Fiber Internet

[Camp]

My neighborhood is finally having fiber optic lines installed (they started on my street yesterday). The install and sales pitch is not exactly what I would have expected. I thought once fiber finally hit the area it would be AT&T, Verizon, or some name I've heard before.

 

Instead, it's a company called Open Infra doing the installation. Supposedly they are a Swiss company that also operates under the name Stadsnätsbolaget. Their sales strategy has not exactly inspired confidence. They are using door-to-door sales people armed with the most basic of information:

 

• Open Infra is not the ISP - Instead, they will connect us to one of three ISP.
• Open Infra is installing the lines to the neighborhood and to homes.
• 1 gig service at $79.99 with no data caps
• Commit to 1-year and Open Infra will install the fiber from the street to your home free
• The 3 ISPs are all no-name regional ISPs that, as far as I can tell, have no operations in Texas. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is SumoFiber
• I skimmed their contract and nothing really stood out as a red flag -other than the 3 no-name ISPs.

 

The sales guy I spoke with couldn't answer questions about modems or how/when I would be put in contact with the actual ISP. He had zero knowledge about any of the ISPs beyond the marketing speak they fed him. The whole experience just feels off. It's especially odd since the neighborhood is quite large so the cost of putting in fiber must be significant.

 

Is this at all typical for new fiber installs? What are the changes that a more well-known ISP (AT&T, etc.) will eventually lease the lines?

 

 

 

 

[dogbert]

I've never heard of this either. That's not the "normal" way of doing it because it's usually driven by one of the big established telcos that run everything end to end (i.e. AT&T etc). This is different by far - they're laying fibre +leasing it to third party ISPs. The list they have for their "app market" of providers is weak (https://us.openinfra.com/fiber/marketplace/) because the big ISPs aren't going to touch this IMO as there's no profit in it for them. 

It doesn't seem dodgy, but definitely unusual for Texas burbs.

[kelley]

This is really common for neighborhoods that the bigger services do not want to install in. Do you have an HOA? A friend's HOA partnered with a company similar to this to install fiber in their neighborhood but the deal you are getting is better than there's, you had to sign up for 3 years at $99 per month for 1Gb during the pre-sign period if you signed up after that period you had to pay $999 for installation. He did the pre-sign deal as he went form 10Mbps DSL that hardly hit 3Mbps to 1Gb fiber.

[Camp]

I suspected the HOA at one point too. Based on what others have found, it doesn't sound like they are part of the deal.

 

I would probably jump in just because the 1-year commitment isn't the worst thing in the world. But, the list of ISPs is so weak that I'm inclined to wait to hear reports from neighbors. One neighbor said the door-to-door sales person told him there is no need for a modem. You just connect the fiber line directly to your router. That strikes me as odd as there has to be something converting the signal from fiber to Ethernet.

[ChrisBardon]

I'd take $80/month for Gb in a heartbeat.  I'm paying that for cable 250/20 right now.

[AlbertA]

That's super weird.

 

AT&T seems to still be expanding here in the DFW metroplex though. At&t informed my brother (He's in Richardson) he know could get fiber - and he did. I got it last year (but had it available for a few years). He got the same price I did too.. $50 for 1G service for a year, $70 after that.

 

 

[Robot Monkey]

It sounds like something similar to an MVNO setup for cell service?

[kelley]

On 4/13/2021 at 4:42 PM, AlbertA said:

That's super weird.

 

AT&T seems to still be expanding here in the DFW metroplex though. At&t informed my brother (He's in Richardson) he know could get fiber - and he did. I got it last year (but had it available for a few years). He got the same price I did too.. $50 for 1G service for a year, $70 after that.

 

 

We’ve got AT&T fiber and it’s great. Way better than my old Comcast service and about 1/3rd the price. Best of all, no data caps. 

[Josh]

Just moved to SF where my building was set up for Google Webpass gigabit fiber for just $70 / mo. Setup was hilariously easy. Dude showed up, pinged an ethernet port already in my unit, and he was done. They only activate one port, but he said if I wanted to I could install a switch in the comm panel and activate other ports. I probably won't bother, but so far I'm super impressed with the speed even on WiFi. 

[foogledricks]

Fiber is great. Fun fact though. Insects eat fiber and have done so twice since I’ve had it with Verizon. The technician was like “Ya insects ate ya fiber”

Blew my mind.

 

I guess even insects have worry about colon cancer

[Josh]

2 hours ago, foogledricks said:

Fiber is great. Fun fact though. Insects eat fiber and have done so twice since I’ve had it with Verizon. The technician was like “Ya insects ate ya fiber”

Blew my mind.

 

I guess even insects have worry about colon cancer

 

do bugs have colons?

[Robot Monkey]

Do they have cloaca?

[foogledricks]

3 hours ago, Josh said:

 

do bugs: have colons?

Fixed

[Josh]

15 hours ago, Robot Monkey said:

Do they have cloaca?

 

i think that's a reptile and bird thing

[kelley]

Funny that this thread came up, I’m visiting our friends who did the HOA fiber. Changed their life, they can work from home when needed, he bought an iPad (he still uses a flip phone). He was telling me about how he’s been documenting his antique tool collection with his iPad so when he dies it’ll be easy for his daughter to sell it all, he just turned 60. They stream their grand daughters volleyball games. It’s amazing what good internet does for people’s lives. 

