Anyone else recently upgrade your cable modem and Internet plan for a BIG speed increase?

[SeikenFreak]

Been using Comcrap here for TV for 30 ish years? And internet for almost 20?

At the end it was supposed to be 200 down/12 up or something at $80 a month. Then I recently tried to swap to my own Arris modem, turned in the Comcast unit, they seemed to F everything up because that is what always happens, and then my internet was doing 30 down/6 up. That's the lower tier I used to have. I also have hated Comcast forever.

Instead of calling up and trying to get them to fix it, about a month ago I saw FIOS was now offering Gigabit in my area for the same/less cost than my Comcast lower speeds AND could add Verizon digital voice (phone) as well (still had ancient old Verizon copper line service) thus saving at least $50 a month. Of course, I assume it's only temporary, but I did it anyway because F them.

After some trial and error, this is where I'm sitting with FIOS Gigabit:


Initially, my download would jump to 400 ish and immediately drop down to around 100, while upload would stay a pretty solid 400. Once I switched the ethernet port I was using on my PC from a supposed gigabit card to one of the onboard motherboard ports, it went up to 400/400.

I haven't cared enough to dig deeper. I'm not sure if that is just the speed I can get in my area or if somehow this onboard network chip is still not legit Gigabit rated even though they all say they are.

So yea thats $70/m for FIOS Gigabit and Phone. As for how Verizon is themselves, we'll see in time.

 

[Zodiac]

Google fiber is currently running lines in my neighborhood with installs set for the next 2 weeks. I can't wait to give the giant middle finger to TWC/Spectrum or whatever those assholes call themselves now.

Naturally I opted for the gigabit internet since I stream 4k, and always like 10 devices in constant use.

 

[quad]

ATT recently installed Fiber in our neighborhood so I may jump on that bandwagon. Currently with Xfinity and my own modem getting 120 down / 24 up. My modem (SB6183) is not DOCSIS 3.1 compliant and not sure if ATT would allow a personal modem either.

 

[Equalbracket]

Spectrum 300/20 getting 340-360 down and 25 up, suprised me. internet/tv/phone less then a $100 a month.

 

[quad]

Just got ATT Fiber today. Wow is all I can say. Videos on youtube load instantaneously! You can skip forward in time on 4k videos and the video plays immediately anywhere you click.

Cost: $70 per month with free installation.

I love the 2ms ping. Wish I had that back in the day when I was playing Quake 3 Arena online. Best I could get then was about 30 ms.

 

[CobraBob]

A shame AT&T fiber is available here. If it was, I'd be all over it. Those speeds are F A S T! I get 330/35 on best days. I can only imagine 850/943. I wouldn't need the upload speed, but I'd sure love the 850Mbps download.

 

[DHG1078]

Here I am just glad I've got 60 offered in my area. I've got 6 at work...

 

[quad]

A shame AT&T fiber is available here. If it was, I'd be all over it. Those speeds are F A S T! I get 330/35 on best days. I can only imagine 850/943. I wouldn't need the upload speed, but I'd sure love the 850Mbps download.

Yes Bob it is amazing. I can't believe the upload speed is even faster! The tech told me we're the first on the block to get it and anyone else coming after us will get slower speeds but it would still be over 500 Mbps. My father-in law is going to hate me because of these speeds - lol! We keep one upping each other.

Some sites will still be slow though as usual because not all networks can handle these high speeds. But youtube seems to work great. I'll be testing this on various sites to see what kind of downloads are possible in the real world. I save my downloads on a SATA drive since the SSD is too valuable and used for programs. The SATA will be holding back the downloads. But I'll test a download to a SSD drive as well.

Oh forgot to mention the ATT service also includes unlimited downloads. Xfinity had a 1TB cap per month.

The tech did a great job considering how hot it was out today. Only thing he forgot to do was use duct seal to fill in the hole where the cable enters the basement but I'll fill it in soon - hope I don't forget! The fiber cable is actually a lot smaller than coax.

 

[quad]

Here I am just glad I've got 60 offered in my area. I've got 6 at work...

I feel your pain. Just did another test and this is even better!

 

[03cobra#694]

Damn, no fiber anywhere near me at all and I don't see it anywhere in the future either.

 

[GT Premi]

What he said - make sure to use CAT 5e or better cable and make sure you have a router than supports gigabit ethernet and hardwire it. As far as routers - sky seems to be the limit anymore. Never thought I would see $400 routers. Nighthawks are probably the most popular high end routers, but they made news for a hack this year, not sure what the latest is on that. I personally run an Asus.

