Fiber optic.

[doc henderson]

Well in the 80s we had dial up internet.  took 40 minutes to upload to my palm pilot.  makin all kinds of noise and tones.  Be dow, Be dow.  then we moved to cable internet.  now the whole block here has gone to fiber.  we have 3 acres and stuff buried all over.  we have a telecom office on the E side of the house, and everything runs between the house and pool.  Power, gas, sprinkler lines, etc. etc.  So, when the sales folks arrived, they said it would be no problem to traverse our yard and not damage anything.  The already had ran the conduit through or sewer drain and caused a backup.  So, I asked, if they break it do they fix it... No.  So, we will be the last on our block, but we got it run through the conduit I had in the back.  had to get to the bottom of the wall where it came through.  A 90^o had come loose so we could not pull the whole way.  My wife said she would help..  We had a cable already in the conduit.  had to pull it out and bring a string with it, and repull cable and fiber.  we want to have cable TV and internet, till they get it hooked up.


 


Wife will be happy when all the connections are made.  had to take out 6 feet of the beautiful sidewalk with the wood grain stamp pattern.  

[Southside]

All I can say is you must really want fiber to go through all of that. 

[doc henderson]

My wife did.  I have put this off for a year.  now she understands why.  good to have the conduit fixed and no other lines were injured in the making of this film.  

[doc henderson]

It had a 90 just over the footing that had come loose.  it needed to be fixed.  if we pulled the cable and just went back with fiber, it would have been easier 3/4-inch conduit.  hope we are good for the next 10 to 20 years.  I know where all the pipes are buried.  I even ran air from my shop to the pool house via pex.  all our downspouts on the house and shop go into 4-inch drain.

[doc henderson]

The It's Shake and Bake And I Helped Commercial (youtube.com)

[YellowHammer]

Sometimes you have break a few eggs to be able to Google "How to Make an Omelet."  

[Southside]

Here we have come to appreciate the spinning circle thing that shows up on web pages while it downloads, we think of it as a friend....   It helps to build anticipation - ohhh, look what just showed up!!  Of course out this way tossing a mouse out of a snap trap to the chickens is considered entertainment so take it for what it's worth. 

[doc henderson]

the circle of death!

[Ianab]

I don't miss the spinning circle of boredom 

As long as your ISP has the back end infrastructure to carry the traffic, you won't regret getting fibre installed. We could save a few bucks by going to a slower speed plan, still on fibre but slowed down to ~200 mbit. But what the heck. Plan is advertised as 950 / 500, so close enough, basically the internet connection is as fast as our internal home network.


Luckily our install was pretty straight forward. We had it done when they were laying cable on the street, and they simply underbored from the street about 30ft to the front of the house. Termination box there, then it runs under the house and comes up at the ONT box in the kitchen. Our town was done in the 2nd stage work, so they had switched to underboring, so everything is buried. The old copper cabling is planned to be retired in the near future. 

And delivered another Starlink terminal on the mail run this morning. House is about 4 miles from any fibre install, so Satellite is a good option for them. 

[SawyerTed]

I enjoy having Emily's  help with big projects.  She does have a way of making them go easier.   I'm sure you appreciate the Georgia's help.

Fiber will be great.  The limits on fiber, as Ianab mentioned, are the switch gear on either end.  I doubt you'll need to upgrade the line ever again.  

Here we live in a main road.  The phone company had land line service available and that's it.  No cable tv cable and there's no fiber.  The best wired internet service we can have is ISDN - 20th century internet. We tried ISDN but were to far from the closest "central office".

So we went satellite. First we had Hughesnet, then switched to Exceed now we have Starlink.  Starlink is fast enough I suppose.   It is consistently over 100 Mbps and usually around 200 Mbps. Depends on time of use.  

[Nebraska]

Looks like a pain in the butt to me, I guess that's the price of progress. 

