When someone rings our doorbell, I answer. I don’t want to usually but you just never know.
A few weeks ago the guy at my door said he was working for a new ISP that is providing fiber. Then he said I’d need an antenna on my roof. I asked some questions and found out what he’s selling is “Wireless Fiber” which is egregious in my mind, but whatever. It’s still supposed to be faster than Cox and cheaper. So I asked some more questions.
Is lag bad? Is it symetrical?
He told me my pings would be great and I could get a couple gig up and down - completely symetrical. He said they’d put the antenna on the roof and run fiber from it down into my house.
I decided to give it a go. WHy not.
The install wasn’t bad at all. I was neverous about what it would do to my roof. They don’t drill anything in. The antenna sits on a weighted down plate that rests over the peak of my roof. That made me happy. They ran cat 6 down the side of the house and came into my office through the wall. ( The idea that it would be fiber from the antenna into my house never made sense so I wasn’t surprised it was cat 6. )
Their modem they profide is not ideal. It has to be configured via an app on my phone. It does not have any way to connect to it directly over the network and configure it. Kind of annoying. I can live with it for now. If I get more serious about things I’ll look into my options to use my own hardware. From what I’ve seen online it looks like some people have been able to do this.
I’m getting 2 GB for a little more than half of what I paid Cox for 1.
My actual is around 1.5 down and 1.3 up. I’m happy with that. My 1 GB from Cox was never a full gig either. So I feel like I’m still double and my up with Cox was pretty bad.
The one other thing that I’m excited about is they said for an additional $10 a month I can have a fixed IP and host stuff from my home. Cox blocks the ports that would let me run a server from my house and the only way around it is a very expensive business plan. If I get self host from my house, I’ll be able to save some more money by dropping Digital Ocean. I love Digital Ocean and have been a customer for years so I’ll be sad to leave them, but it just helps the shift over make more sense.
I’m keeping my Cox plan active at a lower level. I want to run on this a while and make sure it’s reliable before I completely cut over, but I hope I can.
I plan to provide another update in 6 months unless something drastic happens that warrants a report sooner.