Frontier is about to offer 7-gig fiber across several states
theverge.com
theverge.com
They are active on reddit (or was when I used to use it), have a YouTube channel, and even offered tours of their switch buildings to fans!
I don't even know what I would do with 2 gigabit, let alone 7 or 20. Even with gigabit, the only time I really take advantage of it is downloading a new game. Streaming video requires only what, 20-30 megabit?
They were content to just let their Copper network rot, and didn't start doing fiber until there was state and federal money to do it. meanwhile our local Telephone CO-OP went all in on fiber years ago and now offers 8gb Fiber to your door for about 175 a month.
Where that purchase was DSL nearing end of life, Frontier neglects much of the network. West Virginia and the NorthEast US are degrading by the day.
Verizon's FiOS was very well engineered and Frontier acquired it near the beginning of it's life. Even there Frontier spends less than Verizon did. They abandoned Verizon's IPv6 deployment, for example.
In the long run, both the users and the government probably would be better off if everyone switched to Starlink.
Also, as an anchor price, it’s assuring that 1 and 2 gigs are easy.
For other Illinois readers, i3 customer support and the installation were excellent. After Comcast it’s been refreshing to just pick up the phone or start a live chat and immediately talk to a human with agency. And they do deliver the promised symmetrical speeds.
I wonder if they are counting on the fact that it's practically un-saturable as a home user.
I use a reasonable amount of bandwidth in my WFH job (and my partner does as well), but we're just barely topping out a 300Mbit connection right now. I think we could make use of gigabit during the burstiest periods, however.
With Cloudflare access my file server and website are available without being detectable to the ISP, though I actually do have a static IP + hosting plan through an interesting ISP called Skyway West in Canada.
(Just my guess.)
My excitement was short-lived. Soon after moving, I realized that our internal VPN implementation was limited to 50-60Mbs/. So had 50x more upload bandwidth than before, but could only make use of 2x as much bandwidth for the use case I care most about.
For 60e/month I get that, ~260 TV channels, amazon prime, netflix/disney+/canal+ included, wifi 7 and a secondary extender with ethernet backhaul support, a 2.5Gb switch, dedicated ipv4, and a bunch of other things included like a cellphone sim card, a portable 4G router with 50Gb of monthly data, etc ...
What our governement did in incentives push for their "project high speed internet" really worked here, 15 years ago even in large cities we were behind with lackluster adsl. Add EU's push to open the historic copper lines and Free's push into breaking the old money's market, both the home and mobile market is really great.
Similar is happening in spots in the US. I'm in a location that was trenched for fiber using the recent broadband stimulus funds. I went from 40Mb up to 2Gb.
France is much more empty than people in other country usually believe, we're no germany with our population spread out all over, we have a large areas with a lower population density than the midwest called the "empty diagonal" [1], and yet as of today we have 83% of fiber coverage There is no way those area would be covered without such a system
For the mobile coverage they made it even simpler, in that the ISP right to their frequencies is tied to a timeline of coverage % of the territory, so we have 75% covered in 5G and 90% in 4G.
The problem is that there's just a lot of home infrastructure that requires upgrading before I can get to this point. I could get 10Gbit to the UDM no problem, but then I need to install the 10Gbit cards in my file server that are sitting on top of it, swap out a 1Gb mikrotik that routes all the home server traffic, etc etc etc
As others said, you really need to upgrade your home LAN to get much of a boost. I splurged on a nice Intel NIC with quad 10Gb RJ45 ports, and am running a OpenSense router in a VM. I now need a nice 10Gb switch to make the most of, since everything downstream from the router is on 1Gb speed.
What I don't love seeing is the same, predictable responses every time something like this is posted. It's always the same: "oh, they'll never be able to deliver", "their subscribers will never use it, why don't they stick with 50/10", "I get by just fine on my 100Kbps ADSL", "why would anyone want to stream video". I get it, as tech people, we're predisposed to being skeptical and questioning, but why the hostility to progress? Okay then, let's just stick with dialup, because that's only anything anyone will ever need, apparently. We should be celebrating anything that pushes the art forward.
The demand will be induced, the pipes will be filled. Let's think about applications that can actually take advantage of new capabilities like this, instead of pooh-poohing every little bit of change.
Very few things seem to go above 100mb (hard wired). The single exception I have seen is my Xbox which sometimes gets up to 500 when downloading a game.
I guess if you have a big family and a lot of things are downloading or streaming at once, but are people really hitting a limit. Even Netflix’s recommendations are super low.
It just seems like we have some pushes for these crazy speeds(maybe for marketing or increments) when the reality is the speeds to you will never utilize it.
I feel like I am missing something for how you could possibly justify this in your home.
It is expensive to use more than 1Gbps. Need router that can do 2.5GBps or 10GBps. For business have separate access points, need switches and APs that can do 2.5Gbps.
I was curious, so I just went to download the Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft. That is capping out at about 70 mbps. Downloading an almost 7gb file in 2 minutes.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying "oh we don't need this speed". But clearly things have not been changing. We have been past my current download speed from Microsoft being a minimum for a while.
I mentioned Xbox getting to 500, so yeah there are some that are. But you're not downloading a game every day, at least not ones that are 50gb and won't just finish very quickly.
