Which internet line to you prefer?

[NTDaws]

Answer in the poll if you prefer:

DSL

Dual-DSL

Quad-DSL

Optic Fibre

 

My speed with Dual-DSL

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

I use Optic Fibre specifically with Verizon, its been nothing but good, their Actiontec routers are good too.

[Donut417]

5 minutes ago, Being Delirious said:

Answer in the poll if you prefer:

DSL

Dual-DSL

Quad-DSL

Optic Fibre

You left out a lot of options. Like Cable Internet (Coax), which is between DSL and Fiber in terms of speed and quality.  

[paddy-stone]

Some people don't have a preference, only what they CAN get... might want to add that option?

[AshleyAshes]

10 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Some people don't have a preference, only what they CAN get... might want to add that option?

This.  I mean if someone can get fiber at a reasonable price, without any surprise caveats, there's no reason to want anything else.

[Lurick]

I prefer smoke signals backed up with carrier pigeon for redundancy.

[Donut417]

31 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Some people don't have a preference, only what they CAN get... might want to add that option?

Good point. We can only get Comcast in my area. Because we are too far from the AT&T CO. Which is ok to me. AT&T internet sucks unless its Fiber. 

[JustAStrangeGeek]

Wow. everyone, including myself, loves optic fibre...

[Guest]

I've trained by dog to send and receive packets. Faster than my old gigabit service.

[intertan]

dsl, feed by fiber

cable, feed by fiber 

 

 

if you don't like fiber then there is something wrong with you

[Pierce88]

For building or maintain a network, fiber is cheaper and faster and more reliable. Local ISP went dedicated fiber, increased the speed 150x and cut the price in half. Now I'm stuck choosing between $80/m for 250/250 or $100 for 500/500. Was just getting 9ms pings in Overwatch USA tonight. For a few $ more, I can get a block of static IP addresses, but they recommend at least the $100 package if you want to web host. Maybe splurge $190 for 1gb/1gb. If you're really hurting for money, get the 70/70 for $50 plus tax, no hidden fees, free install, no bundling.

 

Should have seen the "We don't do 'up to', we give you guaranteed dedicated bandwidth" marketing campaign. Charter is crashing. I run several pings 24/7 against several remote datacenters. Sometimes I'll see a 5ms ping spike for a short bit to a server in Germany. I get about 5min-15min of downtime per year around 2am. It's not announced, but I can deal with that for the prices and otherwise perfect internet.

[paddy-stone]

1 hour ago, Pierce88 said:

For building or maintain a network, fiber is cheaper and faster and more reliable. Local ISP went dedicated fiber, increased the speed 150x and cut the price in half. Now I'm stuck choosing between $80/m for 250/250 or $100 for 500/500. Was just getting 9ms pings in Overwatch USA tonight. For a few $ more, I can get a block of static IP addresses, but they recommend at least the $100 package if you want to web host. Maybe splurge $190 for 1gb/1gb. If you're really hurting for money, get the 70/70 for $50 plus tax, no hidden fees, free install, no bundling.

 

Should have seen the "We don't do 'up to', we give you guaranteed dedicated bandwidth" marketing campaign. Charter is crashing. I run several pings 24/7 against several remote datacenters. Sometimes I'll see a 5ms ping spike for a short bit to a server in Germany. I get about 5min-15min of downtime per year around 2am. It's not announced, but I can deal with that for the prices and otherwise perfect internet.

But not everyone lives where you do. So saying

If you're really hurting for money, get the 70/70 for $50 plus tax, no hidden fees, free install, no bundling.

  isn't really relevant.

A LOT of people would kill to have options like that... I personally would love to have anything over 76Mb/19 available to me at all. I mean 76 isn't BAD, it's actually fairly good for the UK, and not being in/near a city.

 

I don't like how come places get upgraded like a few times in 3 years, and others get upgraded once if they're lucky in 5-10 years... there should be a LOT more investment in upgrading IMO, if not at a certain point soon the landline will cease to be viable option at all for many people, as long as the mobile data plans keep increasing their limits and allow tethering.

Just to be clear, I am happy enough on my plan, even though it COULD be much better... I just feel really bad for people still stuck on like 1Mb/s because BT won't upgrade their exchanges... and yet some places have <300Mb/s, I know that they need to be profitable, but some places have been upgraded loads of times, whilst others are still on copper that hasn't been replaced in >30 years, yet they are still wanting £30-£60 per month for packages with really shit speed on ADSL.

[Pierce88]

7 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

But not everyone lives where you do. So saying

  isn't really relevant.

A LOT of people would kill to have options like that... I personally would love to have anything over 76Mb/19 available to me at all. I mean 76 isn't BAD, it's actually fairly good for the UK, and not being in/near a city.

