Fiber to my home

July 5, 2012 10:20 AM

Is gigabit (fiber) internet access all that?

Just got word that fiber is being laid down my street by US Internet, and it looks like a great deal--more speed for less money.

1. Has anyone in Mpls had experience with US Internet fiber service?
2. I assume that buying 1Gbps service would be pointless due to upstream bottlenecks?

Any other gotchas when switching away from the big name broadband companies (currently using Comcast)? Is reliability an issue?

posted by mpls2 to computers & internet (6 answers total)

1Gbps would be awesome if you're a bit torrent user
posted by buggzzee23 at 10:44 AM on July 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

You can stream a full-HD video at less than 100Mbps.

Unless you're going to be streaming more than one movie at the same time, all the time, it's kinda hard to imagine what an individual consumer might want to use that for. Doing a full-drive backup over the internet? Even at cable modem speeds that's only going to take a few days, and it's not the kind of thing that you're going to be doing every week or so. Heck, most such systems really only require you to do a full upload once; they'll just update changed files after you get your initial copy.

So yeah, I'm sure we'll eventually come up with uses for that kind of bandwidth, but right now most individuals can be satisfied with current broadband speeds most of the time. I'm a little annoyed with my ISP, but I'm stuck at DSL speeds around 7Mbps. Even 20Mbps would do me just fine, thanks. I use torrents fairly regularly, and even at 7Mbps I can download a TV show in twenty or thirty minutes, which is plenty fast. At 20-30Mbps it'd be a fraction of that.

This, of course, doesn't apply to businesses. My employer has upwards of thirty people using the same internet connection just in this office. Even though it's mostly the equivalent of light surfing, a consumer-type line could easily find itself swamped by that sort of volume. But heck, our LAN is only 100Mbps, so it's not like a 1Gbps line would make any of our individual surfing any faster.

That's something else to think about, actually. Unless you've got a gigabit LAN, you're probably going to waste the excess bandwidth.
posted by valkyryn at 10:48 AM on July 5, 2012

*Sidney Greenstreet chortle* Oh, yessss.

But, like most all-you-can-eat arrangements, you are (as said above) not likely to saturate it for very long. And if in fact you do, you probably need the reliability of business-class service anyway. But I find myself chortling again at the thought. Will you excuse me now?
posted by wenestvedt at 1:06 PM on July 5, 2012

I work for a small ISP in the US but far away from you. We are busy putting in fiber to local businesses, similar to the setup you're being offered. As a marketing promotion we connected up a guy's house at full gig-e line rate over fiber (and then to the Internet via multiple 10gbit lines from our aggregation point). We had to also provide him an enterprise-grade firewall (Juniper SRX) so that we could even get screenshots of the service exceeding 100Mbit/s, because most consumer/home routers just... won't do it.

Now that it's been installed to the guy's house and the novelty has worn off, his usage is like any other light-residential user -- average of only a couple mbit/s when he's active, and peaks of <1>
That said, anyone doing heavy use of bittorent (legal or not) can easily peg a connection at 100mbit/s and push close to a gigabit. But you'd have a hard time watching all that HD video or using all those Linux ISO images. Even a high-def raw blu-ray is doing less than 50Mbit/s from disk to the video codec. You can fill up some hard drives right quick if you want to.

Reliability is completely dependent on the particular company running the service. Call their listed phone number. How long does it take to get to someone who knows your local area? (ask technical questions about the service like speed, IP addresses, etc, and see how many times they have to transfer you to someone else before you get to someone with answers). That will probably be a good general first guess of how good they'll be.
posted by frontmn23 at 2:02 PM on July 5, 2012 [1 favorite]

I think upstream bottlenecks are going to be the biggest thing. I mean, I've almost never had ANY download source be able to saturate my connection. (Except the old Compaq.com. That thing was FAST.) At some point, faster isn't really faster, it's just you can do more stuff concurrently.

And then on the other end, sure, they have fiber to your house, but what do they have connecting themselves to the rest of the internet? That's the question.

If it's cheaper, go for it. But you might find out that it's cheaper for a reason.
posted by gjc at 3:02 PM on July 5, 2012

If I was in your position, I'd be going for the 100 Mbps option. Many many many web servers wired up in data centers around the world are only on a 100 Mbit port anyway. The price they're showing is actually pretty awesome, and it's just a few bucks more per month than the 50 Mbps package. (I see what they did there....)

I have FIOS in north Texas, and I love it. the latency is almost zilch, speeds excellent, and it's just nice & fast. Never had any problems with it whatsoever. FTTH (Fiber To The Home) is a proven, reliable technology. No worries there.

But 100 Mbps would be sweet. I only have 15/5 right now ;-)
posted by drstein at 7:28 PM on July 9, 2012