Fiber is Up

First off, I want to thank Time Warner Cable for pushing me to another provider. My plans were to wait for Google Fiber, wasn’t even considering AT&T even though they had just run fiber through the neighborhood. Last month, TWC raised our bill from $80 to $100 for 300Mb down/20Mb up. So based on recommendations of friends in ATL and Austin/SAN, we’re giving AT&T a chance.

I have to say, I was really impressed with the knowledge, experience and professionalism of the installation tech. Definitely not a TWC contractor, that’s for sure. Overall, it took about four hours with just a “minor” challenge of running the fiber through parts of the basement, snaked around some corners and into the IDF room. Yup, I said IDF room 😉 We had to do that because I, along with the builder of the home, didn’t take into consideration that I’d run fiber someday and the existing contuits and chases wasn’t going to work.

When the tech arrived and started to explain what he was going to do, I mentioned that I have a background in telco IT, and he immediately switched into our tech language. Nice little chat about wavelengths and just how much bandwidth I could really get with the right equipment, say a Broadcom ASICs powering a pair of 25Gb optics. Hmmm…

But anyway, the installation is done, it’s up and running and the bandwidth is great. 1Gb symmtrical. The real benefit here is the upload speed. Backups of datasets to Crashplan won’t take months now with a fraction of using a 20Mb upload. Also, connecting to my Plex media server and AirVideo instally connects over mobile and streams start instantly. I could get used to this. Next up is fulltime replication to the cloud.

Having flashbacks right now of downloading IBM fixpacks for OS/2, on 21 floppy disks over a 28.8k modem. Just go to bed and in the morning, hope the line didn’t disconnect. Now…? I’m thinking about throughing a TWC liberation party, inviting friends over with their laptops, open the guest network and have a download festival.

BTW, Amazon charges $59 a year for UNLIMITED storage on CloudDrive.

Challenge accepted……