 

I don't like how come places get upgraded like a few times in 3 years, and others get upgraded once if they're lucky in 5-10 years... there should be a LOT more investment in upgrading IMO, if not at a certain point soon the landline will cease to be viable option at all for many people, as long as the mobile data plans keep increasing their limits and allow tethering.

Just to be clear, I am happy enough on my plan, even though it COULD be much better... I just feel really bad for people still stuck on like 1Mb/s because BT won't upgrade their exchanges... and yet some places have <300Mb/s, I know that they need to be profitable, but some places have been upgraded loads of times, whilst others are still on copper that hasn't been replaced in >30 years, yet they are still wanting £30-£60 per month for packages with really shit speed on ADSL.

The sad part is the only reason I have fast cheap internet is because the local ISP decided to offered dedicated internet in the first place. I actually got to talk to one of their network admins who had been working with them for 20+ years, since they were dial-up, and he said over-subscribing was horribly expensive. Their support costs were through the roof. It was a game of whack-a-mole, constantly trying to monitor the entire network for congestion, only to get constant calls about transient issues related to congestion, but not obvious. Burned up lots of time of expensive tech people, and taking away time from real issues.

 

After several years of the issues, they said enough is enough. They went all dedicated bandwidth. Their internal network can handle 100% of all of their users using all of their bandwidth at the same time. Zero choke points all the way to the trunk. After they did this, the number of support calls and truck rolls dropped substantially. It was overall cheaper to just provide the end user what they want for than to deal with customers reporting than their internet doesn't work. Did you know that a single truck roll to investigate an issue can cost an ISP all of their profit for a customer for a year? A single 15 minute call to tech support can cost the ISP more than an entire year's worth of bandwidth. Grandma making a single call to the ISP costs more than the torrenting "data hog".

 

Similar setups are being done around the USA. The single most expensive part of being an ISP is the support. Cut down the support calls, cut down your operating costs. The single easiest way to do that is zero over-subscription and fiber. Case study after case study shows this approach can pay itself off for an existing ISP in as little as 2 year's time, and pure increase in net profit after.

 

When I was on Charter, I was calling their support every other month due to connectivity issues. Typically 30min-1 hour on the phone every month, and several truck rolls per year. I've had one call to the fiber ISP, resulting in a truck-roll, and it was due to a poorly fitting Ethernet plug resulting in a connection that dropped out for very brief moments, not even enough for the network port to register it was down. After that, zero issues.

 

Another cost saver is the dedicated fiber. They have virtually zero field work to do anymore. They've gone from 50Mb Internet to 1Gb Internet in the past several years, and no changes to their network required. I never see their technicians working outside after the original roll-out. Even going to 10Gb will be easy and 100Gb  should not require any changes to the fiber. Charter on the other hand, I see constantly around the city doing upgrades, for the past 15+ years. It's like they've made a business of splitting nodes to keep up with bandwidth demand. It's labor intensive and not future proof at all. Charter actually offered 100Mb for 2 years, but then removed it as an option because they could not keep up with demand.

 

The end result is Charter is about the same price for 60/5 as 500/500 dedicated fiber, and completely ignoring reliability. The only reason Charter is even around is they have a much better TV package that is pretty much required to be bundled. Mostly better sports. Fiber IS the future. And yes, 100Gb fiber to the home that is backwards compatible with current PON networks is being worked on and sounds quite close, claiming 5-8 years out.

[mynameisjuan]

Fiber is literally the ONLY answer here. 

[paddy-stone]

3 hours ago, Pierce88 said:

The sad part is the only reason I have fast cheap internet is because the local ISP decided to offered dedicated internet in the first place. I actually got to talk to one of their network admins who had been working with them for 20+ years, since they were dial-up, and he said over-subscribing was horribly expensive. Their support costs were through the roof. It was a game of whack-a-mole, constantly trying to monitor the entire network for congestion, only to get constant calls about transient issues related to congestion, but not obvious. Burned up lots of time of expensive tech people, and taking away time from real issues.

 

After several years of the issues, they said enough is enough. They went all dedicated bandwidth. Their internal network can handle 100% of all of their users using all of their bandwidth at the same time. Zero choke points all the way to the trunk. After they did this, the number of support calls and truck rolls dropped substantially. It was overall cheaper to just provide the end user what they want for than to deal with customers reporting than their internet doesn't work. Did you know that a single truck roll to investigate an issue can cost an ISP all of their profit for a customer for a year? A single 15 minute call to tech support can cost the ISP more than an entire year's worth of bandwidth. Grandma making a single call to the ISP costs more than the torrenting "data hog".

