We currently use Spectrum at 100 m, and that speed seems OK, but less would be bad. One of the promotions wore off and now it's $55/month. I recall two years ago signing up over AT&T saying to myself "I live in a growing community, and in two years there will be 5G and fiber choices abounding". Here we are two years later, pretty much the only viable choices are Spectrum and AT&T. What gives?
The parent of the company I work for is the local phone company. The basic answer is that laying fiber is crazy expensive and it wasn't that long ago that a lot of copper was laid down in many areas. A subdivision that was built 10-20 years ago was probably a big copper roll out project and they can't tear that out and replace it with fiber until they've milked everything out of that asset.
What we're seeing around here is that the local governments at a county level are kicking in pretty substantial amounts of money to help pay for the buildout to have fiber run to every address in the county. There's pretty much no way we would have been able to afford that without that scheme.
EarthLink and at&t both show having 18% fiber coverage in your area. You'd have to call and ask directly to find out if it's where you are.
My guess from looking at providers in the area, ATT still has a strangle hold and won't upgrade until they have to.
If your state got any ARP funding last year there might be some more options incoming. PA got a few million specifically for better broadband deployment, I have to imagine other states will as well.
Check with your city council or county seat, there might be smaller ISPs in the area that don't show up on basic searches. That's how I found fiber at my house when we moved. I almost backed out because all I could find was DSL listed online.
RevRico said:EarthLink and at&t both show having 18% fiber coverage in your area. You'd have to call and ask directly to find out if it's where you are.
My guess from looking at providers in the area, ATT still has a strangle hold and won't upgrade until they have to.
If your state got any ARP funding last year there might be some more options incoming. PA got a few million specifically for better broadband deployment, I have to imagine other states will as well.
Check with your city council or county seat, there might be smaller ISPs in the area that don't show up on basic searches. That's how I found fiber at my house when we moved. I almost backed out because all I could find was DSL listed online.
Earthlink is -more- expensive for the same service, and AT&T is where I came from.
checked city counsels and chambers of commerce, and found: Spectrum and AT&T
RevRico said:
My guess from looking at providers in the area, ATT still has a strangle hold and won't upgrade until they have to.
So, maybe showing my Telco bias here, but... ATT upgrading to fiber for all their existing customers would be akin to you upgrading to a new house while just throwing away your old one. You're over $20k/mile to lay new fiber and there are a lot of cable-miles in even the smallest city. And if it's $55 for 100mb over Cu, folks aren't going to pay $300/month for gigs on glass. When you get into rural areas, it's an even bigger problem. You might be able to amortize the $20k/mile cost over a 30% uptake in a cluster of three or four 250-unit subdivisions to be able to hold a competitive price. And then you've got plenty of area to churn. But if you have to run 25 cable miles to cover a dozen doorsteps, that gets a bit dicey.
T-Mobile home 5G is growing pretty quick and we've had great success. Then again just about anything other than dialup would have been better than our 5meg DSL bs
bobzilla said:T-Mobile home 5G is growing pretty quick and we've had great success. Then again just about anything other than dialup would have been better than our 5meg DSL bs
I checked, not available yet.
$55/month sounds pretty nice. We both work from home (and I do iRacing) so we need lots of download/upload speed with low latency.
I pay $140/month for 500mb down.
wae said:RevRico said:
My guess from looking at providers in the area, ATT still has a strangle hold and won't upgrade until they have to.So, maybe showing my Telco bias here, but... ATT upgrading to fiber for all their existing customers would be akin to you upgrading to a new house while just throwing away your old one. You're over $20k/mile to lay new fiber and there are a lot of cable-miles in even the smallest city. And if it's $55 for 100mb over Cu, folks aren't going to pay $300/month for gigs on glass. When you get into rural areas, it's an even bigger problem. You might be able to amortize the $20k/mile cost over a 30% uptake in a cluster of three or four 250-unit subdivisions to be able to hold a competitive price. And then you've got plenty of area to churn. But if you have to run 25 cable miles to cover a dozen doorsteps, that gets a bit dicey.
