Menu
What's new

Fiber.

Don Baer

Don Baer

Moderator
Staff member
Messages
11,784
Location
somewhere east of Queen Creek, AZ - South East of
They have been installing fiber in my neighborhood. I just got a flyer offering me 4 options, 500 mps, 1 Gig, 3 gig and 8 gig. I am debating which one to choose either 3 gig or 8. My dilemma is almost all devices will be using wireless and I don't know if I will gain anything going with the 8 gig speed since the wireless connection will now be the limiting factor. it's only $65 difference but if it's not going to buy me anything why spend the money. Your collective thoughts on this would be appreciated.
 
Honestly.. if you only have one wireless network setup and don't have a fairly high end router going into a decent quality switch with multiple access points I think you'd be hard pressed to use more than the 1G link.

In theory wifi 6 supports up to 6gig or so.. in practice single device speeds are pretty universally sub 1gig, and that's especially true if you're more than about 20' from the access point. So unless you have a whole bunch of dense clients or multiple access points with a lot of bandwidth hungry clients.. I'd save the money personally. If you spend big $$ and went to wifi 7 in theory you can get a bit over 2Gbps per client, but again it's seriously distance limited so in order to really use it you need multiple bw hungry clients.

Our options here are (well.. will BE by summer!! 🤞) 100, 250, 500, and 990Mbps and we're probably going to go with 500Mbps after looking at our actual usage.
 
I'd also recommend the 1gb and save the money. If there was a gamer in the house I might go higher, but most streaming and such will work well over the 1gb. You can check what equipment the ISP is providing, but keep in mind that your speeds are also limited by the technology of your devices connecting to it. My iPhone15 is probably my newest device and it's only the wifi 6 technology.
 
Also keep in mind that not all websites/services run 1gb speeds on their end. The bigger ones will, but you’re really only going to see the 1+gb speeds when downloading larger files for most large sites.
 
Given that the slowest speed you'll be offered is 500Mbps, a speed about twice to three times my Starlink speed, and as noted above, a speed above which few site servers deliver anyway ..... I'd be more worried about a data cap than speed.

IE : how many movies can you watch before you pay extra?
 
There is no Data cap but you guys pretty much confirmed what I thought. The rates are locked in for life with no contract so I think I'll opt for the 3 gig so if in the future I get some devices that can use it it will be there. The price point of $100/ month is still less than the $120m I am paying Starlink. The 1 gig is $75/month the 3 gig is $100/ so not much different. I definitely don't need the 8 gig.
 
Darren Wright said:
Where we were all week the speed was limited to 5 Mbps up/down, while slower than I was used to, certainly could still get done what I needed to for work. Was even able to connect to my home network remotely to keep an eye on things.
Click to expand...
Actually, the almost 7Mbps down does not impact our needs. We have about 4 echo devices, 5 Blink cameras, 2 cell phones, 2 laptops, a printer and 1 Davis Pro weather station all on our network and everything functions. We are accustomed to the loading speed of pages and aren't really upset with life on such a slow connection. Basically by now (over 5 years) we don't really know what the difference would be like to again have a speedy connection. I guess the connection we have matches the pace of our life now.
 
Bill Satko said:
Actually, the almost 7Mbps down does not impact our needs. We have about 4 echo devices, 5 Blink cameras, 2 cell phones, 2 laptops, a printer and 1 Davis Pro weather station all on our network and everything functions. We are accustomed to the loading speed of pages and aren't really upset with life on such a slow connection. Basically by now (over 5 years) we don't really know what the difference would be like to again have a speedy connection. I guess the connection we have matches the pace of our life now.
Click to expand...
Oh yeah. I forgot about the TV.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top