOS internet and cell phone services have been disappointing.
A lot of midsize metros are losing out on gaining residential fiber internet access. Larger metros are getting Google Fiber. Many rural areas are getting government-subsidized rural fiber access through public utilities. Where I live (Columbia, SC area), we have Spectrum and AT&T, both of whom do not seem to have the desire to upgrade all of their infrastructure to fiber. And our electric utility is Dominion Energy, which is privately owned and has no interest. Not too far from me, the electricity comes from an electric co-op, and they offer fiber internet services, being that they took advantage of government subsidies, which Dominion cannot.
So soon we are going to get a T-Mobile 5G home hotspot and see how that goes. We are in their highest speed coverage area according to their coverage map.
We live not so far out in the boonies in Central Carolina. I worked from home for decades, so we were the first to get DSL over the landline when it hit the dirt more than 20 years ago. Most of our neighbors have a choice of our local landline or Spectrum cable, and we have the cable near our property but would need to pay additional installation costs to get it the extra half-mile to our home. One of our neighbors is in the same boat and uses HughesNet because they previously lived miles away from civilization and could easily transfer the service here. Our local electric coop has been teasing the prospect of broadband over powerline (BPL) service for years, but has not seen enough interest.
A few counties and cities now have municipal-run broadband services here in Washington, which is due to expand thanks to a 2019 state law that relaxed most restrictions.
The city of Anacortes has $40/month fiber (https://www.anacorteswa.gov/984/Access---Anacortes-Fiber-Internet) ($70 if you want 1 GBps) that is slowly being expanded across the city. A few PUDs (public utility districts) in Central Washington have 100 Mbps plans for $51/month, mainly serving rural areas; Grant County (https://www.grantpud.org/getfiber) has a nice expansion priority list to show just who they are targeting.
The internet should have been treated as a utility from the start, but there's no time to catch up like the present. I'd much rather have an easy-to-regulate government utility handling my internet connection than some faceless megacorp.
TDS just pulled the only available fiber lines in my neighborhood area during mid spring of last year and through all of the walls in my apartment building last winter, but I do not subscribe. I currently take the free Wifi that the landlord offers (from Spectrum). Spectrum has been wasting a LOT of money in printing and Postage for as long as I have been here in a futile effort to get me to sign up for their full services. The Wifi is adequate for my needs, but has an annoying habit of going down for a couple of days at a time every three or four months. I can see full speed anonymous internet service ultimately becoming a ubiquitous public service like water and sewer, too.
Mike
For my neighborhood, your choice is either Spectrun Internet (cable broadband) or AT&T Fiber. While both offer near gigabit download, Spectrum has 35 megabit upload AND is more expensive that AT&T fiber which has near gigabit upload.
It also helps that my Internet is paid by my employer.
Quote from: wriddle082 on October 29, 2022, 10:52:01 AM
A lot of midsize metros are losing out on gaining residential fiber internet access. Larger metros are getting Google Fiber. Many rural areas are getting government-subsidized rural fiber access through public utilities. Where I live (Columbia, SC area), we have Spectrum and AT&T, both of whom do not seem to have the desire to upgrade all of their infrastructure to fiber. And our electric utility is Dominion Energy, which is privately owned and has no interest. Not too far from me, the electricity comes from an electric co-op, and they offer fiber internet services, being that they took advantage of government subsidies, which Dominion cannot.
We're in the service area of an electric co-op (OEC) that is rolling fiber out to their service area. But our particular neighborhood is served by OG&E, the local for-profit power corporation, so OEC hasn't hooked up our neighborhood yet. They've mostly been focusing on the rural parts of their service area where cable internet doesn't reach (which makes sense, I guess, but it means our area is kind of falling into the crack your post describes).
Centurylink: speed is not a gigabit but is at least somewhat faster than ISDN. reliability is fair to middling. Service went out because the installer who installed my line didn't bother writing down which lines in the switchbox were in use, so when a different installer went to install another line he just yanked at the wires to see who complained. Router is a bit slow at times. More than one person in the household using the internet slows it down way more than I'd expect, even if neither person is watching movies etc.
Quote from: kkt on October 30, 2022, 02:24:44 PM
Centurylink: speed is not a gigabit but is at least somewhat faster than ISDN. reliability is fair to middling. Service went out because the installer who installed my line didn't bother writing down which lines in the switchbox were in use, so when a different installer went to install another line he just yanked at the wires to see who complained. Router is a bit slow at times. More than one person in the household using the internet slows it down way more than I'd expect, even if neither person is watching movies etc.
Centurylink sold the service in my area to a little known entity called "Brightspeed"
Cox has rolling out fiber for a while now, but it isn't in every area.
I don't think we can get fiber Internet at our current home, but we do have a gigabit plan from Comcast, and it suits our needs just fine (I still haven't gotten around to buying an Eero system that supports the higher speeds).
There's an outfit called GoNetSpeed that moved into my area town by town as fiber infrastructure has been laid out. Their pricing is flat rate, inclusive of all taxes and fees, and I'm locked in at a lifetime rate. I was able to get 500GB down and up with a static IP address for $60 a month (the 150 was $50 but I had a coupon for a free upgrade and the static IP is $10). Frontier has started offering fiber in these areas as well, but I haven't seen much about Cox or Comcast advertising it yet, plus both are more expensive for .even 200 GB down and only 20 up
Quote from: jp the roadgeek on October 31, 2022, 07:25:12 PM
I was able to get 500GB down and up with a static IP address for $60 a month ...
You have the same upload speed as download speed??
Quote from: kphoger on November 01, 2022, 09:54:49 AM
Quote from: jp the roadgeek on October 31, 2022, 07:25:12 PM
I was able to get 500GB down and up with a static IP address for $60 a month ...
You have the same upload speed as download speed??
This is the way FiOS is supposed to work, but my speed tests have proven otherwise. No harm done, though, since my download speed is higher than what I'm paying for.