Speed Test! How fast is your bandwidth?

Trunk Monkey

Trunk Monkey

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Going to restart this thread here. Since switching to HULU and dropping Spectrum cable my son has repeatedly had problems connecting to and staying connected to games on his phone. I believe Spectrum is throttling our content - especially games.

Google fiber is coming to town soon and I can't wait to get their gigabit service for the same price I'm paying now for shitty 300 MB service. Fuck Spectrum! I'm so sick of their monopoly.

Using Speedtest this is my unthrottled bandwidth. I tend to believe that it's a best case number and does not represent what I'm receiving on a real world basis.

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Half-Gig Spectrum wifi through a gigabit router.

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FirstNet LTE.

My local utilities board just ran fiber lines down my street last month that will supply 2.5Gig service to my house within the next month.
 
Ting looks like a fiber provider. No way a cable company would provide gigabit uploads.
 
Those specs could run an isp; damn.
I cut mine due to money; I was spending way too much. I dropped to the 75mbps tier, saving 150bux, and haven't really noticed any difference at all. I still have 40mbps down and about 11 up, only I think that's the laptop, more than the connection. I'm not running servers with 50 players these days. Skillz are returning after the stroke, but slowly.
 
Ting is a fiber provider, it's totally overkill, but is about the same price or cheaper than spectrum and wayyyy more reliable.
 
theterminator93 said:
I wish it was mine. :wink:

It's one of the schools. I've been slowly upgrading them all with 10 gig+ backbones.
Click to expand...

Going to hit Spectrum up tomorrow and see if they'll give me gigabit service for the same price I'm paying now because GOOGLE Fiber is going to be here in a few months offering exactly that. It should be an interesting conversation.
 
Good luck. I upgraded to gigabit because the first-year rate on my December 2022 contract ran out on my 400 Mbps plan. Due to this month's promotions and the generally poor value of the poverty bandwidth plans (I really should stop calling them that when there are actual low-income discounts that telcos can give eligible customers), my best option was to take the promotional first-year gigabit rate for a $10/month increase rather than let my 400 Mbps plan pick up a $25/month increase in year two.

Unless you sail the high seas and even if you do, due to VPNs, it's not often that you'll feel any real-world benefit of gigabit. Downloading massive archives from distributed multi-stream CDNs like Akamai or Cloudflare doesn't happen very often. Even if you do, Xfinity has idiotic data caps so the high throughput is still functionally limited.
 
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This is why I haven't been advising most of my schools to upgrade beyond 1 Gb/s pipes. There are a couple at 2 Gb/s (with 3000-4000 users at those locations) and two at 10, but only because the ITC charges the same for 10 as they do for 1. Once the peak starts to get to 80% or so of the limit and average utilization exceeds 60% then I recommend upgrading to the next highest speed tier.
 
My ISP, Sonic, keeps teasing a rollout of 10Gb fiber but my neighborhood already has 1Gb fiber deployed using space leased from AT&T poles so they don't seem to be in a hurry to replace them with their own fiber.
- Personally, I care less about the increased speed and more about the possibility of dropping the phone service they force me to take (The optical to ethenet termination point also breaks out an RJ11 cable as part of their deal with AT&T).
- I don't care if they give me free long distance calling to 90+ countries, this "free" service costs me something like $16 in taxes+fees for a service I've never even used. Such BS.
- On the bright side, the service is quite reliable and means I haven't given Comcast a check in 7 years.
 
Irv said:
Even if you do, Xfinity has idiotic data caps so the high throughput is still functionally limited.
Click to expand...

I had a 1000 or 1200 gig monthly cap before I upgraded to the unlimited gig speed internet .. this surprisingly doesn't take very long to hit the cap when you have three Xbox ones and games like COD are upwards of 100 gigs, then the kids run out of HD space and delete that to install something else, and then re-download COD again .. see where I'm going with this ?? 🙄

gunn said:
- On the bright side, the service is quite reliable and means I haven't given Comcast a check in 7 years.
Click to expand...

