I have TV service from my ISP. I don't have the ability to record or time shift but I have the ability to install the app on my AppleTV and Android devices which is nice.
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How Fast is your Internet?
- Thread starter Christopher11
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The symmetrical fibre here is provided by Bell Canada and they also have extensive TV offerings, but my issue is that they require the use of both PPPoE and VLANs. My home WiFi network is Apple AirPort based and I'd have to redo the whole thing (including buying lots of new equipment, and learning it) in order to set my home network up on that. Plus at least until recently, the TV video quality was worse (mainly because for the longest time they were catering to the VDSL2 market with 50 Mbps internet service). If I didn't have to have TV, things would be much easier.* In contrast, on my cable service, it's all very simple. No VLANs required for TV. *It's also been harder to negotiate good pricing deals with Bell, I suspect because they know they are the only game in
The good news though is the only higher bandwidth needs I have for upload are for iCloud, and it's pretty good for doing this in the background, even if it means a bit more delay than I'd prefer. Also, it does seem that on cable DOCSIS 3.1 a lot of neighbourhoods are getting that 200 Mbps upload. DOCSIS 4 apparently brings Gbps upload speeds, but I don't expect that in my neighbourhood for a decade, if ever.
P.S. It turns out (some) USB-C multi-gigabit Ethernet adapters work fine on the iPad Pro. This is via Ethernet on my 1500 / 50 Mbps service, using the D-Link DUB-E250 2.5 GbE adapter, which I bought for all of CA$20 (US$14).
ATT. I pay $30/mo for
300 Mbits symmetric FTTH. I warned ATT if the pull the same [redacted] Crapcast did they will loose a customer for life.
300 Mbits symmetric FTTH. I warned ATT if the pull the same [redacted] Crapcast did they will loose a customer for life.
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for what it's worth I'm on the Bell 3Gbit plan and using their supplied modem/router and it's wifi coverage and performance is great on my Macs, it also supports wifi6e but I prefer disabling on my Macs so that it sticks to wifi6 and has better range, but on wifi6e it will go up to 1500Mbit/sec at around 20-30 feet away.
I have a big house with an odd L-shape, and the Bell fibre optic cable comes into my one end of my house, in the basement. This is ancient history, but when I had their Home Hub 3000, it was just terrible. Range sucked. We couldn't get reliable TV in some parts of house, and at least back then, they told me that using my wired network was not supported.
Actually, you could use a wired network, but their point was that their technical support did not cover that. And then I understood why. When I manually configured Bell's TV boxes for Ethernet, they would work just fine... until a power outage. When the power went out, they'd revert back to the default network connection, which was WiFi... and would fail to connect because the range was poor. This would happen every few months, so eventually I started installing UPSes everywhere.The other thing that would irritate me to no end is that every once in a while, after a firmware update, the modem would fail to reconnect. What would make it even worse is that they always triggered updates during sleep times (for obvious reasons), but then would fail to connect to the internet, and would not provide me any home phone service either. My wired home alarm system would detect this and then start beeping, waking me and everyone else in the house up. I'd then have to run down into the basement and unplug and replug the power to the modem to reboot it, to finally get it to reconnect to the internet and restore phone service. It was just a disaster.
And then when it came time to renegotiate after my promotional deal expired, they would have the gall to try to raise my prices $50-70 a month and say it was a decent deal because it wasn't full retail pricing.
The hardware is better now, but they still have the requirement to use VLANs just to watch TV. It'd be easier to manage if I didn't have to get TV service though.
I use the router provided by my ISP in France which is great. It's developed by them as well as the OS running it. It has a 2.5Gbps integrated switch an SFP port for 10Gbps connectivity and delivers Wifi 7. To top it off it is rock solid in terms of stability, never had any complains.
I don't think so, it's internally developed by my ISP Free : https://www.free.fr/freebox/freebox-ultra/ (sorry not in english)
It's also not very large so fits in neatly : (that's a Raspberry Pi 4 on the right to give you a sense of scale)
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Beautiful installation!