[JFo]

Well, if all goes well, I’ll be getting fiber internet installed at our place in the next couple weeks. We have a new provider in our town (Metronet). They’re set to come out and do the installation on the 16th. Next week they’re going to have a surveyor come out and check the area to make sure that they can get the cable to our house. We live in the middle unit of a townhouse, and the box where the connection comes from is on the other side of the end unit’s yard. It has to go under both our neighbor’s driveway and our own in order for the install to reach our door. We’ll see how that goes.

 

Once the new service is up and running, I will be canceling my Xfinity service. While they have met our needs quite well and there have been very few service interruptions in the six years we’ve lived here, I’m tired of the data caps and the fact that they can’t provide upload speeds faster than 12 Mbps. Also I can get gigabit internet service for  less than what I’m paying Xfinity now for the next two years. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with those faster upload speeds yet, but I’m sure I can find something to do with it.

 

What’s really weird though is that Xfinity gave me a free bump in service speeds right around the same time the new service was installed in our neighborhood. What an amazing coincidence!

[Robot Monkey]

8 hours ago, JFo said:

What’s really weird though is that Xfinity gave a free bump in service speeds right around the same time the new service was installed in our neighborhood. What an amazing coincidence!

 

Amazing coincidence!

 

I'm on the cheapest tier for FIOS and pay $60.59/month all in. But they've increased my speed tier every two years for free and, this year, even knocked a couple bucks off the bill. They over provision and then it's free for them to upgrade because I'm on autopay and electronic billing.

 

And I think there's zero chance they'd do that if they didn't have to compete.

[ChrisBardon]

That's great-I'd still love to be able to get fiber.  Unfortunately, I can't get fiber to the home here (house is about 40 years old), so I'm stuck on cable.  Worse yet, the CRTC changed the wholesale rules a couple of years ago, so the 300/20 service I was paying $75/month for went up to $95 (last bill was $107 taxes in).  Still, it's better than dealing with Bell or Rogers.

[JFo]

Well, it looks like I will have to wait a while longer before I can enjoy fiber internet. In order to get the line to my house, the ISP needs to bury a line to the house. However, because I live in a townhouse, I need to get approval for that from the association first, which can take upwards to 30 days. With the cold weather settling in here in Minnesota, it's highly unlikely that they would be able to bury the line since that would put us into the middle of December.

 

I've now cancelled the installation (which was scheduled for tomorrow) and will work with my association to get the approvals needed to install the line. At this point, I'm thinking I may have to wait until April or May for the ground to thaw before I can try again.

[JFo]

Dat upload speed tho.

 

 

Fiber internet and Goldeneye 007 on Xbox in the same day? I must be living in a dream.

[kelley]

We’ve been looking to move house and the first thing I check is if it has fiber internet. If not I’m not moving. 

[AlbertA]

1 hour ago, kelley said:

We’ve been looking to move house and the first thing I check is if it has fiber internet. If not I’m not moving. 

[JFo]

2 hours ago, kelley said:

We’ve been looking to move house and the first thing I check is if it has fiber internet. If not I’m not moving. 

 

Well, I gotta say that I'm enjoying it so far. I just can't stop running speed tests.

 

The installation went really well too. The technician who came out to do the install was really knowledgeable and friendly. He got it set up exactly the way I wanted it too. I have a networking box in the basement under the stairs that has ethernet cables running all throughout the house. He managed to run the line from outside to the box in the basement so that all the rooms in the house with a networking connection were able to take advantage of the higher speeds.

 

We also received an Eero Pro 6E as part of the package at no additional monthly cost. I already owned an Eero wi-fi network set up in our house, consisting of an older gateway station and two Beacons, so it was pretty easy to integrate the Pro 6E. The only downside is that the Beacons don't support the same wi-fi speeds as the new gateway, so they there's a bit of a bottleneck. However, I don't believe any device we currently own supports wi-fi 6, so we're not missing out — at least not yet. I do expect we'll have to upgrade that portion of the network at some point though.

 

What really matters is that we now have the higher speeds for all the wired network devices in our house (my iMac, game consoles, Apple TVs, etc.), symmetrical speeds, and no more data caps. 

 

Also, I gotta say that I was really surprised when he showed me what the actual fiber line looked like. I couldn't believe how small and thin it was. To think that you can get such high internet speeds from that one wire blew my mind!

[JFo]

So, this ended up being a super-relevant conversation for me this week:

 

 

As I said in the post above, we have ethernet cables running all throughout our house. What I didn’t say is that they are all Cat5e, so the bandwidth  limit is 1Gb. As happy as I am about finally having gigabit internet, part of me has wondered if, in ten years time, I’ll regret not having cables that can support up to 10 Gb.

 

Linus, in this video, shares his thoughts: Not only is 10 Gb unnecessary for homes right now, he doesn’t think it will ever be necessary. I think it’s usually dangerous in the world of computing to say that any amount of anything will ever be “enough,” but I think he makes some decent arguments here. If we ever find ourselves in a position where 1 Gb isn’t enough it may not be for a long, long time.

 

I can tell you that in my own home, even with all four of us using connected devices at the same time — be it streamers, tablets, or game consoles — we’ve never come close to hitting the limits of our bandwidth. And that’s even when we had relatively slow speeds of 400 Mb and below. If anything the gigabit speeds we have now may be total overkill. But like the offscreen voices in the video, I have because I want to have it. 😁

 

What do you guys think?

[Brandon H]

I’m in even worse shape — most of the cables in my house are straight-up Cat5 — not Cat5e — although I do have Cat6 running to and within my backyard cottage where the consoles and home theater are. I’ve toyed with the thought of having it all rewired, but that would an expensive, painful proposition in an 85-year-old house that still has a number of plaster walls. And honestly, even streaming 4K, I don’t much notice any issues.