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Is fibre internet "up to" speeds like copper cables? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So my house finally got fibre to the house . Gone from having a 30mb connection to a 1gb connection. My question is if I have a 1gb broadband plan should I be getting fairly close the 1gb speed fairly consistent? So maybe 900mb consistently? So when I first got it for the first few days I was hitting between 800-980mb consistently. But now I only get 500-600 at best throughout the day. I know the old "copper"cable was "up to" 100mb. And you got whatever you got. But with fibre I assumed you would always get pretty close to the advertised speed or am I wrong? Thinking of changing to 500mb as it's cheaper and I'm technically only getting 500mb now anyway. Tested speeds are wired with cat 6 cable on a laptop.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

None of the major ISPs offer SLAs (service level agreements) with throughput guarantees for residential service. You’ll hear anecdotes from people here about their performance, but this is specific to their market and their specific network segment. You can’t make the leap from those anecdotes to “service type X is better” because it’s not the service type that’s delivering more throughput; it’s the ISP network design.

Here’s the thing. All residential internet works over shared medium networks. The wire or fiber that goes back to the distribution node is shared amongst your neighbors. For fiber, it’s called a PON (passive optical network). For cable it’s called DOCSIS (please don’t at me if you’re an engineer, I’m generalizing). These networks use a shared physical layer to supply data to the last mile.

So your actual throughput is usually limited by two factors:

Traffic on your local loop / PON.
Provisioning limitations at the distribution node.

ISPs routinely oversell the throughput available on these networks. It’s how they turn a profit. Getting good speeds is a matter of finding the provider with the least over-provisioned network in your area. That last part is important. An ISP can be good in one region and lackluster in another.

All that said, fiber networks tend to be newer, so it takes time for ISPs to sell them out. For example, if the cable provider in your area had a near monopoly, then the local phone provider rolled out fiber, it’s going to take time for people to switch. You can take advantage of that by adopting early. Just understand that your network performance will degrade as more people switch and you end up with more network contention.