Oh no I totally get it. What I don't get, or like, is how the major providers won't let anyone else do the work because the major provider owns the poles.
That was a big problem at my old house, comcrap owned the poles, every single pole the little startup fiber isp wanted to hang fibre off of, they had to for fight in court. Not neighborhoods, not streets, every single pole. berkeley Comcast.
The break up of ma bell was supposed to destroy monopolies, not create regional monopolies.
I really lucked into a good provider with the new house. $110/month for gig down, 50MB/s up. They had an easy fight because Verizon owns most of the copper and has openly admitted they refuse to upgrade or service it despite the millions they got from the state to do just that, so they're letting other companies rent the pole access.
Tuna, are you in or near the green zones? Scroll down past the ISPs and there's a map showing coverage. If you still live in the city in your profile.
Yah, $55/month sounds absolutely reasonable to me. I was paying $250 a month to the thieves at Comcast until we "cut the cord" and gave the cable part to Hulu Plus and others of my wife's choosing (she watches television, I don't). We're a little over a year into the promotional period and it went from 100/month to 120/month for fairly fast internet plus home phone service.
Edit: Just ran speedtest. 16ms ping, 215 Mbps down, almost 12 Mbps up. I seem to recall getting a notice that they were boosting our internet speed.
Thats fairly reasonable.
I honestly don't get the desire for greater speeds. Name on server you can connect to where a 100mb connection would be the bottleneck. You can watch 4 simultaneous 4k streams. Latency is a separate issue.
Everyone likes to think they are a heavy user, but most people arent (this isn't directly specifically at OP)
As someone that works in this industry I often tell people that we have competitors, they just aren't competitive. Also you pay for higher quality. I don't know how Spectrum prices things out but we do pretty significant speeds upgrades for not much more. Like you would get double the speed by paying $65. Most people overpay for speed. We have 300mb service which was 200mb up until last fall. We never had issues at 200 and certainly never have issues at 300.
If you call and threaten to cancel because att offered a better deal, I've had success with charter. I currently pay 40$ a month for 400mbps. Pretty sure I'm locked in for 24 months with that too.
In reply to ProDarwin :
try living in today's streaming world and WFH with a 5 meg DSL. Believe me, you'll believe in higher speeds.
As for cost, we were paying $82/mo for that terrible DSL because it was our only option. Our distance from the node/hub/box thingy dictated that 5 down, 0.5 up was literally the fastest we could get. So $50/mo for 20-25X the speed up and 100X the speed down is ... well it's a no brainer.
$55/month is a pretty good deal, I'd just stick with that.
I pay $45/month for 25mbps on Centurylink DSL and it's enough for us. Comcast in my area internet only is I think $50/mo on promo, and $80+ after the 2 years.
I believe t-mobile 5G is ~$50/mo, haven't used it personally, but if you already have 100mb cable, there's no reason to switch to a less reliable route like that, even with the common gripes of cable companies.
My in laws use a 4g cell service for the house, (T-mobile 5G not available for them yet.) and it's $100/mo, but the only other option is CenturyLink DSL, which in their area 5mbps is.... optimistic.
bobzilla said:In reply to ProDarwin :
try living in today's streaming world and WFH with a 5 meg DSL. Believe me, you'll believe in higher speeds.
Yeah, definitely. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But I often hear people with 50 or 100mb service thinking they need to pay more for 500mb or 1gig service, which doesn't make sense.
Hi! It's me again.
Verizon just sent out flyers for their 5G home internet service. It's attractive.
Right now we pay $55 for spectrum Verizon wants $50 with autopay. Question A: Is it worth it?
