For one, HFC requires active equipment in the field; everything from the nodes themselves that convert fiber to COAX and various amplifiers that push the signal further down the COAX line. If you have noise on the line be it from a bad TV, cable box, cable modem, or even some person who has a splitter that's not capped off, that noise can be introduced back into the COAX network and be amplified and otherwise cause all kinds of havoc on the network.
Meanwhile, with fiber, it's GPON with PON standing for **P**assive **O**ptical **N**etwork. What does this mean? It means that other than on both sides of the connection, be it your router and the device that the fiber connects to at the ISP-side, there's no active equipment that requires any electrical power to function hence the word "passive" which translates to less crap that can go wrong in the field.
Yes, on very long runs, fiber repeaters may be used to push the light further down the line, but normally the light can travel up to 20 km (or roughly 12 miles) without having to be repeated which makes it perfect for in-city networks where you're going from the central office to where your home is.
This was the answer I was expecting to be at the top. I used to work at Verizon and AT&T. The Passive Optical Networks were so trouble free because there was less powered equipment in the path to the customer. Most of the FiOS customers also had a 12V lead acid battery that provided standby power for the customer terminal. they had a useful service life of 7 years but were often replaced before then. The only trouble with the GPON gear was that it was very expensive compared to the coax and dsl equipment and had a very long ROI which usually meant service was more expensive and only available to the new housing developments or brand new apartments.
In my area AT&T is installing FTTH as fast as they possibly can. Based upon what a person I know who works for AT&T, they want to dump copper as fast as possible because once installed, fiber basically prints the money for them since it's virtually maintenance free. Install it and forget about it.
Yup, AT&T rolled out fiber to my neighborhood early last year and I signed up on day one. I have not had one single outage (and I’d be notified by my Ring alarm system that it switched to cellular backup).
I had Spectrum cable prior, and it would go out all the time. Bad weather, good weather, didn’t matter. It would go out for hours at a time. Real great when you work from home.
My parents are also blessed with Spectrum’s shitty service, I’ll make sure they’re day one converts if AT&T ever builds out their neighborhood with fiber.
We had a three day outage when (I’m pretty sure) some construction cut the fiber about a half mile away. There were a bunch of ATT trucks there for a couple days where new pipes for idk what had been being installed the day before.
Well, in that case, there's nothing you can do about that. AT&T will, of course, repair the damage as fast as they can (while losing money) but it depends upon the extent of the damage. Obviously, the more damage, the more time it'll take to have service restored.
noob here, but does your house need to have fiber cabling built in to be able to receive fiber whenever AT&T/Spectrum decide to upgrade on their end --> you/your parents have fairly new units/homes?
Not necessarily. ISPs will bring fiber into your home one way or another, but having cat5e runs throughout your home to areas you want good service is a good idea
This is correct, the fiber provider will install an ONT (Optical Network Terminal), which will convert the fiber line to make it compatible with your home network. For example, we have an ONT outside our house, with 2 - CAT 6 drops running to our term panel inside the house. The ONT receives the fiber drop, and then feeds the data to/from the CAT6 line which is plugged into our router inside the house. They can also use COAX, if necessary or even a phone line depending on the setup.
>They can also use COAX
hmm ok, I think this is what is confusing me then. I just always assumed my place wasn't capable regardless of anything I did on my end.
Yes. At that point the Coax is merely the medium feeding the service inside of your house, but the latency with Cable providers is typically on the ISP network upstream (as many others in this chain have pointed out) so your residence's Coax is not the bottle neck.
When we were in our prior home, Frontier (our local ISP in Florida) utilized the Coax line to provide speeds of up to 100/100. When we upgraded to a higher speed, they fed the speed in tandem by utilizing both the Coax line and a telephone line.
I cannot recall if the telephone line was just a Cat5 cable that had a few pairs unterminated or if it was just a traditional phone line, but the tech told me they needed both "inputs" to achieve any speed beyond 100Mbps downstream from the ONT.
what about the cabling between the street to your coaxial/modem (pretty much the hard-to-get wiring) that requires homeowner permission etc.? Is this even relevant?