[customsawyer]

I've had fiber for several years. I'm not sure why, but our local phone company has been running it all over the area for years. They plowed all the way to the house and hooked it up. They are a little bit higher than some other options but any time I have a problem there is someone here in less than 30 min. to fix it. It also keeps the funds local, which I really like. Most of the folks that work there are customers of mine. Last time I called I ended up speaking to 3 different people. All of them had questions about sawing and such. My son gets a little frustrated since I have faster internet than he does in the bigger cities.

[Machinebuilder]

I got Fiber a couple years ago. I really like it.

over the years I have gone from 4800baud modem to 9600baud to Hughes net (one way) to hughes net 2 way to cellular to AT&T Uverse and now to Spectrum Fiber

I am on a 300Mbps plan and very rarely see any slowdown. I just tested and am getting 367Mbps download and 12.1Mbps Upload. I could get 1Gmbps this is working fine for me
They also offer TV Mobile phone and home phone.

When i saw contractors installing Red pipes along the road I got interested and found out it was part of the rural broadband program started after covid.
It is underground up to the power pole near my house and then goes overhead.

The last time we had really bad storms and power outage I ran an extension cord to my camper to use its solar system to power the modem and router, those things still need power to work

I

[SawyerTed]

For ten years I worked with a neighboring county school district.   I was in charge of IT and vocational programs. 

The local co-op telephone company was very innovative and eventually built an extensive fiber network. In part they used building to the schools to justify building out their network. They did things we couldn't get a bigger phone company to do and were very responsive.  It was a great partnership. 

[doc henderson]

The neighbor across the street worked for ideatec and got the whole street excited and to sign an intent to use.  Made everyone feel we would get it sooner if we had a critical mass of folks.  I knew a guy that worked for them, and he said we were in line anyway as they came down the hill for many blocks.  we are going in the box with the clinic behind us.  the two boxes in from have to travel 150 feet to get to the house, and lots of underground services in a small area, and lots of concrete.  All things my wife could not understand.  she has been relatively patient but thought we should just let the install it.  It ended up like when our long cul-de-sac street has a garage sale.  My wife who has sworn many times, "we will never again have a garage sale at our house" suddenly wants to be part of the event, and we put junk on our driveway.  For two days we have strangers who want everything for a quarter walking all over our yard.

[Resonator]

You're a lucky man to have her help Doc!

Over the past couple years all over the county I live they have put in miles and miles of fiber line. The crews put a stub out junction box at just about every dive way. When they got to my place to put one in I had them call their supervisor to find out if I was being charged for any of this. He said no, all the initial work is paid for by the American Infrastructure Act. If I decided to sign up for the service the final line running to the house, that I would get charged for.
It is good to have it available out where I live, I've heard of people loosing the sale of there house because it didn't have high speed internet. Also I've heard some need the speed and capacity to upload and download if they work from home.

[PoginyHill]

I enjoy having Emily's  help with big projects.  She does have a way of making them go easier.  I'm sure you appreciate the Georgia's help.

Fiber will be great.  The limits on fiber, as Ianab mentioned, are the switch gear on either end.  I doubt you'll need to upgrade the line ever again. 

Here we live in a main road.  The phone company had land line service available and that's it.  No cable tv cable and there's no fiber.  The best wired internet service we can have is ISDN - 20th century internet. We tried ISDN but were to far from the closest "central office".

So we went satellite. First we had Hughesnet, then switched to Exceed now we have Starlink.  Starlink is fast enough I suppose.  It is consistently over 100 Mbps and usually around 200 Mbps. Depends on time of use. 

Wow! I have Starlink, but not nearly those speeds. I wonder why the difference. Guess I was under the impression they used the same satellite network. Download, I might bet 40-50Mbps. Upload rarely above 10. The antenna has a clear, unobstructed view.

