AT&T is coming Thursday to install fiber internet from the street to my house. They pulled the cable several months ago in my neighborhood of 40 houses. They sent two attractive girls to my door this afternoon to schedule the install. I asked what if I don’t want it and they said that is not an option.
So, for the same price of $30 per month, we get upgraded from 50/12 Mbps internet to 300/300 Mbps. I guess I should be pleased except my 50/12 Mbps U-Verse internet has always worked perfectly with Roon (3 servers always on and connected) and Roon ARC plus 3 internet protocol HD TV’s.
Hopefully, the install with be pretty much painless, but I’m afraid it might be a total cluster fluck. I guess we’ll see Thursday.
EDIT: Yes, it will be a new gateway to replace the current gateway. I’m really dreading going through this. I think I would prefer a root canal. I never drank a lot, and recently stopped drinking altogether. However, I may need a few beers Thursday night. Off topic: I also reduced coffee consumption from 20 ounces per day to 10 ounces.
EDIT2: For me, the AT&T fiber will be way faster but, I don’t need way faster. I don’t need faster at all.
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AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
2
I assume they will likely be fitting a new updated modem/router to handle the new speeds.
If so this is probably where any fluster clucks will lay.
Good luck Jim!
We had a similar experience with Telkom , our national phone supplier. They decided that they will remove all copper cabling and replace it with fibre , then all our phones will go wireless
The bit they missed was the intervening 7 years where our residential estate has had a fibre infrastructure and anyone who wanted to make the move had already done so.
We politely (several times) told then that we didn’t want their service , even on the day the scheduled the unwanted / unnecessary conversion of our supply.
I manage quite nicely on 2 VOIP phones thank you
Typical African bureaucracy they couldn’t understand that they were late to the party
But seriously we have been fibre for 7 years over 2 ISP’s and not a scrap of bother
I switched to full-fibre from cable last year. The ISP gave me the option of a router as part of the package, but I declined as I already have a Ubiquiti UDM-Pro in the house. They just terminated their fibre to a GPON which has an RJ45 outlet to connect to my router.
FTTH is quite clever. The GPON employs a beam splitter - Tx is at one wavelength Rx at another. The same single-mode fibre caries two-way traffic via two different wavelengths.
Hey Jim, I may be in the same boat here before long. I’ve had Suddenlink 1G cable service for years with speed test results regularly around 900/40. At least until the Ethernet port on my laptop crapped out, had to go Wi-Fi and now its around 400/40. The service has been very reliable. Now we have Metronet laying the fiber cables in our area and will be down our street one of these days.
Since it is different company’s I’ll have the option to keep cable/internet or switch to Fiber. Thinking about having the Fiber installed and keeping cable, at least for a while, if that is possible. I know that will require a second modem but would like to try it before making the switch.
I have the same concerns as you do and it ain’t broke so don’t mess with it. The only benefit I’m aware of for fiber is the upload speed should be the same as the download speed and not sure I care about that. Are there any other benefits?
I changed the title of this thread. Easy peasy, piece of cake.
AT&T tech took about two hours for the total install. Ran a fiber cable from the street, around the side of our house to the back. There, he installed a new box and ran fiber through the wall into our main bedroom, where the old gateway was.
Next he installed the new gateway (BGW320) and plugged everything back exactly as I had it. He was able to download all the old settings directly from AT&T to the new device except the port forwarding for Roon ARC. I gave him the port numbers and that was that.
From my perspective, nothing has changed except we went from 50/12 internet to 300/300 that measures closer to 400/400 for the same $30 per month.
I tested Roon ARC over both WIFI and cellular and it works well. Life is good again here. No beers were needed.
EDIT: The only thing I’ve had to do is reconnect my Mac Mini to Splashtop. I also did not run the new fiber internet through my surge protector as I did with the copper internet.
EDIT: The price of $30 per month includes a loyalty discount of $30 per month that I will get as long as I remain a customer. My price will always be $30 less than the full price. I get a $40 loyalty discount from Verizon.
We went through a phase where our cable service was flaky when it rained. I’m pretty sure it’s related to the condition of the provider’s street-side architecture. Their cabinets are in a very sorry state.
Fibre seems to be much more resilient in this regard.
The GPON (or more precisely as I should have said, the GPON ONT - optical network terminal) is basically a modem. It handles the PPPoE connection between the router and the ISP (and does all of the duplex magic over the fibre).
I had a nasty experience when during a thunderstorm , my neighbour’s palm tree took a direct lightening hit which travelled all the way down the copper telkom cables and zapped my network ,2 x streamers, AV amp etc
The fibre is non conductive and underground !! Mostly , our installer was sloppy and left the fibre sheathing within inches of the surface , prone to gardeners forks , that said the sheath is quite strong , it looks a bit like polycop water pipe
Oh, if only Ziply would do this on my street! They are still running on the ancient copper infrastructure they inherited from Frontier/Verizon/GTE before them. They said the best they could offer me was 1 Mbps DSL.
I’m not holding my breath for fiber, because I’m way out in the boonies. For the foreseeable future, Starlink is my best option.
The good news is they’re not charging you extra for it (yet). Root canals aren’t free and unless you have very good dental insurance you would end up paying a good chunk of it.
If I had the option of fiber to my home I would jump on it, and dump my cable service, which I only use for Internet. Verizon offers “Fios” service to many neighborhoods in my city, but not mine.
I hear what you’re saying about not needing more speed and not wanting to shake things up. However I have found getting Verizon to do any sort of maintenance on my copper service is like pulling teeth, or root canals. I used to think that in the event of a major catastrophe involving a long term power outage my copper voice service would still be there, but not necessarily if I switched to fiber. (Cell towers will probably be the first to go). But I don’t trust that to be true any more. Phone companies really want to stop supporting :POT (plain old telephone) service. There’s no money in it for them any more. Most of the world has already abandoned it.
Years ago–I’m talking 1990’s–my phone service would become noisy whenever it rained. Dial-up Internet, which was what I had then, became unusable. It was clearly the drop line to my house. When I called Verizon they asked if I was using a cordless phone, which I wasn’t. I added that I had gone to the basement, disconnected all my equipment at the service entrance, clipped a test set onto their line, and the noise was still there. Despite making it perfectly clear I knew what the hell I was doing, it took me a long time to convince them to send someone over and fix it. But they finally did.
