Just got fiber internet - quite a difference

Arkadia7

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Oh wow, I can't believe how fast fiber is compared to DSL internet.
It's like, night and day.

I work from home and my DSL internet service had slowed to a crawl starting on Monday, when it was working at all, that is. Apparently some cell tower in my area close to me went down, and the Tmobile techs told me when I finally got through that they were working on it, and aware of the problem. Gee, thanks a lot.

But it wasn't just my internet, my phone service was also affected, and either down completely or using 3G to try and make calls so it was affecting everything. I work from home so this was an impossible situation for me.

So I looked for new internet and found Century Link was offering fiber internet and advertising speeds of 940 Mbs. I didn't think I would get that fast but thought it must be better than the horrible DSL service I was getting which was pretty slow on even its best days.

So it got hooked up today, and I am seeing vast improvements where I even got over 900 mbps on one test, both up and down. But it can vary as well, I also got around 300-400 mbps on a different test I did. But anyway, all of these speeds are way way way faster than I was getting, which was like, 30-60mbps on Tmobile best days, and it wouldn't last long and usually go to more like 10-20 mbps on a consistent basis.

This new internet speed is amazing. I know its old hat to some lucky ones here in the USA who have had fiber for awhile and also especially to Europeans who are used to this kind of speed, and faster speeds, but for me its "far out". :biggrin:
 
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Congratulations. It really makes a difference.

Now you can play all those MMO's as they should be played. :)

an incarnation of pibbur who now is hiding in ... won't tell ya.
 
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Nice. We have Century Link over here but not at those speeds. I'm still using Comcast because they have the fastest connection in my area even though I despise them.

Have you downloaded any games yet? I'm curious what you'll get in MB/s.
 
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Nice. We have Century Link over here but not at those speeds. I'm still using Comcast because they have the fastest connection in my area even though I despise them.

Have you downloaded any games yet? I'm curious what you'll get in MB/s.

No, not yet. I am going to download one though and I'll let you know the size and how long it took in this thread.
 
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I'm curious what you'll get in MB/s.

Yeah, big difference between mbps and MB/s. If it's 900 MB/s, that's the hard stuff.
 
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Yeah, big difference between mbps and MB/s. If it's 900 MB/s, that's the hard stuff.

Yep, those companies always advertise the mbps because it's the higher number, and a lot of people don't know the difference.

It sounds like he's got a pretty fast connection though. Even if he only averages 400 mbps, that should be about 50 MB/s. That'll suck down most games pretty fast. I only get 25-30 MB/s myself.
 
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OK, not as fast as I may have thought when downloading a game from steam…maybe its busy now (primetime right now in Western USA) or maybe steam servers slow right now? I dunno.

But I downloaded a 28.2 GB game, and it took me around 14 minutes.

I had a peak while downloading of 73.2 MB/s (= almost 600 Mbps)

average was around 35-40 MB/s (=around 300 Mbps)

low was around 11 MB/s which is around 90 Mbps (not sure what happened there, lol, network slowed down a few seconds to this real slow speed a couple times briefly)

Anyway, maybe I will get faster at different times, but I'm happy with it regardless. Compared to what I had, this is luxury.
 
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Yeah, that sounds like decent speeds. Also bear in mind that the speeds on individual downloads are also determined by the speed at which their busy servers can deliver to you - that's often slower than your connection to the ISP can deliver. That'll often be the cause of the variance.
 
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Gigabit connections can be had now, mainly in the big cities. But again I tend to think the benefits would be limited at the moment, and few services would be able to saturate it.
 
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Yes, I have heard that, they can go up much much faster now. But more of a future tech thing than practical now, I guess.
 
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I think it would come into its own if you had a house-share, or a big family of heavy streamers and downloaders, where contention would be an issue on a regular connection. Also awesome for small businesses.
 
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I recently upgraded from 100mbps to 900mbps - got sick of the kids updating Fortnite at full speed and it interfering with my Netflix :p

Man, games download super fast now. And it only cost around NZ$10 per month more.
 
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I haven't seen anything faster than 2 Gigabits yet, at least over here. A 1 Gigabit connection would give you approx 125 MB/s download speed, so 2 Gigabits would be 250 MB/s which is crazy fast.

Like Ripper said though, you're going to be limited by whatever the site you're downloading from can provide.
 
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OK, not as fast as I may have thought when downloading a game from steam…maybe its busy now (primetime right now in Western USA) or maybe steam servers slow right now? I dunno.

But I downloaded a 28.2 GB game, and it took me around 14 minutes.

I had a peak while downloading of 73.2 MB/s (= almost 600 Mbps)

average was around 35-40 MB/s (=around 300 Mbps)

low was around 11 MB/s which is around 90 Mbps (not sure what happened there, lol, network slowed down a few seconds to this real slow speed a couple times briefly)

Anyway, maybe I will get faster at different times, but I'm happy with it regardless. Compared to what I had, this is luxury.

Are you connected via wifi ?
 
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Ah, now that's me getting it muddled - I actually meant gigaBYTE connections are in cities now - actual 1000MB/s stuff. You need a full end-to-end fibre for that though, so you have to wait for them the replace the phone lines on your street.
 
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