I looked into Comcast Fiber for my company since we have up to 28 patients streaming 24/7. I forget how much they wanted... $4000? just to bring the fiber into the building from the street (literally 10 yards). As you know I use Ubiquti Unifi... The switches I have can accommodate fiber + 2.25gbps per port, though I think I would have to upgrade the router (currently 1gbps max) which I think would be a few hundred. I believe Comcast supplies the modem, which probably also has the router but I prefer to use my own. But as I had estimated when I finished installing all the access points the 250mbps cable internet worked just fine, the bottleneck was at the access points. If you think about it, 5-10mbps is plenty to stream, 250mbps is plenty for now. Clinical staff have their own separate network entirely.
So here's where I do agree with something you said. Comcast is a huge rip off on their business side.
I'm not completely sure how it turned out, but when we were building out location #1 over a decade ago we used a cable ISP which also happened to be my own ISP I used at home. I forget the details but it was so-so quality and it was fine because it afforded us internet and TV services and we were much smaller then. I think a year or two passed before FiOS biz was available and we dumped the coax provider ASAP.
Locations #1 and #2 serve over 120 employees, there's multiple lines coming in + TV service and our bottom line costs a drop in the ocean This includes internet, phone services, plus TV with DVR boxes. Service is fantastic. If we have an issue, a truck is rolled out within 20 minutes. I can't say the same for our previous provider. Some of our competitors in the area use Wave Band, which is very good and used by corporate clientele, but they didn't meet the little things we wanted. We were rather lucky with both locations as the city we're in already has fiber built out for companies to use. Verizon's installers said we'd probably be looking at costs in excess of $40,000 for all our drops.
We're eyeing up a third location that'll house 200 employees but current land prices and wanting to be in a different area is making estimations tricky. Ideally, we prefer to build out once the economy takes a nose dive. It's cheaper to buy up and build, but it also injects cash flow into local contracting companies and developers. Also very easy to get build and site permits as cities are eager to make it look like everything is okay.
We found a lot of ways to legally offset costs we'd incur by investing in greener tech for our locations.
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This was back in 2016 I believe when I asked. But if I recall it was 1000 IF there was a close enough fiber connection. Okay so to be fair the building would need 10 yards to the street and probably another 30 to get ton main road. Still outrageous pricing.
Do'h. My apologies. I was referencing consumer side/home use. I'm sure it's pricier on the biz side. No idea what personal consumer/home use FiOs costs.
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You’d be surprised. My parents have 150mbps service and when I had to call them to activate their new router they tried to upsell me saying that 150mbps was insufficient for 2 adults in their 60’s which is nonsense... especially considering that up until that point they were paying for 100-150mbps for YEARS despite having a DOCSIS 2.0 modem from the cable company that could only accommodate 35mbps (I believe original to the house in 2001). They (Spectrum) love to do this and pretty much everyone in town that’s had the internet for 10+ years. Cox did the same thing at our beach houses.
Spectrum does do that. But so do all providers, and even back when they only offered cable in the early 90s they did that, too. The reality is the sales people are asked to push it. 150 Mbps is enough for two people, but use case matters more. I know people your parents age, such as some neighbors down the block from us, who... and I'm not sure how to say this without coming off as ageist, don't come off as their age. You would think they're two 30 year olds with however much net stuff they do. They're on the same 400 plan as us and use most of its bandwidth. I've seen the logs the husband keeps. I forget what his background is, but he was some tech exec who retired early. Being both retired, they stream several terabytes of data a month at 1080p to adjusted 4K.
However, you've told me enough about your parents for me to believe the immense eye roll you made after hearing that 150 Mbps line. Though Spectrum doesn't offer 150 Mbps. It's likely it's a 100 Mbps plan that's been way over provisioned. Which is a very good thing. Within the next year your folks should get a health standard upgrade to 220-250 Mbps at no extra cost as Spectrum is slowly dumping 100 Mbps base for 200 Mbps base.
They try to sell people on BS all the time.
My point is in reality 2Gbps for most consumers is not yet really a practical service. And I think they market 2Gbps because most other services advertise 1Gbps.
Yeah 2 Gbps by Comcast is pure beta testing. Their pricing says it all. 1 Gbps costs me a negligible amount more than what we pay now. We stream a lot of stuff, and as of now in the last 24 days we've streamed 679 GB of data while transferring roughly 30 GB which were uploads of files into the cloud. If the kids were old enough to stream, I suspect that our use case would be higher. I'm pretty happy with a hardwire speed of 400-450 Mbps on an open server.
I generally prefer this ISP because they don't have limits and they aren't nosy about much. If you give them a heads up you use TB of data for streaming, they're fine with it and make a note on the account. Though they do want to move onto fiber in the future. I believe their network is a somewhat hybrid network at the moment.
I'm guessing if I opt to use a FLAC streaming service like
@AustinIllini, our use case would be higher.