So that is 2 things that actually seem to utilize the speed that I can get, but it doesn't seem like the rest of the internet is anywhere near this capability and hasn't really been changing much.
I've reached out to them several times to come out or do a survey, or run the existing fiber through already existing conduit and they just refuse.
I'm not against 'progress' generally per se, but I think that you're reaching diminishing returns >1 Gbps, and that's quite the price tag, especially compared to:
> Google Fiber has a $150 / month 8Gbps plan, but it’s only available in select cities, such as San Antonio, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Mesa, Arizona.
From a strictly societal utilitarian perspective, I would think that going for more ubiquitous fibre coverage would be better.
Back in the last century/millennium, there was a mass push to having electricity and telephone connections everywhere, and I'd like to see the same thing done with fibre Internet—ideally owned by local government, with Layer 3 being provided by companies:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Speed_PON (G.9804)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_in_the_first_mile
The main point is to deploy fibre everywhere, and not necessarily which service speed is offered.
(A separate question is whether to go with PON or with 'active' networking.)
I agree though the goal should be to deploy fiber everywhere. I was just responding whether or not it's utilitarian to roll out the higher speeds like 7G while waiting for that - it is at it costs next to $0 on the infrastructure side for the areas already having the fiber independent of resources we dump into rolling out more fiber.
I have a 400 megabit upload speed which is more than a lot of the VPS services I use in practice. However, the IP sometimes changes without warning. No way to get a static one without business pricing which is an order of magnitude more. I'd like to run my servers locally.
I cannot imagine much use for more than 200 megabit. I know Alan Kay preaches that you need to be living in the future to invent the future in a technical way. But I don't believe it. The things we need today don't seem to more and faster but better organization of the tech we already have.
We're absolutely in the stone age with software architecture, organizational structures, and communication technology that helps (and not hurts) humanity. We've got a lot work to do here.
Peer to peer networking enabled by reasonable upload speeds could help here. But still, you need a static IP to make it practical.
Anything important is in a rack at a colo facility.
Even without wifi 7 and just using 5GHz, I think your estimate of 100mbit and that gigabit is too much for wifi is overly pessimistic.
of course if performance is accaptable is the real question. But if you are happy on wifi you can be satisfied with a cheaper plan, or so I'm guessing
It is not like gigabit is state of the art anymore, we are now starting to upgrade to 10 gigabit at home, 1 gigabit routers are cheap, and ISP's buy them in bulk.
If good/faster fiber is easily available to everyone, this also includes people or organizations who need it and benefit from it.
Also just because you coulduse it, doesn't mean you need to but fiber as a technology is a lot better than copper which is the main reason why we had slow internet for ages.
Fiber has a lot less issues with powerlines (basically none). Its a lot faster, you can have a lot longer lines without performance degredation like dsl or vdsl.
And if these people actually need to upgrade, they can just buy a new Wifi router or use a cable. But with a slow copper line, they don't have any option.
My personal position is that customers in outlying areas deserve worthwhile, reliable internet access - even if that reduces shareholder dividends and executive bonuses.
But for real. Seeing as most consumers are using WiFi, a quick google suggests the fastest WiFi standard is 1.3Gbps, what is the usecase besides super users who are willing to wire everything? (Is that 1.3Gbps per device and so a combo of devices can use 7gig?)
[1]: for those not in the US -- "Frontier [airlines]" is a ultra low cost airline
We also don't know when we need more.
When corona hit, a lot of people realized that there normal internet speed was not enough.
Fiber availability means also a general better availability for people, companies or other organizations to have it when needed (a more rural school for example).
I can also see a future with robots: Imagine you are old and need help. But you only need help a few hours a day for food, cleaning etc. Buy a robot, have someone remote help you through using the robot (video streaming, spacial data streaming, voice, audio etc.)
Much more important than high peak data rates was getting those 10 Mbit/s consistently throughout the workday, and in both uplink as well as downlink.
For that, top speeds per individual connection are almost meaningless; what matters is a not-oversubscribed network. I nominally got 1 Gbit/s, but during Covid often saw that slow down to 0.3 Mbit/s during business hours.
I'd much rather pay for 100 Mbit/s with an SLA (maybe something like "at least 50 Mbit/s to your city's top three POPs at the 99th percentile or you don't pay for the entire month"?) than for "up to 7 Gigabit!!!" with none.
For now you're correct, but this year there is expected to be a new WiFi standard.
802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) 2.4/5/6 GHz Up to 46 Gbps
The vast majority Frontier's FiOS is in California, Texas, Florida and New York. Frontier's little footprints in other states are basically them padding their resume.
Since then I've picked up a cheap piece of shit 8 port 10G on Aliexpress for ~$100. Works surprisingly well.
I think they left off the usual provider's asterisk next to that bullet point, or they're hoping to have so few customers that know what to do with that amount of throughput that only the long tail customers would use it
Frontier bought them out and they could not keep DSL working at all. Problem after problem that they couldn't fix. So we switched to Comcast - that's how bad Frontier was.
Now we use Metronet and I'm waiting for that to get completely enshitified since they were purchased by TMobile or someone like that. I hope i3 is available in our area, I'm guessing if it's not, they'll be moving in as Metronet goes to shit.
Time to champion municipal/coop fiber in your area.
All the Frontier fiber options in my area are not available to me.
Comcast xfinity is the only option.