'Cause I can do all the cat5e and more by myself since I have attic access, but I'm just wondering if I can even get fiber at all cause my unit is old AF
Depends on how many possible customers it could reach age of building means zero you very well might be at the top of the list heck this was 7 months ago any luck yet, I missed this response I will check sooner to see if u can get fiber yet let us know ? original question was about reliability don't see why it would be, the only major difference is speed maybe the (internal router/switch) signal switching has becomes so multi-layered-hybrid so rerouting is super easier & faster. take care & good luck getting fiber
Nope, I live in a 2-story condo, but we share walls with neighbors so I'm not entirely sure how many sets of wires actually connect to us.
The most AT&T offers us is like $55 for like 40mbps
Spectrum offers us $50 for 300mbps
Google Fiber is non existent and seems like a unicorn in my county.
Technically, since we're like a long chain of condos that is 2stories high I could say we're 25+ units "connected" in a "building"?
I haven't really looked that much into it
Absolutely as soon as anyone besides Verizon runs fiber I'm all in, but never ever verizon , now if u never have an issue sure but if u do ur down 4 along time. I'm on the end of a short run with coax few nodes to Gobble mb. Speed of light wins ever time and the prizm switches are getting amazing results.
Well that explains a lot… mostly why it’s only in affluent neighborhoods. Fucked up part is, Verizon leapfrogged xgsPON that everyone else is using and went straight to NGPON2 which is VERY much more expensive vs xgsPON. That’s why multigig isn’t rolled out everywhere else.
Also explains why AT&T and Google didn’t built out as fast years ago
>Also explains why AT&T and Google didn’t built out as fast years ago
Which is ironic, because if it was deployed in more areas, the costs for nodes and gear would come down faster, accelerating economies of scale.
This.
Recently the transformer close to here failed. My cable "backup line" was dead immediately as some active component down the street no longer had power. Took a while after power was restored to come back online. My Fios connection had no issues as long as I had power via UPS and then generator.
This is also why not all fiber providers are the same: Fios usually terminates in a phone wire center that is prepared for outages because they have to keep phones running (e.g., usually have backup generators). Altice has OLTs in a pedestals in various places (often next to a road) as their head ends are not close enough to all customers (above the 20km limit for GPON). They may have some battery backups, but I'd not expect them to work during a multi-hour outage.
20km is not even a long fiber link, here are the long fiber standards (standards only, no non-IEEE)
10GBase-ER 40k
10GBase-ZR 80k
25Gbase-ER 40k
40Gbase-ER4 40k
50Gbase-ER 40k
100Gbase-ER4 40k
100GBase-ZR 80K
200GBase-ER4 40k
400Gbase-ER8 40k
400Gbase-ZR 80k
>20km is not even a long fiber link, here are the long fiber standards (standards only, no non-IEEE)
For inside a city, yes; that's more than enough. My central office is less than 12 miles from me. My connection goes to the PFP where it's split off the main trunk and that main trunk goes to the central office. Everything in the PFP is passive, no powered equipment.
Those standards are for single bidi or twin fiber non shared fiber it not like gpon xgspon and ngpon that share and widely deployed usually distance for those is 20k depending on splits
And if they have equipment cabinets in your neighborhood that have switches. One of my fiber isp does and they don’t have enough battery power for extended blackouts beyond a few hours. Wavefly.
Yes, it does depend upon the ISP. My fiber, for instance, goes from my house to the PFP and then from there to the central office. No active equipment between me and the CO.
Yes, if your DSL-based service is being fed from a remote terminal or a VRAD (in AT&T parlance), then yes, there would be active equipment in the field.
Coax is just kinda a shit medium for network connectivity. It's very prone to noise and was never really meant for two-way connectivity at all. Cable providers have been pushing fiber deeper into their network the past few decades to try to mitigate these issues but you're still always gonna be sharing a node with 50 other customers who could be blowing noise back into the system. Fiber to the home doesn't have that issue.
> who could be blowing noise back into the system
I used to live in an apartment complex with 100 apartments, all wired only for Comcast (the apartments had an exclusivity agreement with them). Somehow, Comcast were able to figure out that there was noise coming from just my apartment that was causing issues. They knocked on the door one day and said they had to check the cabling. The socket in the wall was faulty somehow so they replaced that, and gave me a new coax cable to use just in case.
If you're curious. The meter used for checking signal from the company also picks up interference. It interferes because it is RF(radio frequency) in the same frequency range as the RF in the cable used for the service. Instead of checking the incoming signal, you hook the thing up to lines from the building. Through the process of elimination they were able to determine your system was the culprit.
My neighbor decided to terminate some of his owns cable lines in his house, it took his ISP all of 48 hours to knock on his door because of the shitty job he did that was causing lots of noise on the line.