[beenthere]

Same story as SawyerTed. The fiber is 1/4 mile away, but I was stuck with just the copper line for the land-line phone. Went with Starlink and most of the time it picks up enough of the moving satellites to have 150-200 Mbps. Need heat in the dish to melt snow. Fast enough to rarely see the spinning icon. Wanted 30,000 dollars to put fiber to the house. $120/month for the Starlink works better for this home. 

[Ianab]

Starlink speed can vary for a couple of reasons, similar to cellular connection speeds actually. 

First is that the Sats are in specific orbits, or rings around the Earth. You see it when they are launched, and still close together in a "train". They then space themselves out and settle into their final orbit, so only a couple are overhead at any time. But your signal is going to depend on your viewing angle to the shell that's going overhead. If you are directly under them, you will get a better signal than if they are lower to the horizon. Think of that like how close to the cell tower are you?

Then all the ground terminals share the same radio bandwidth from the satellite. So speed is going to depend on the number of users in range, and what they are doing. That's why there was a limit on installations in the early days, and people noticed that speeds sometimes dropped a bit over time. As their neighbours installed more ground stations it used more of the sat's capacity. Over time they have launched more sats to increase capacity, so most of the wait list stuff has stopped. The number of ground stations in an area was being limited to make sure the existing customers were getting at least the minimum promised speed. So again like cellular, the more phones connected to a certain tower, the less bandwidth available to each device.

Other connection options are cellular and ground based microwave, generally cheaper than Starlink, but coverage is more limited. Cell coverage in rural areas may exist, but see the "Distance to Tower" factor. Voice and txt doesn't need much bandwidth, so can still work with a weaker signal. Streaming or video calling needs a good connection.  Some areas also have land based radio where you have a small dish that connects directly to a small local tower. Local company offers that service, and although it only gets about 40mb, it's cheaper than Starlink, and they have a network of small towers offering cover into many of the remote areas.

[SwampDonkey]

They'll put up Fiber Op on some rural roads and others not, pretty much the same population density around here. You can't figure the reasoning and they'll feed you any line of bull to deflect your inquiry. 

[Larry]

Our local power coop offered fiber to anybody that wanted it a few years ago. They offer basic 100 mbs for $50/month. Bunch of other options with the top being 2.5 gig at $110/month. TV packages are also available through the same pipe at reasonable prices.

Service is exceptionally good, I suppose one reason is everything is brand new state of the art.

Since they are a coop I'm not sure if they get a subsidy to offer the service. Before them reliable, and fast internet was not available. I think property prices made a big jump when we got good internet. Lots of work from home folks in my area.

[Ianab]

Service is exceptionally good, I suppose one reason is everything is brand new state of the art.

One good thing about fibre is that it either works 100%, or it's broken, and needs to be repaired. Copper and wireless more prone to weather and interference, and "sorta working". Copper DSL modems train down in speed until they can maintain a stable speed, and if that's only 2 mb, that's what you get, even if it should be about 10. 

A fibre link is either good, or broken. 

You can get slowdowns if your ISP hasn't put in enough upstream bandwidth (to save money), but on a fibre connection you wont really notice your 100mb is only getting 50 at peak times, because everything still works.

Other speed issue is your own home network. 
Right now my phone tells me 16 mb download (weak wifi), while my desktop measures 850. (hard wired) That's my problem to fix, not the ISP's. If you want max speed, then cable it. 

I did a quick test today out in the back blocks when I stopped for lunch. I got 50/15  mb on my phone, but I was up on a hill with a nice view. So if you have that, then cellular internet is practical. Down off the hill, no signal, so it's not.  Starlink or local MIFI is then your options. And another Starlink terminal delivered today. They are only 2km from town, but I'm guessing the kids streaming and gaming pushed the issue. 

[Menagerie-Manor]

Our local electric coop took the Fiber internet challenge in 2019 and secured a grant for the project that finally delivered last year. Never thought I'd ever benefit from a gov't program but I sitting here with 890 mbps on 5G wireless, amazing coming from 15 mbps.