Switched to online payments ? I haven't wrote a check to Comcast in years either, but I still spend $280 a month for a land line phone I don't answer, cable box for two rooms and the gig speed internet .. 🤔
 
gunn said:
Cable box?
You're such a boomer, buddy.
Click to expand...

The cable fuckin thing. But I do, as a matter of fact, still have one of those old-school brown cable boxes .. this one was pirated, it got all 32 or so channels on the A side and the B side buddy. 🤣
 
We cut the cord in August and switched to Hulu streaming… saved $20 a month in the process.
 
Cable boxes are still the best for paid TV. Try it however you want, streaming still sucks. It lags and kills your bandwidth. We have a cable box at the office. It has one job and that is to let me type in a channel number and see a station. It's nice.

At the house we have an antenna and Pluto TV, both free. To me, the point of cutting the cord was to spend less money and watch less TV. If there's an event on I want to see that isn't OTA, I use the network's app on the Apple TV and borrow my parents' cable logins. 😂
 
The problem with cable TV was paying too much for a bunch of crap you don't watch. Before we got the insane fragmentation that we have now with so many disparate streaming services, I was on PlayStation Vue for a couple of years for much less than what cable TV cost. These days, I have Internet only and that stupidly asynchronous gigabit plan I have is $65/month, which is on par with Google Fiber the next town over in terms of download speed and nothing else.

The last time I had cable TV was 2017 and I feel like I got rid of it kind of late. At its worst before I figured out Comcast's pricing games, the highest normalized monthly charge I saw was $218/month in 2013, but it was consistently above $160 for all those years.

PSVue and a double number port with T-Mobile as an intermediary to convert that former Comcast phone line to a Google Voice number brought down that Internet/TV/phone bill to around $100. I haven't replaced PSVue since cancelling it back in 2019 because I don't really watch TV anymore.
 
We had PS Vue as well and loved it. It was the closest thing to a cable box we've found. We were sorely disappointed when they terminated that service. After that died, I mounted the antenna and called it a day.
 
It used to be the main usecase for having cable was live sports... but everything can be streamed now (legally too) so I guess the main reason people have it is laziness and/or lack of tech savvy.
-g
 
Trunk Monkey said:
Going to hit Spectrum up tomorrow and see if they'll give me gigabit service for the same price I'm paying now because GOOGLE Fiber is going to be here in a few months offering exactly that. It should be an interesting conversation.
Click to expand...

Just to give an update. I did stop by their customer service center and ask. The said no way they could compete with 1GB up AND down for that price. My son asked why and I told him Spectrum (Charter Communications) is a Billion dollar company, GOOGLE is a Trillion dollar company. 😄


So, I'm left waiting until Google Fiber moves in. As I type this they're laying the lines in my community. It's just a matter of time. I can't wait to finally cut the cord with Spectrum.
 
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Trunk Monkey said:
Just to give an update. I did stop by their customer service center and ask. The said no way they could compete with 1GB up AND down for that price. My son asked why and I told him Spectrum (Charter Communications) is a Billion dollar company, GOOGLE is a Trillion dollar company. 😄
Click to expand...
And yet, some local municipalities that don't have the budget of either company have also laid down fiber because they recognize broadband as a modern day essential utility.

I don't know exactly where I'm going with this, but Charter (and Comcast) are full of crap. I'm no fan of Google either, but at least they're providing the service that people should have access to instead of forcing them to be at the mercy of shitty cable companies who are deliberately sandbagging it. Implementing intelligent solutions to combat those who abuse their networks is something they're not interested in, so it's data caps and low upload speeds for everybody.
 
I've had Verizon Fios for years, not wasting my time or money with Comcast. They're the only 2 games in town.

Joe
 
Starlink is bit slow tonight. It fluctuates from 40 to 200 down depending on the time of day. I believe I am in a somewhat oversold area as most people with the service report better speeds. Apparently they are going to eventually have a laser grid between their satellites that speeds things up.

Before Starlink nothing was available in my area but unreliable cellular service. So needless to say it's been amazing to have even these speeds.

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