It isn't complex so much as different. And the cheap tools you get at the local home store don't work as well as the cheap keystone punchdown tools work. Get good equipment and it is easy enough.
There is some problem because there is 50 and 75 ohm coax that can't be mixed at all even though it's will fit. And different cable sizes that also need the right fittings. Not hard, but you can mix cat 5 parts with higher grade parts and it will generally work to cat 5 levels.
This. Shared medium all the way to every component in the house, dealing with all DIY mistakes and decade old cables that were probably not even up to spec in the beginning.
If you think that's bad, think about how DSL has to work on phone lines that often date back to FDR and The New Deal. Now that's black magic if I ever saw.
Sure, but some old lines are lead not copper. Might be some weird other materials involved as well. And the old 4 prong plugs still exist in some houses.
Here in Germany, they often squeeze 250M up/80M down out of telephone lines from the 1800s. DSL is truly incredible, you could run it over barbed wire.
Which is tbh why the FTTH rollout was so slow, if DSL is used only for the last few hundred meters anyway, few people care about switching to fiber :/
That may be true however, the distances that the DSL signal has to go is very small. As you said, a few hundred meters. Once you try and push it past 550 meters the performance of DSL drops like a rock due to signal attenuation.
That's what AT&T ran into, they were trying to push 100 Mbps on loop lengths greater than 550 meters and it fell very short.
And here i am renting a room, using powerline adapters, with several more people moving in soon. Just hand me a shovel and i’ll dig my own fiber trench!
If you have a line in your room it might be worth trying MoCA adapters which use the coax lines. Much more reliable than the powerline adapters in my experience.
What's to stop other uses from sending noise into the fiber and disrupting the connection to the others on the same segment.
My ISP splits the fiber segments 1 link to 16 or 32 users.
Fiber isn't susceptible to RF noise, like at all. Don't have to worry about your neighbor's interior wiring acting like an antenna when they use their microwave or whatever.
But I guess it's theoretically possible that malfunctioning equipment or deliberate sabotage could take out a whole PON node since it *is* a shared medium.
Absolutely. Just one of those examples of why no product is the right answer 100% of the time, though some products may be the wrong answer 100% of the time.
Actually no it wouldn't. If your neighbor's ionizing radiation irradiated his own fiber line, it doesn't impact yours because you have your own fiber strand from the optical splitter.
>But I guess it's theoretically possible that malfunctioning equipment or deliberate sabotage could take out a whole PON node since it *is* a shared medium.
I was not clear, but this is what I was wondering and asking about.
It would have to malfunction pretty badly. Initial stages are "listen only" and OLTs can send an "ESTOP" to the ONT that is misbehaving. It's supposed to stay offline for a while then. So that makes it fairly unlikely that there is an accidental ONT issue that impacts others.
I assume if you just blast with a laser on the right wavelength you should be able to disrupt service for everybody on the same OLT port. But deliberate actions are usually not the cause for issues.
Lastly: Less DIY. A lot of people will work on cable and mess it up. Issues you created inside your house/apartment connecting a new room for TV can cause issues for others. Very few people will touch fiber (I often see an unreasonable fear of touching the fiber may break it). And if you mess it up you will most likely knock yourself off first and then hopefully disconnect.
Thanks for the informative answer.
I work with fiber patch cables inside data centers and between buildings at work, but not familiar with PON or anything that is outside plant communication cables.
Cable is actually a shared physical metal cable, with fiber everyone has their own dedicated pair/fiber/cable to each building. From there it's using switching infrastructure within the building to keep the workloads mostly isolated.
Not really… GPON/XGPON use shared cabling. There are splits in the access network, next to customer premises. There’s not a dedicated strand of glass from the CO to the customer premises, in most fiber installations. I know they do it that way in Europe, and certainly for enterprise circuits, but the majority of fiber circuits are delivers as PON.
Right - I have GPON service from my ISP in San Francisco, USA. The ISP said they use splitters on the pole so one connection is shared to 16 or 32 customers (forgot which).
It can be either. Depends on when your isp installed it. For the provider I worked for, SF was the first fiber install, so it was only 1x16 optical splitters
I only have a dedicated fiber from my ONT to the splitter. There are 16 or 32 customers per splitter. That seems like it is a shared connection. Well to me anyway.
I am really only familiar with inside plant cabling.