The Sagecom is fairly popular in North America as it supports up to symmetrical 8 Gb and has a 10 Gb LAN port.
I'm running bare metal opnsense on an n100 fanless mini PC. The PC is located in my furnace room and doesn't look pretty but is very functional.
AT&T Fiber 5Gbps symmetrical XGS-PON.
Tech gave me the third degree as to why I picked this service level, 'why do you think you need this?'. And said I was the first person to go in on the XGS-PON side on my 'hoods node. He was doing it for the first time himself.
Tech gave me the third degree as to why I picked this service level, 'why do you think you need this?'. And said I was the first person to go in on the XGS-PON side on my 'hoods node. He was doing it for the first time himself.
As mentioned I have 8Gbps symmetrical XGS-PON but really never even get close to that. The only reason I have this is that my ISP offers these speeds as part of package including Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime at a great price. I also get a discount on their mobile network which I used to have but unfortunately their coverage isn’t that good.
In France you are locked into using the router provided by your ISP. This is one of the reasons I went with mine since it offers the most flexibility in terms of configuration.
Some providers won’t even allow you to use a custom DNS.
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I have 50/50 for a family of 4. Except for when I'm updating Steam games it's more than fast enough to keep up with doom scrolling, Netflix, and whatnot for a family of 4.
Are you using QoS? Apple TV+ can peak at 45 Mbps on a single 4K stream alone. Netflix is less than 20 Mbps though.
Anyhow, since we use IP TV and also stream Netflix/Apple TV+ etc. and like you are also a family of four, and because I'm on VPN all day, 50 Mbps download would be a significant problem for me.
I'm currently on 1500/50 Mbps service, which is actually closer to 1900/50 Mbps service in practice. The download is overkill, but the upload is somewhat slower than I'd prefer, partially because we back up everything to iCloud. I'd be happy with 200/200 service.
BTW, I said 1500 down was overkill, but the reasons I'm on 1500 down are because it included the maximum 50 Mbps upload and it was actually cheaper than getting a slower service with a reasonable upload speed, due to the way my ISP's promotional discounts work.
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Just whatever the default settings are for the router Verizon shipped to me almost 7 years ago.
Ting just sent me an email stating that my 1Gbps fiber service has been upgraded to 2Gbps. Since the PON has a 2.5G Ethernet port, I'd been guessing that such a speed upgrade was possible and that's why I opted for the 10G port on my new M4 Pro Mini. Next step is getting a 2.5G router (thinking pfsense), 2.5G Ethernet switch and then finding an hour or so window when the wife doesn't have the TV on to switch to the new router.
Let us know which router setup you choose (and why). Right now I'm just using my ISP's gateway to do my 2.5 Gbps routing, paired with inexpensive 2.5 Gbps unmanaged switches.
I went with a barebones Topton mini PC n100 from Aliexpress and added a 8 GB stick of DDR5 SODIMM and 60 GB SATA3 SSD. I'm running bare metal opnsense since July, 2024 and it's been stable and has never crashed. I started with opnsense 23.7 and, through successive OS upgrades, it's now running 24.7.11.
How complex is it to manage?
I was considering getting a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max, but it's currently capped at 1.5 Gbps if you have IDS/IPS turned on. Hopefully they'll update it sooner rather than later to remove that 1.5 Gbps limitation. It does run hot though, which is a concern too. That little box consumes up to 16 W, and people say theirs are often at 90 C. Yikes!
There are a lot of options and plugins available which makes things a bit more complicated.
Before deciding to go with pfsense, I read the opnsense documentation and visited the opnsense forum to see the types of issues I may encounter. In the end, it was very straightfoward because I don't have a complicated network. The main options I use are Wireguard server and Control D DNS. I don't need to manage usage, utilize parental controls, etc. I also don't run intrusion protecton or detection as opnsense is quite secure without them.
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