They offer a deep discount if you have a cell phone with them. They also offer a bonus for switching, around $1200 for both of us, two lines and two phones. This bonus is payable within eight weeks of connection and is only useful for paying your bill. The cell phone bill would go from $70/month with consumer cellular to $140 with Verizon. It's a lot to save the $35 monthly. In essence it takes our hypothetical Verizon internet + consumer cellular $120 to a Verizon everything $175, a loss of $55 each month. We would have a bonus of $1200, though you have to subtract an activation fee of $70, so $1130. That means that after two years we are paying more again.
Question B: Is it worth switching everything over only to switch it back again in two years or so? Essentially, since that bonus is payable only to the cell phone bill, the best financial decision is to get the bonus, pay the bills as fast as possible, then switch cell phone plans immediately, at which time we would have saved something like $400.
In reply to tuna55 :
I don't see anywhere the speeds they are offering you. Is it speeds up to? Or is it you get x? My company advertises X speeds and in fact we give customers 20% more on most packages.
Spectrum is ostensibly the "300 mbps" plan and Verizon is advertising "85-300 mbps" download.
Given that Spectrum varies quite a bit via speed tests, I am not sure what to believe.
In reply to tuna55 :
A good friend of mine just made the jump from garbage Verizon dsl to the 5g Verizon home hot spot. I'm concerned because Verizon cell stuff is usually the most expensive, especially data overages, but he hasn't hit or found a cap yet. It's only been a few months, but the internet actually works at his house now.
No telling what the future will hold with regards to surprise price increases or data limits.
I would suggest against joining their cell network if you can, but that's more because I consider them a terrible, untrustworthy, dishonest company than anything else. But I feel that way about most telcos because they've never given me a reason not to.
In reply to tuna55 :
Ok next how are you testing? Ethernet or wireless? Let me walk you though my first job this morning.
Customer owned equipment paying for 1 gig service. I explain to her that I can show her what speed is available to the modem but the modem and everything else is her equipment. I test at the connector for the modem and 1.244 gig. That's not good enough for her. I test the output of her modem on Ethernet and 990 meg. Reason it doesn't show the 1.2 is I'm on gig Ethernet and there's a little overhead so perfect gig Ethernet always shows ~990. That's still not good enough for her so I put my iPhone on her wireless. Show her 450 meg standing 3 feet away. She says that's not good enough for her because she only gets 100 meg on her work computer 20 feet away. Ok I lay my iPhone on top of her computer and show her 440 meg. Finally she says that she doesn't have any problems except with her work computer. All other devices get good speeds. This is how you get charged $100 for not thinking.
So Ethernet should on a good cable system be very consistent. Wireless will vary depending on distance and other wireless devices in the area. 2.4 gigahertz WiFi is limited to about 100 meg. 5 gigahertz WiFi to about 750 depending on the device. If your devices are limited to 2.4 gigahertz because of hardware or range then it doesn't matter what you feed it with you'll never see over 100 meg.
TLDR there's lots of variables with Internet speed most of which are due to wireless and how it works.
RevRico said:I would suggest against joining their cell network if you can, but that's more because I consider them a terrible, untrustworthy, dishonest company than anything else. But I feel that way about most telcos because they've never given me a reason not to.
Highlighted because I believe that too. But, my belief comes from the inside and 14 years of middle management with Sprint, AT&T, and Nextel. For the past 10+ years since being out of the cell-game, I find the only way to keep the cell companies honest is to go with their per-paid offering. If you subscribe to their games of "well give you $400 off" or a $500 handset trade in, you first have to believe that the handset they are offering you is worth $1,100 and the service is worth $100 per month.
For me, I pay cash for sub-$200 Motorola handsets. Yes, they have less "glitz" but I still get to see pictures of what others had for breakfast and make comments on them. I'm glad that your visual experience of this is in higher resolution and loads to the screen fast...great. Not worth the additional $900 to me.