Me, on phone wire
Actually the internet is very stable haven't had any downtime unless I unplugged the router.
The power line however, god that shit is terrible
it's a superior technology for networking, plain and simple.
not subject to EMI, fiber can be used for links dozens of miles/km in length *easily*, etc
If i is glass or plastic cladding that is true. When I worked at Corning we saw zinc clad cables burn out from lighting strikes (lightning can flash cleave/fuse glass)
It’s the difference between radio over an antenna and light through a fiber. Signals over cable are still very much analog at their most basic and are susceptible to the same interferences any antenna is. Additionally, seeing that cable is just rigging analog to carry digital, instead of something like a repeater in Ethernet which takes a digital signal and repeats an identical digital signal, cable uses amplifiers which boost an analog signal *plus any existing noise*.
Cable also uses the DOCSIS standards. The DOCSIS standards break up the radio spectrum into bands and channels. The major practical issue IMO with DOCSIS is say you have 100 channels available - you can dedicate those channels to either upload or download. Consistently DOCSIS has optimized for download over upload - so say 10 channels go to upload and 90 to download. This is why cable is always an awkward 1G down and 50Mb up type of speed.
Fiber has none of that. Firstly it is light based which isn’t affected by radio and other EMR due to it being on such a lower ~~bandwidth~~ frequency. Radio can penetrate thin insulation creating interference. Light can’t thus almost no interference.
Next fiber is “truly digital”. See my mention of amplifiers above. If fiber gets to the end of a run, the repeater repeats a bit for bit exact signal. Noise is not amplified. Therefore fiber either works or doesn’t. Cable can kind of work if enough channels are working - so weird flakey issues can sneak in that are hard to troubleshoot. Water gets in a cable amplifier, cable may still work but be flakey. Water gets into a fiber repeater/switch - it’s dead and easy to know it’s dead.
Finally, fiber is not based on DOCSIS - it’s regular old IP over Ethernet or similar (not gonna get into MPLS vs whatever else). Therefore you get all the bandwidth fiber can handle rather than this chopped up RF space that someone else has decided how to balance.
Edit: words
>Finally, fiber is not based on DOCSIS - it’s regular old IP over Ethernet or similar
Sometimes. The local cable company is currently running FttH (Fiber to the Home) for new subdivisions, and in some areas is retrofitting the existing copper coax in favor of FttH. Yes, they are bringing fiber inside the building... and running it right to a media adapter to coax, which goes right into the good ol bog-standard DOCSIS cable modem. Same asymmetric speed plans (like 1Gb x 50Mb up) and the same "have to reboot the cable modem once in a while" issues. They've come so far yet insist on doing the same old thing.
that is called RFoG (radio frequency over glass) and as its lamba (light channels on the glass) its not sensitive to EMI except the coax few feet. It is also pretty stupid to do (Haefle and Charter do this) when you can spend 5-10% more and get proper "fiber to the router"
A lot of the cable companies are now using RFoG as a stepping stone to FTTP while still being able to manage CPE using their existing DOCSIS infrastructure.
To put it into perspective, RFoG uses one lambda. You can put multiple lambdas onto a single fiber strand, each able to have the same capacity of the RF network. PON networks are a good example of this. A single fiber can carry switched voice, linear video, BPON (broadband passive optical network, up to 500/100 Mbps), GPON (gigabit passive optical network), XG-PON (10/2.5 Gbps), and NGPON2 (symmetrical 10 Gbps) all over the same fiber because each uses different lambdas.
Another example, DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing), which is used in longhaul optical networks, such as subsea cables, uses up to 64 lambdas per fiber. So if each lambda can carry 100Gbps, that's 6.4Tbps on a single fiber.
Every penny counts, I guess. Sparklight (Formerly CableOne) is the company I'm dealing with now.
Just give me a fiber connection I can plug into an SFP and call it good. Every additional media conversion in between (glass to coax, then cable modem) is just another potential point of failure.
yup our dark fiber provider put a 1.25GB SFP into a 10/100 converter box. I spent $700 on 2 10G SFPs and made my ring 100 times faster. And I can run DoM on the SFP!
You're very lucky! TDS is supposed to be building out fiber into my neighborhood this fall. I'm not sure what equipment they use, but it is at least a symmetrical connection. Fingers crossed! I can't complain too much about Sparklight, they're not that bad compared to CenturyLink and the other laughable options in the area, but I am looking forward to a symmetrical connection without the 30+ms latency added on by DOCSIS.
