3 years of gigabit bidirectional for 249/year

[pcpete]

For the month of February we have an offer from a new fiber optic company offering 3 years of gigabit internet up and down for $249/month. We are are paying about 80/month for 100down/10up currently. Do you think we will notice it? Does it seem like a good value?

 

[HCHTech]

That's about what we are paying for 150/150 business service through FIOS. We have a block of 5 IPs so that adds some small amount, maybe $10/mo. Sounds like a good deal to me, but I guess you're rolling the dice on the quality of that connection.

 

[phaZed]

Dang. I'm paying $80/mo+small fees for Gigabit Fios... It is residential.

 

[Markverhyden]

That seems pretty pricy, almost 9k plus TT&L.

 

[Brett A]

Dang I am paying about $130 for 300/25, same company has offered me gigabit/35 for $350. I feel like i am getting screwed now. Of course my previous connection was costing me about $150/month and was for 50/10 but was more like 30/5.

 

[pcpete]

price aside, do you think we will notice the speed difference for day to day stuff?

 

[Brett A]

Depends on your day to day, if you are just doing basic web browsing likely not. While your own connection does make a difference, If a website is loading slow on a 100/10 connection the fault is likely with the way the site was developed, or where it is hosted.

If you have a massive amount of down/up you would. Moving from my 50/10 to 300/25 made a huge difference. I was able to download backups and upload huge files much faster. It sped up my web development process and when I need to download a disc image it is usually done within a minute to two. In fact I had a website that was compromised today, I was able to download a backup from Amazon S3, about 150MB, and upload it to my server within about 15 minutes including restoring the site. That used to take me about 45 minutes to an hour.

I'd love to go gigabit but with only a small increase in up speed, it won't make a large enough difference for the price increase. If I was offered gigabit both ways, i'd be throwing money at them.

 

[timeshifter]

price aside, do you think we will notice the speed difference for day to day stuff?

Is this for a business or residence? If business, how many users?

 

[pcpete]

Is this for a business or residence? If business, how many users?

Business, three of us total

 

[phaZed]

price aside, do you think we will notice the speed difference for day to day stuff?

Yes, I believe you would.

Remember, you never buy "speed" (Ping), per say, only bandwidth. Things like website loading and "small-burst" traffic will be relatively similar to what you have now (Assuming you're not saturating your link speed). Large downloads, ISO's, Snappy Driver Packs, "many PC's in an office/repair shop doing downloads/Updates", etc... will all benefit from the increased bandwidth.

 

[pcpete]

for $160/month extra on $40,0000 in business(the majority of that is in shop) is just a tiny fraction of a percent. We would probably easily save 2 hours labor in a month. With having that massive upload speed, we could find some cool stuff to do. It may even make sense to get ip phones and keep the slower internet just as a backup. I think I just made a decision.

 

[roborobs computer repair]

For the month of February we have an offer from a new fiber optic company offering 3 years of gigabit internet up and down for $249/month. We are are paying about 80/month for 100down/10up currently. Do you think we will notice it? Does it seem like a good value?

I saw the title for this post and went WOW that's an amazing deal then I read the body. You may want to fix the title it isn't $249/year but per month.

 

[HCHTech]

for $160/month extra on $40,0000 in business(the majority of that is in shop)

Well, that comma is in the wrong place if you meant $400K. So it looks like it won't be a problem financially, and if most of the business is in-shop, then you have to be doing a ton of traffic. You should have business service in any event because that typically doesn't have a data cap. That's why we switched back when we did - we had too much traffic for residential service.

If you have commercial customers, faster, uncapped service also makes it easy to setup VPN tunnels to them you can use when needed. We used that quite a bit setting up new servers last year. It let us get most of the data copied before we even went onsite, then we just needed a "true up" run with robocopy on the day of installation. VPNs make it easy to get into their firewall, NAS, and workstations, too. We make a tunnel for most all of our commercial customers, then just leave it disabled until we need it.

Dang. I'm paying $80/mo+small fees for Gigabit Fios... It is residential.

I remember those days fondly - We didn't have gigabit, but we got along just fine on residential service for quite a few years. We only switched once we started regularly exceeding our data cap (turns out the ISP doesn't like that very much - who knew). There was definitely some sticker shock involved with that switch.

 

[pcpete]

Well, that comma is in the wrong place if you meant $400K. So it looks like it won't be a problem financially, and if most of the business is in-shop, then you have to be doing a ton of traffic.

as I get older my typos go up dramatically

 

[pcpete]

.

If you have commercial customers, faster, uncapped service also makes it easy to setup VPN tunnels to them you can use when needed. We used that quite a bit setting up new servers last year. It let us get most of the data copied before we even went onsite, then we just needed a "true up" run with robocopy on the day of installation. VPNs make it easy to get into their firewall, NAS, and workstations, too. We make a tunnel for most all of our commercial customers, then just leave it disabled until we need it.

what do you use to provide the vpn? Special hardware on both sides or can it be done with software only?

 

[lcoughey]

I'm paying $420CAD/month for 100M fibre. So, that seems like a sweet deal to me.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Day to day....you probably won't notice much change.

We have symmetrical fiber, we pay around 400 bucks/mo for a 40/40 connection with a full static IP block It's enterprise fiber....so...we pay a lot...for the high SLA. Why? Because our business depends on it! We host our RMM, and our ticketing system, remote to our workstations when out, all that stuff. NEED IT RUNNING 24x7x365!

So...the questions I would have are:
*Will you demand a high SLA? Or is...typical broadband reliability good enough for you?
*Brand new company.....hmmm....reliability as they mature/grow? Or try to figure things out?

 

[HCHTech]

what do you use to provide the vpn? Special hardware on both sides or can it be done with software only?

Hardware on both sides. We're a Sonicwall shop.

 

[roborobs computer repair]

Hardware on both sides. We're a Sonicwall shop.

Have you looked into using PfSense for any of your firewalls?

 

[HCHTech]

Have you looked into using PfSense for any of your firewalls?

Not even once. Pick a brand, learn it and stay there until you have a reason to move. ...or something like that. Sonicwall provides a good product line, once you learn the OS you can do most things easily, we make a profit on the hardware and license renewals, and when I get a thorny problem, I can call support to figure it out. Wins all the way around.

On the "reason to move" front, we used to use Sonicpoints for wifi solutions, but Ubiquiti came along and gave us a reason to move. Better hardware, much more reasonable price points and scalable without causing sticker shock. So now we use Ubiquiti for wifi.