I had to go with VZ (prepaid) because they offer the rural coverage I needed. It is now just $35 per month for service that meets my needs. I don't need international travel or international calling. The best part, is since it is pre-paid, ( I just have it roll to a credit card) but if I don't give them money in time, the phone just doesn't work until I do. They don't bad mouth me all around town and tell anyone else that lend me money that I'm a "bad person." If you become indebted to the telcos they will negative report the heck out of you but a funny thing is they never "positive" report you. No one ever says, "get a phone contract to establish/build your credit."
rant/
John Welsh said:RevRico said:I would suggest against joining their cell network if you can, but that's more because I consider them a terrible, untrustworthy, dishonest company than anything else. But I feel that way about most telcos because they've never given me a reason not to.
Highlighted because I believe that too. But, my belief comes from the inside and 14 years of middle management with Sprint, AT&T, and Nextel. For the past 10+ years since being out of the cell-game, I find the only way to keep the cell companies honest is to go with their per-paid offering. If you subscribe to their games of "well give you $400 off" or a $500 handset trade in, you first have to believe that the handset they are offering you is worth $1,100 and the service is worth $100 per month.
For me, I pay cash for sub-$200 Motorola handsets. Yes, they have less "glitz" but I still get to see pictures of what others had for breakfast and make comments on them. I'm glad that your visual experience of this is in higher resolution and loads to the screen fast...great. Not worth the additional $900 to me.
I had to go with VZ (prepaid) because they offer the rural coverage I needed. It is now just $35 per month for service that meets my needs. I don't need international travel or international calling. The best part, is since it is pre-paid, ( I just have it roll to a credit card) but if I don't give them money in time, the phone just doesn't work until I do. They don't bad mouth me all around town and tell anyone else that lend me money that I'm a "bad person." If you become indebted to the telcos they will negative report the heck out of you but a funny thing is they never "positive" report you. No one ever says, "get a phone contract to establish/build your credit."
rant/
I hear you both. I consider all telecom companies to be pretty terrible, although Consumer Cellular has been pretty solid. As for Spectrum vs Verizon, it seems a wash in terms of terribleness.
To be clear, we already have phones, they give us rebates for bringing them in, so most of your point there seems moot. We're not getting new phones.
No contracts on any of this at Spectrum, Consumer Cellular or Verizon, so that also seems moot.
Stampie said:In reply to tuna55 :
Ok next how are you testing? Ethernet or wireless? Let me walk you though my first job this morning.
Customer owned equipment paying for 1 gig service. I explain to her that I can show her what speed is available to the modem but the modem and everything else is her equipment. I test at the connector for the modem and 1.244 gig. That's not good enough for her. I test the output of her modem on Ethernet and 990 meg. Reason it doesn't show the 1.2 is I'm on gig Ethernet and there's a little overhead so perfect gig Ethernet always shows ~990. That's still not good enough for her so I put my iPhone on her wireless. Show her 450 meg standing 3 feet away. She says that's not good enough for her because she only gets 100 meg on her work computer 20 feet away. Ok I lay my iPhone on top of her computer and show her 440 meg. Finally she says that she doesn't have any problems except with her work computer. All other devices get good speeds. This is how you get charged $100 for not thinking.
So Ethernet should on a good cable system be very consistent. Wireless will vary depending on distance and other wireless devices in the area. 2.4 gigahertz WiFi is limited to about 100 meg. 5 gigahertz WiFi to about 750 depending on the device. If your devices are limited to 2.4 gigahertz because of hardware or range then it doesn't matter what you feed it with you'll never see over 100 meg.
TLDR there's lots of variables with Internet speed most of which are due to wireless and how it works.
Testing only wireless, because that's all I use, and we have a dual band router (TP-LINK AC1750), tested @ 5 Ghz a few feet away from it with multiple devices. I know the Disney Circle is slowing things down, so it's out of the loop when we do testing. I am not even sure any of my devices have an ethernet port anymore.
To be clear, Verizon's claim and Spectrums claim likely overlap, though Spectrum, in our experience, has been spotty. Verizon costs $5 less per month and gets the cable out of the wall (which is a slight but nonzero gain mostly for Tunawife just visually)
You'll need to log in to post.
