Spectrum Fiber Optic Internet?

[5030]

Hate to be the one that tells ya but your landline isn't really a landline. Your internet or power goes down, your landline goes with it. Nothing like the landlines from the past.. In fact, a cell phone is better than those internet based telephone lines...

I know that. My wife wanted it for Township business.

 

[WM75Guy]

Spectrum ran fiber in front of our property a few months ago and we switched over to Spectrum. Our property is 700' from the road. I have 2 accounts, one to the house at 300 Mbps & phone ($65/mo) and one to the shop at 100 Mbps & phone ($45/mo). Since install they increased the speed for the house to 400 Mbps without any additional charge. I cut my data and phone bill down from $170/mo to $110/mo.

They laid 2 fiber cables across the pasture, down the fence line from the pedestal at the street to each building. The cable connects to a demarc box on the outside wall. From there they drilled a hole to the inside wall, mounted the modem, and connected the 2 with a short piece of fiber. There are 2 ports on the modem, one for data and one for phone. The modem does require an outlet for a power cord. I have 2 Cat 5e lines run from the modem to my garage utility closet on the far side. In the closet I have 2 42" boxes, one for phone & data, and one for the Directv equipment. I connected the data line to a new D-Link mesh router and the phone cable to my phone network.

Spectrum employees did the initial install of modems and cables. It took a while but eventually a sub-contractor came out and buried 2 new lines. They left the 2 original cables still connected on top of the ground, as they are not allowed to connect them. Spectrum employees then came back, connected the new cables at each end, rolled up the original cables, and took them away.

So far it has worked reasonably well. The majority of the outages at first were from cable cuts due to all the new fiber being laid in Henderson County. That leveled off and now it is the occasional outage. Speeds down are as advertised, upload speed is about 15-20 Mbps. Much improved over our Verizon Home LTE at 50 up/5 down Mbps. Zoom or Webex sessions would be no problem.

 

[newbury]

I've written several times about how in the last dozen years the government has gone like a spider on drugs laying cable in an effort to remove the backwardness of rural areas.
When we bought our "place to retire" in Mississippi a dozen or so years ago the best internet we could get was speeds of ~1.6 Megabits down and 600 kilobits up, on the local Telephone company's DSL.

Then about 8 years ago the government decided to "upgrade" the counties. Two companies, The Telephone and the Electric Coop competed for our county. Their rates were about the same 100Mbps up/down $55/mo. But Telephone went underground and Electric went on the poles.
Electric got to us first, about 3 years ago.
Well last year Telephone gave up, stopped digging.
Service has been fair to middling. Now mind you this is Northeast Mississippi.
I run about a dozen IP cams to monitor the place, plus relatives stopping by. Last summer, about June, we had left for a couple of months in Virginia and a storm came through and I lost connection. I called the company, was told to check a couple of things, I told them I was 900 miles away. BIL drove over (~16 miles) checked it out, all looked fine on the inside. He rebooted everything, still no connection to the net. I called customer support, they said they could not do any thing unless someone was there to let them in and stay with them. And they couldn't do anything from the outside. My BIL is a practicing Doctor and I didn't want to task him.

So I finally got back down end of September. Network had been down July, August, September. Call the support, they go through about 50 questions of any added equipment, etc. etc. and they finally send someone out. He couldn't find anything wrong, he then checked the connection on the pole at the street. Wasp nest. Could have easily been fixed the day after it went offline. Been working fine since.

"They are so sweet" my MIL would say.

But they did change the rates, now it is 300Mbps up/down for $55. 1GB is $85.
Monthly costs have stayed the same, minimum speed tripled. And I routinely check the speeds, now getting ~250+.

So Eddie - go for it.
/edit - note - I think your getting shafted on upload speeds.

 

[EddieWalker]

Spectrum ran fiber in front of our property a few months ago and we switched over to Spectrum. Our property is 700' from the road. I have 2 accounts, one to the house at 300 Mbps & phone ($65/mo) and one to the shop at 100 Mbps & phone ($45/mo). Since install they increased the speed for the house to 400 Mbps without any additional charge. I cut my data and phone bill down from $170/mo to $110/mo.

They laid 2 fiber cables across the pasture, down the fence line from the pedestal at the street to each building. The cable connects to a demarc box on the outside wall. From there they drilled a hole to the inside wall, mounted the modem, and connected the 2 with a short piece of fiber. There are 2 ports on the modem, one for data and one for phone. The modem does require an outlet for a power cord. I have 2 Cat 5e lines run from the modem to my garage utility closet on the far side. In the closet I have 2 42" boxes, one for phone & data, and one for the Directv equipment. I connected the data line to a new D-Link mesh router and the phone cable to my phone network.

