Is there fiber on your street? Maybe they could run a line to your house and then you could wire it from the source box.
The company that does residential gigabit here does its own wiring for the whole building. That means you need to get enough people to register interest before they’ll offer it, and they need to persuade whoever manages/owns the building, but it’s doable. Took about six months from when I first got onto them before it was up and running.
Gigabit is about $15 more a month than 250 Mbps ($55 vs $70). My router can’t really deal with more than about 820, so it roughly triples the theoretical speed to pay the extra $15.
I can, and have, maxed out the connection. You can get that level of bandwidth on a single connection during a steam sale. It’s not uncommon to get around 500 Mbps on a download, so I’m roughly doubling my actual speed on large downloads from big providers.
It’s nice to never have to worry about bandwidth being saturated. I can have multiple family members streaming video/audio/whatever and things don’t slow down. That would probably be true at 250 Mbps as well.
So it probably isn’t worth it, really. But it makes me happy, and it’s not that much more.
Gigabit internet is totally worth it. I pay $90/month. Who needs QoS when you can’t ever saturate your bandwidth to begin with since everything becomes server side limited.
I was really excited to log into my internet providers website and see they now offer 1Gig service! I pay about $70 for 150/5 right now. Asked them how much to upgrade to 1G - the answer was $250 per month! Ack!
If you’re on cable internet, gigabit service is very new. It’s theoretically possible on docsis 3.0 but almost nobody does it there due to inefficiency, so most ISPs are migrating to docsis 3.1, which doesn’t require infrastructure changes but does take new cable modems. I’d expect to see a lot more common gigabit cable over the next 1-3 years.
Gigabit fiber is of course already pretty common, and in large markets prices are very reasonable. I pay $72.48/month for gigabit fiber in manhattan.
It’s a MDU or multi dwelling unit so the telco must negotiate with the property board. Me as an owner of one of the apartment units getting onto the board, which is all retirees who probably don’t see the need for fibre, is a first step but I can’t ad hoc wire stuff just to my unit. :(
i have friends in places since i worked at the telco before that could expedite things from years into months but that would mean i have to get on board first to bend some ears.
As far as I know only Sweden has gigabit internet in Europe (Germany and a few other countries are in the roll-out phase apparently).
It’s about $110 per month in Sweden.
It’s interesting to see the reversal in ISP speeds from Europe to the US.
I’m on 380/80 for about $60 per month, theoretically capped but in practice unlimited.
I’d be happy enough with 100/20 for something like $40 to be honest.
You pay $110 for internet alone, or does that include TV and VOIP?
The US has long fallen behind because of our legacy infrastructure and sheer size. Fiber coverage is very limited across the country. I am lucky enough to have fiber in manhattan, but even most of this tiny island isn’t covered.
That’s why docsis 3.1 technology is so important. Cable coverage is near 100% and it can handle gigabit speeds no problem.
Where did you get this idea from? I don’t think it’s true by any meaningful definition. E.g. where I live (Zurich) they started rolling out a fiber to the home network in 2013 or so, and are at about 75% coverage now. The network is shared by multiple ISPs, so there’s some competition. 1Gbps up/down costs about $80.
FTTH doesn’t equal gigabit, that requires docsis 3.1 modems (which are a good bit more expensive).
I didn’t know about Switzerland! Is it Swisscom or init7?
Norway, Portugal, Romania, Germany, France and the UK all have pilot programs but nothing major. Netherlands is said to have it launching in the next year or so, no word on any major provider in Italy or Spain that I’m aware of. There’s more FTTH penetration than there are providers willing to offer gigabit services and docsis3.1 modems.
This is PPPoE not DOCSIS, so it hasn’t been blocked on that.
Swisscom have their own fibre network, and alternatively I could go with any of about 10 ISPs who are using the fiber network built by EWZ (the local power company). Init7 would be one of those.
also, remember that even if the line is capable of gigabit, the telco may nickel and dime tiers of speed.
here with telus fibre installs they are selling ‘only’ 150mbps when the line is capable of 1000.
The main provider in the UK is doing FTTDp and then copper to the homes, Virgin in Ireland/UK & Liberty in NL/Germany are doing a mix of true FTTH and HFC using the same docsis3.1 modem in all cases. Australia’s National Broadband Network is only doing HFC+Docsis 3.1. SFR in France are doing FTTB + Docsis 3.1. It seems to be the de facto standard in achieving gigabit internet in Europe!
It’s really annoying when you see the gigabit being rolled out everywhere but where you are, and you’re stuck with shitty-ass Charter.
Yeah. But if it makes me feel any better, you people bitching about your piss-poor internet is giving me a chubby.
No idea about the technical side of it, but I get over 900Mb/s when I use a wired connection to my router, so it sure feels like gigabit.
Speaking of internet speed - I was told a while back that Comcast was switching my tier of internet from 150 to 250 mbps, no extra charge. But I checked a few times after that (including rebooting my modem as they told me to) and was still only pulling about 130 mbps, same as previously, so I figured I just wasn’t going to get the increase, and since it’s still silly fast for most purposes, I didn’t feel like talking to tech support to figure out why. Just now, on a whim, ran a speed test. I’m now pulling down 237 mbps. Not too shabby!
(Of course, since I apparently didn’t notice when this changed, it seems like there’s not much practical difference really.)
Meanwhile 30 down, and 5 up, is the best I have available to me in the Chicago suburb I live in.
Ain’t regional monopolies great?
I was told lies about the gigabit internet in my area, as it won’t be till the end of the year. They did bump me up to 330/30 when I complained. Also my price stayed the same at $75, so double the speed I had at the same price is alright in my book.
It’s amazing to see the changes in speeds we are getting over the last few years.
This was me back in July of 2014 paying around $65, I remember how amazing that was coming from DSL:
