alf the time I have no idea what you guys are talking about, but it sure sounds cool!
Internet provider options what would you do?
- Thread starter wander2039
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There's a ATT tower less than 1/4 as the crow flies and the TMobile is 2.5 miles, not sure how close that is in latency terms.
Cost - you have great prices and I see competition which is T-Mobile and ATT.
Where I live, we have no option to go lower than 500/500 and the cost is $68 a month/
I did have 300/300 for $58 but they did away with it and forced us to the higher price. We have NO other options and they know it.
Even worse is this is our local co-op here in NC
At our previous house in SC we had our electric utility co-op offering fiber and it was $49 for 500/500
Typical families dont need more than 300/300 and the providers know it so they charge more for speed you dont need = Profits
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$70 for fiber/1GB is pretty good. Even here in South Carolina I pay $89 for 600MB. What is the price after 1 year?
Lucky you, I only wish.
I can drive two miles down the road and have even posted someplace in this forum maybe 2 years ago. The 5g signal off the T-mobile tower there, I recorded 700+ MBPS download on my iphone. However two miles back at my home I couldnt even get 70 and T-Mobile/ATT/Verizion wont offer it to me at our home. MY wife works from home and pretty intensive stuff at that so ever if they offer it one day, it would have to be rock solid.
There are others in my community about 1 mile closer to the tower that do have T-Mobile home Internet and love it.
Even in our last home, we were always on the fringe and stuck with Spectrum cable, than literally as we were moving out in 2022 our electric utility was putting fiber in the community... oh well again.
So my fiber here is great mostly but I am paying for more service than I need.
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$95 after the 1st year unfortunately. Our Google fiber has been $70.. well $71.50 now for years.
If you are getting that much throughput using higher frequencies, the tower you connect to is much closer than 2.5 miles. C-band and midband become pretty useless at distances > 1/2 to 1 mile even with line of site. If you add some trees and houses into the mix, the distance is even less. T-Mo is probably on the close tower as well.
A typical HD stream is 10 Mbps. 4K stream is 25 Mbps. So even with multiple concurrent video streams, it should still leave plenty of bandwidth for other activities.
What matters for online gaming is low latency. One should check for buffer bloat in this case to make sure your router isn't a roadblock when the link gets saturated...
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
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What @Quattro Pete said.
The providers love to recommend higher bandwidth if you have "multiple people using the internet at the same time". The only reason is they want larger monthly fees and they know it will not affect the amount of data sent/received, so it's a win for their pocketbook. 250 x 250 is more than enough bandwidth for 99% of homes.
Even then it is fast enough. There are very few people that need faster than that if all other aspects of your network are working correctly
So just clarifying, the house is built but there's no utilities running there yet? Utility installers should carry insurance in case they break any other utility lines if you're worried, but I understand.
If you don't need low latency or extremely high speeds, I suggest starting out with TMO and see how that service goes for you. If you like it, then that's perfect and you can stay with them if you're satisfied. If you're not satisfied, move towards the fiber. Personally I'd start with the fiber anyways; I've never had good dealings with 5G "home internet" with the ones I ordered for project sites or employees use at home.
If you don't need low latency or extremely high speeds, I suggest starting out with TMO and see how that service goes for you. If you like it, then that's perfect and you can stay with them if you're satisfied. If you're not satisfied, move towards the fiber. Personally I'd start with the fiber anyways; I've never had good dealings with 5G "home internet" with the ones I ordered for project sites or employees use at home.
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Nothing on the property, the only thing on it right now is the RV, container and one camera. After thinking about the monthly cost and how much it is after a year I might start out with TMO, the price is quite a bit cheaper and truthfully fiber will be way more than I'll need. The straight Talk hotspot worked fine for VPN when I'm on call and streaming but it's limited. It's $25 for 10Gb where TMO will be $35 for the lowest but unlimited.
Wow. My promo rate on my 1G symmetrical fiber was $55 and now it's been at the "normal" rate of $60 for some time.
Guess that would of been a smart thing to do.. Our address is fairly new so doesn't always show up so thought I'd have to call. But I did put in the neighbors around and nope it isn't. So much for that I guess. The fiber is available though, lines across the street and least verified the neighbors can get it.
You can try it free.
I just checked my old address of 16 years. We were stuck with Spectrum at the time, obnoxious at over $80 for 300/300 however our Electric Co-op was laying fiber at the time just over 2 years ago. I waited 6 years for them to get to us and then when they do we were moving *LOL*
I only wish I had that here $50 for 350/350... but I am shocked that you can get up to 8Gbps service where I used to live. Up near Lake Murray, SC (yeah recent earthquake yesterday 3.0 centered near the dam)
I only wish I had that here $50 for 350/350... but I am shocked that you can get up to 8Gbps service where I used to live. Up near Lake Murray, SC (yeah recent earthquake yesterday 3.0 centered near the dam)
Anything over a Gbps is mostly marketing. There are very few people that could even utilize that amount of bandwidth without expensive enterprise class networking hardware and wiring in your house. Most inexpensive home networking equipment is Gbps with 2.5Gbps getting a little more affordable. Most people's perception of bad internet comes down to poor equipment or configuration problems.
I just switched to 1GB service from 80Mbps DSL only because it was cheaper to switch companies. I worked from home a lot as an sw engineer, had DirectStream TV on multiple Rokus, and 3 kids that gamed and did whatever teenage things without a problem on 80Mbps. Kids have moved out, but I can't really tell the difference with the 1GB unless I need to download a large file. The only complaint when the kids were at home was when they downloaded a large PS5 game. It took an hour or 2 instead of 10-15 minutes.
This is a good tool. I would also suggest being very careful with trying to fix the findings because it's quite a complex topic. When you throw in speed differences, like a 2.5g internet (link speed - not committed bandwidth) and a 1g link to a desktop, you need added buffers to avoid drops from the speed difference. Things coming in at 2.5g rates can't leave as fast on 1g, so you have to buffer some or you'll get packet loss that hurts your overall throughput.
Mix in some wifi latency, because of channel utilization, and it's even harder.
Tiny buffers work great when everything is at the same speed in the device.
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