Spectrum employees did the initial install of modems and cables. It took a while but eventually a sub-contractor came out and buried 2 new lines. They left the 2 original cables still connected on top of the ground, as they are not allowed to connect them. Spectrum employees then came back, connected the new cables at each end, rolled up the original cables, and took them away.

So far it has worked reasonably well. The majority of the outages at first were from cable cuts due to all the new fiber being laid in Henderson County. That leveled off and now it is the occasional outage. Speeds down are as advertised, upload speed is about 15-20 Mbps. Much improved over our Verizon Home LTE at 50 up/5 down Mbps. Zoom or Webex sessions would be no problem.

Thanks Randy!! This is what I was hoping to hear. I'm probably going to call Perez and get things started, but I really wanted to know what to expect before I made the call.

Why do you have phone? Is it like a landline? What does their phone service do that a cell phone doesn't do?

 

[WM75Guy]

They are landlines. We still have a fax machine in the house office. Some government agencies only accept fax or snail mail to submit signed documents. It goes straight to voicemail. I give it out instead of my cellphone so I am not bothered by telemarketers. It gets 10-20 calls a day, especially during Medicare open enrollment times. The shop landline is for the stained-glass business. Cheaper than another cellphone line.

 

[EddieWalker]

Thanks. I was worried that I was missing something.

My dad retired from AT&T and got a huge discount on his landline phone, so he had to have it. When he passed away, they removed his discount and my dumped it.

I'm actually relieved because it rang non stop and he always answered it. I was sure it was just a matter of time before he gave away his life savings!!!

 

[JeepHead]

Thanks Randy!! This is what I was hoping to hear. I'm probably going to call Perez and get things started, but I really wanted to know what to expect before I made the call.

Why do you have phone? Is it like a landline? What does their phone service do that a cell phone doesn't do?

The phone service that comes in over a fiber network is NOT a traditional landline. Thy will not function if the fiber modem isn't functioning. They need power and data to work. They carry no voltage over them like the traditional landlines did.

 

[WM75Guy]

The phone service that comes in over a fiber network is NOT a traditional landline. Thy will not function if the fiber modem isn't functioning. They need power and data to work. They carry no voltage over them like the traditional landlines did.

If the fiber network goes down, the phone does go out. But my traditional copper landline went out more than my fiber landline has done so far. Every heavy rainstorm took it out. The local tech told me they were running out of good pairs in the underground cables, with no plans to replace them. I was one of their few remaining customers in my neighborhood, and that was before we got access to Spectrum fiber service. Most had switched to cell service.

 

[JeepHead]

If the fiber network goes down, the phone does go out. But my traditional copper landline went out more than my fiber landline has done so far. Every heavy rainstorm took it out. The local tech told me they were running out of good pairs in the underground cables, with no plans to replace them. I was one of their few remaining customers in my neighborhood, and that was before we got access to Spectrum fiber service. Most had switched to cell service.

I am a former communications lineman for AT&T so I know a little about this stuff. Fiber is really reliable stuff, it pretty much only goes out if the line is damaged. But we found that whatever coating they use on the lines, the rodents love. Squirrel chews are a constant thing with fiber on the aerial lines, obviously not so much for the underground lines. But what we found with underground lines is that many installers don't ground the lines so they become undetectable and are often cut accidentally.

The copper network is very old, some of the main transmission lines have been in place for decades. It's yesterday's technology and it's going away. At AT&T we got to the point of charging customers many hundreds of dollars month if they wanted to keep their landline. We forced them away from it by making it not affordable. I had one guy that I went to change over and he was irate. He had the landline for 40 years and we increased his bill to $400 a month and he kept the landline, so we knocked him up to $850 a month for that one telephone line and he finally said NO WAY. But he certainly gave me an earful that day even though I didn't increase his cost. lol And if you were in an area that had fiber available and you still didn't wanna change over to fiber, if you had any line problems whatsoever, we would refuse to repair your current line. Only option you have was to convert.

But phone service over fiber is internet based phone service and not a landline.. A lot of people don't realize this.

 

[Oaktree]

I've worked with point-to-point data links (T1 lines, etc.) and audio dry pairs for years and agree that fiber is head and shoulders above copper. Even lines where the "last mile" is copper, most of the trunk lines have been fiber for a couple decades now. Maybe there are a few small independent phone companies that still have an old-school central office with batteries, but they're few and far between

But phone service over fiber is internet based phone service and not a landline.. A lot of people don't realize this.

Can't speak for others, but when I refer to a landline these days I'm just talking about a wired phone as opposed to a cellular device. At some point in the circuit it's all VoIP these days.