A few months ago, my household finally reached an important and thrilling milestone. Our home was upgraded from DSL to Fiber internet. Let that sink in…1GB Fiber internet!
I could write paragraphs about how much we suffered the slog of DSL speeds. That lamentable state lasted too long; somehow we endured. Our download speed averaged about 16MB, and our upload speed was – I kid you not – measured in KB, as it averaged 800KB. Abysmal!
In our modern internet age, DSL speeds are intolerable. What finally brought change seemed to be the Covid pandemic, acting as the catalyst for fiber internet coming to our rural Texas area. I think it was fueled or funded by federal government subsidies since two companies raced each other to roll out fiber to the surrounding regions.
Coincidentally, both companies reached my house within weeks of each other. As of this writing, I now have fiber internet from two separate service providers. From one, my house gets 500MB up and down speeds. And from the other, we enjoy 1GB up/down! The actual max I’ve seen is about 850MB up/down.
These new speeds are miraculous compared to the DSL my family barely survived on. In this day and age, we’re not just wanting fiber to stream 4K movies or download large video games. We need broad bandwidth. My wife and I homeschool our five (5) kids, so we need a lot of internet access. And I was recently working from home full-time for over a year and desperately needed constant high speed access. I still need it now that I’m hybrid, working from home part of the week.
The incredibly fast fiber also enables online cloud file backup for any of our devices. Fiber being synchronous means not only can we download gobs of bits, we can also upload all our photos and videos in a flash. It’s wonderful.
My family was starving on DSL; now we glut on fiber internet. Before, when we needed a stable or fast connection, we didn’t even use our DSL. Instead, we relied on our iPhones’ mobile hotspot data all the time! But now, we have a total of 1.5GB of high bandwidth streaming in and out of our house. I can almost download the entire internet!
We are very grateful to be blessed with reliable and crazy fast data now. I hope to never take it for granted. It makes computing, blogging…anything and everything…amazing. Simply loading a web page on our modern wifi6 (wireless-ax) computers is practically instantaneous, which is superb.
I hope that fiber is rolled out to everyone in rural areas across America as soon as possible. I consider broadband access a utility these days, like water and electricity. Although not everyone has access to fiber yet, I’m glad that some extended family of ours, for example, finally has relief from their slow data. They upgraded to StarLink internet and have seen remarkable speed and reliability improvements.
What’s your internet situation like? Do you recall the days of dial-up like I can? Do you have 5G on your phone now?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for sharing.