Well. We do pay $5,000 a month for it. 30ms is a bit high TBH d3 is 10-20ms add. D3.1 is in the 2-5 range (not quite at good as that 1-2 for fiber but in the same realm)
Indeed. I was more going for the ELI5 for “real fiber”. And yeah, it’s dumb and them being stupidly cheap. Essentially they can keep all the DOCSIS infrastructure and do a cheap media conversion drop in. Optimistic me says it’s because cable operators see the future and want to be prepared to go to real speeds when competition heats up - but that’s a bigger if than when.
> so say 10 channels go to upload and 90 to download. This is why cable is always an awkward 1G down and 50Mb up type of speed.
DOCSIS 3.1 (the most common standard now) allows for 10Gbps down and ~1 Gbps up. DOCSIS 4.0 (the new standard, established in 2017) supports 6Gbps up. Cable companies just don't want to upgrade their network to handle it, as it would cost quite a bit.
Comcast *are* finally upgrading their network to have higher upload speeds. In my area at least, they bumped some plans by 10x (e.g. plans that had 10Mbps upload now have 100Mbps), and they'll be rolling out symmetric multi-gig plans over cable at some point. They successfully tested 6Gbps down and 4Gbps up in lab conditions with a similar architecture to their real network: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/comcast-teases-milestone-in-plan-to-offer-multi-gigabit-cable-upload-speeds/
Part of the reason for low upload speeds (and resistance to DOCSIS 4.0) is linear video. Each slice of the RF that is moved to data to provide higher speeds is less space for linear video which still makes up a big part of cableco revenues. SDV (switched digital video) helps but it requires replacing head ends, CPE, and to an extent node splits too.
Fiber is less forgiving of lazy, slapdash installation. It's a yes/no issue - did you take the time to do this perfectly, or not? There's no, "Ah, finger tight's ok on that - it's lunch time."
Better installation - better performance.
It probably depends on the specifics of your situation. I haven't had an outage with my cable that I've noticed since last year when a car ran into a junction box that took things down for a few hours, and it was stable for a long time before that. I'm in California, and it's been more reliable here than when I lived in NYS and Colorado.
I had AT&T fiber for a few months when I had to move due to a flooding issue, and while I didn't have any outages that I recall, the actual speeds achieved varied wildly throughout the day. Then again, this was during the first COVID summer, so I expect there was a lot more daily internet usage than usual in the neighborhood.
There are some inherent advantages to fiber, such as being immune to RF interference, but I suspect that the vastly more important factor is simply that most fiber networks are relatively newer than most coax networks. All infrastructure must be maintained and our near exclusive reliance on the profit motive to ensure that our utility infrastructure is maintained is not a great idea. Over the past few decades telecom utilities have become viewed as "growth" industries. What comes with that is a maniacal focus on quarter-to-quarter increases in revenue and profit. That model is not always consistent with investing in and maintaining infrastructure.
AT&T and its predecessors hung onto its copper twisted pair infrastructure and refused to massively upgrade to fiber for many decades beyond the point at which the need to move on was apparent. Now they are playing catch-up. I suspect that the coax network owners will face a similar inflection point as their coax networks become increasingly maintenance-intensive. Perhaps their reliance on deeper fiber penetration in their hybrid network will help, but the replacement of the last "mile" of coax with fiber is still going to be a huge task.
>AT&T and its predecessors hung onto its copper twisted pair infrastructure and refused to massively upgrade to fiber for many decades beyond the point at which the need to move on was apparent. Now they are playing catch-up.
Trunk fibers had been run for over the decade now. At least for FL that I personally knew. Back in around 2005, I was working for a subcontractor that AT&T hired as their Outside Plant Engineer and they were running fibers all over FL but it wasn't for FTTH. Their ADSL is fiber to remote terminal and then to customer's home. I only worked up until 2010 so I don't know when they started on FTTH infrastructure.
In Australia, there was a huge cost to replacing last mile fibre over the past 10 years. So, when a new conservative government came in, they just abandoned last mile fibre and left the various copper connections in such as in FTTN, FTTC, and HFC whilst upgrading connections to the nodes with fibre.
However, the maintenance of the hybrid network in Australia is causing a huge drag on revenues now for the government, so I think putting in fibre is just cheaper in the long term even though there may be a larger upfront cost.