Heavy processing power in the router is more about handling many fast connections at once, not max speed on a single connection. In other words, there shouldn't be a need for a $400 home router unless you have a giant family that's going to be streaming on many devices at once.

That "hack" wasn't really a hack. It was people not properly securing their routers on their own. Netgear issued a firmware upgrade for it a week or two after it was reported.

I think for most cases a high end router is unnecessary. However, they do have a place in the market. Higher end routers also have longer range. We had (and still have as a backup) a Netgear N900 router. It's a freakin' fantastic router, but it's not able to provide strong coverage to our whole house. Instead of adding a bunch of repeaters all over the place, I opted to upgrade to the Netgear Nighthawk X6S R8000 router. It provides strong coverage throughout the house and some of the outside. We used to have coverage out to the pool area, but we had new windows installed, and I believe the aluminum oxide coating on the glass interferes with the wifi signal now. Anyway, if you have a large house, a high end router is the way to go, unless you want repeaters all over the house.

 

[greenscobie86]

To be honest, unless you are streaming several 4k movies, you shouldn't need more than 100mb\s. Netflix 4k stream is 25mb\s. 1080p is only around 5-10mb\s. The errors were more likely due to signal issues, which could continue with the new higher speed service. Please post back in a month or two and let us know how it works out for you.

QFT...

Even 100mbps is more than ample. Most enterprises with 100's of users that I've seen in my professional career are still using ~100mbps pipes in and out.

Without doing a site survey or really diving in to you LAN setup or infrastructure I would guess that signal issues and connection quality are whats causing you grief. If most of your equipment is wireless I would have spent the $20/month extra and invested it into a new WAP with MU-MIMO or something similar, maybe multiple WAPs, or perhaps a wired connection for your 4k TV's(if they arent wired in already.) JMO of course as I am mostly shooting in the dark here.

 

[DHG1078]

QFT...

Even 100mbps is more than ample. Most enterprises with 100's of users that I've seen in my professional career are still using ~100mbps pipes in and out.

Without doing a site survey or really diving in to you LAN setup or infrastructure I would guess that signal issues and connection quality are whats causing you grief. If most of your equipment is wireless I would have spent the $20/month extra and invested it into a new WAP with MU-MIMO or something similar, maybe multiple WAPs, or perhaps a wired connection for your 4k TV's(if they arent wired in already.) JMO of course as I am mostly shooting in the dark here.

100 is definitely ample, gigabit is awesome though if you have the hardware and equipment to take advantage of those speeds.

 

[quad]

QFT...

Even 100mbps is more than ample. Most enterprises with 100's of users that I've seen in my professional career are still using ~100mbps pipes in and out.

Without doing a site survey or really diving in to you LAN setup or infrastructure I would guess that signal issues and connection quality are whats causing you grief. If most of your equipment is wireless I would have spent the $20/month extra and invested it into a new WAP with MU-MIMO or something similar, maybe multiple WAPs, or perhaps a wired connection for your 4k TV's(if they arent wired in already.) JMO of course as I am mostly shooting in the dark here.

I have done work with smaller offices of 50-75 people. One office has an onsite virtualized Exchange Server. Users will routinely receive emails with large attachments exceeding 100 megabytes. The Server is using a POP Connector so email is actually hosted by another party and then forwarded to the Exchange Server. And it is not a catchall configuration either. There are benefits to have them separate though - for example in case the onsite Exchange Server is down for maintenance or due to a crash. The users can then still access their emails from the main host. The problem with this is that even though we have configured Exchange to reject emails exceeding say 40 Megabytes the POP Connector will still download the large emails exceeding that limit and dump them in a too large folder.

Their Internet Connection is Cable and about 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up. In their case a much faster connection would really bring down delays in emails. They also use VPN quite often offsite and a faster upload speed would really help with that. Dropbox / One Drive / Google Drive / CloudStation is also used in the office so a Gigabit Internet Connection would make a huge difference I think.

 

[quad]

I tested the LAN speed between my wife's computer and mine. Both have a gigabit ethernet adaptor and are connected with CAT6 cables to a gigabit switch in the home office. The gigabit switch is connected via a single CAT6 cable to a gigabit Linksys EA9200 AC3200 Tri-Band Wi-Fi Router in the basement. The test involved copying a 2000 Megabyte file from my computer to a shared folder on my wife's computer's main SSD drive. Well the transfer rate was actually lower than my internet connection. I expected this because I have done tests in the past and never got 1000 Mbps on the dot with a Gigabit connection. I am sure cable length, number of switches, number of devices on the network etc. all come to play in the transfer rates you can achieve on your network.