 

Similar setups are being done around the USA. The single most expensive part of being an ISP is the support. Cut down the support calls, cut down your operating costs. The single easiest way to do that is zero over-subscription and fiber. Case study after case study shows this approach can pay itself off for an existing ISP in as little as 2 year's time, and pure increase in net profit after.

 

When I was on Charter, I was calling their support every other month due to connectivity issues. Typically 30min-1 hour on the phone every month, and several truck rolls per year. I've had one call to the fiber ISP, resulting in a truck-roll, and it was due to a poorly fitting Ethernet plug resulting in a connection that dropped out for very brief moments, not even enough for the network port to register it was down. After that, zero issues.

 

Another cost saver is the dedicated fiber. They have virtually zero field work to do anymore. They've gone from 50Mb Internet to 1Gb Internet in the past several years, and no changes to their network required. I never see their technicians working outside after the original roll-out. Even going to 10Gb will be easy and 100Gb  should not require any changes to the fiber. Charter on the other hand, I see constantly around the city doing upgrades, for the past 15+ years. It's like they've made a business of splitting nodes to keep up with bandwidth demand. It's labor intensive and not future proof at all. Charter actually offered 100Mb for 2 years, but then removed it as an option because they could not keep up with demand.

 

The end result is Charter is about the same price for 60/5 as 500/500 dedicated fiber, and completely ignoring reliability. The only reason Charter is even around is they have a much better TV package that is pretty much required to be bundled. Mostly better sports. Fiber IS the future. And yes, 100Gb fiber to the home that is backwards compatible with current PON networks is being worked on and sounds quite close, claiming 5-8 years out.

Exactly, this should be a goal from the start to cut costs on expensive tech calls related to problems, by upgrading the lines so that they support the network throughput. The trouble is bean counters and board members/shareholders often don't know enough about the business and don't see that doing it this way SAVES money... so the operators and customers are unhappy and the business itself suffers, when they could be making thinsg good for all involved as per your situation above.

I am so glad it worked out for once and you have a good ISP that's getting things done

 

[NTDaws]

9 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Exactly, this should be a goal from the start to cut costs on expensive tech calls related to problems, by upgrading the lines so that they support the network throughput. The trouble is bean counters and board members/shareholders often don't know enough about the business and don't see that doing it this way SAVES money... so the operators and customers are unhappy and the business itself suffers, when they could be making thinsg good for all involved as per your situation above.

I am so glad it worked out for once and you have a good ISP that's getting things done

 

You make more money with less money.

[paddy-stone]

29 minutes ago, Being Delirious said:

You make more money with less money.

Elaborate.

[NTDaws]

Just now, paddy-stone said:

Elaborate.

More people want to buy, with a cheaper price.

[paddy-stone]

2 minutes ago, Being Delirious said:

More people want to buy, with a cheaper price.

Well of course, but we weren't talking about customers costs really, we were saying about fixing problems that exist and aren't going away, does more to save money, both in keeping expenses down, getting a great rep and getting many new customers because of said rep, retaining satisfied customers instead of them getting annoyed very often and leaving to another ISP.

IMO there's little point having cheap packages that MIGHT bring in customers, but then you don't have the capacity to give those customers a decent online experience. They will leave, business gets a bad rep and then less customers join/retain... which in turn gives less profit and less money to spend on upgrading. eventually something has to give, and it's most likely the ISP would have to upgrade anyway or fold... I can't see many customers joining after a while, certainly not people that actually research the ISP and care about good/reliable service.. at most they might get customers that don't care about speeds and just want a connection for as cheap as possible.

[GidionK]

coaxial is here in the netherlands pretty much everywhere and you can get here about 400/40 mbit and the netherlands (KPN) doesnt really care about fiber.

 

speedtest on my 200/20 connection: http://www.speedtest.net/result/7047881913

[skywake]

On 10/02/2018 at 1:28 AM, Being Delirious said:

More people want to buy, with a cheaper price.

Well all of these technologies cost about the same to deploy in the first instance. So if there's no existing infrastructure fibre is the only sensible option because it's the technologically superior option. And because of the ability to charge some consumers more by offering speeds other technologies couldn't deliver. If you can offer some of the higher end users better services that reduces the price you need to sell the service to consumers who are happy with a slower speed. So for that reason and the lower running costs fibre will always be the option that allows you to offer the cheapest price service.

 

The problem comes with the fact that most places already have some service already running past their house. Whether it was originally deployed as a phone service or cable tv service. So in the short term it's cheaper to just keep using what's already there. The problem with that approach though is that ultimately fibre is still cheaper because of the lower maintenance costs and ability to offer higher tier plans. If there is any demand for plans better than can be offered on HFC/DSL in a given area? In the long term fibre would have been cheaper.