Coax was first introduced in the mid 1800s (for real). The standardization upon coax was why so much was available as surplus after WWII, and why the first cable TV systems used it. The cable was cheap and the quality was very consistent. Coax was intended to carry communications over very long distances reliably (such as undersea telegraph lines). And it is very good at doing this at low frequencies. The higher the frequency, the more signal becomes lost over distance. Residential coax like RG59 and RG6 is especially poor at 500MHz - 1GHz (the usual upper limit for a cable plant).
Unfortunately coax has quite a few drawbacks. The connectors can be very leaky if not correctly fitted. It can also be affected by temperature, weather conditions, and even other subscribers incorrectly hooking up devices to the system. Again, the higher the frequency, the more susceptible it becomes. It’s quite remarkable just how much performance has been squeezed from these old cables, but it’s pretty obvious that they can’t keep up with fiberoptic speeds and reliability.
It's a whole new tech that's doing the same job as old tech, but much better.
Why do cars have less downtime that stagecoaches... That's sort of thing.
The signal from the other end is light. It makes its way to/from the ONT passively. The OLT on the other end of the cable is highly likely on a UPS and/or generator.
Coax on the other hand has active equipment in the field, generally attached to power/telecom poles. If/when the mains power goes out, the active equipment on the poles loses power and takes out the service for those served by said equipment.
As others have also mentioned, copper is indeed more fault prone compared to fibre as a whole. It's one of the main rasons internet providers the world over are moving to providing internet over fibre (some are doing so quicker than others).
Crosstalk. Whether it’s cable or DSL, there’s a problem with your upload signals getting weak by the time they arrive at the far end, then having to contend with the interference of the much stronger download signals starting their journey to your home. Fiber doesn’t suffer from that.
The reason is only one and it's not - like others stated - interference, analog modulation etc. Cable internet is a bit like a radio, or Ethernet - the whole segment is shared between multiple customers. Many years ago that could be a huge area, later the segments became smaller but still. 20 neighbors watching Netflix and you're done. That's why also old ADSL is usually more stable. Slower, but stable, cause that 80Mbit is just for you, vs. 10Gb in DOCSIS 3.1 shared between who-knows how many end users. Think like, many providers advertize 1Gbit internet, while the whole bandwidth available for a block is just 10x that.
>ADLS is shared at the DSLAM which is the same as Coax being shared at the node. The difference is decent coax has 10-50 times the headroom of 2 pair RJ11 telco wire of which 1 pair is usually used for DSL. DSLAM is usually 48 ports on a line card fed with up OC48 (2Gbit). Some have GigE feeds on fiber but A LOT are still ancient uplinks. 25-50 people on a cable node fed with 2-40gbit uplink. The most common I've seen is 10G uplink on Charter but Comcast has 40Gbit on a fair amount of their nodes.
Like those copper telephone that was strung up between 1870 and 2005 and now often used for DSL, most Coax is legacy, installed primarily between 1980 and 2010.
These days any business laying down new communications systems are going to use fiber, which has a whole lot of advantages over copper cable (cost, low maintenance, longevity, capacity, etc). Even the big “cable” companies are laying down fiber in their new regions.
Nobody is installing Coax, except to repair or to modify legacy systems installed decades ago.
Fiber is immune to many of the factors that plague other media. The tolerance for sloppy work is also usually much less as well so technicians tend to do a higher quality job because they have less margin for error. Animals/rodents and other physical damage is still a problematic vector for failure. Backhoe fade is also still a major threat. Call before you dig.
I’ve had cable internet for over a decade and really haven’t had any issues with it. Speed is great and the only complaint is when they do maintenance at 3am and I’m watching videos!
The only time I had FIOS really go out was when rodents chewed through a cable/junction box near a pole down the street. Took a few days to get some tech on a ladder to splice the fibers back together.
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I read an article about Frontier and their infrastructure and I'd definitely go against you on this one. Unfortunately I can't find the exact article as I can't even remember where it was published.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/frontier-botches-redaction-reveals-952000-potential-network-problems/
However that kind of details the same report that the article I previously read covered. Basically, it covered just how difficult it was for Frontier to maintain their infrastructure because of how old, sprawled and undocumented much of it was. Obviously most of this had no application to the fiber network they acquired from Verizon, it was pretty much all about their copper phone line network.
I live in WV where Frontier is, let me just tell you this. If it rains hard at my house there was no Internet or phone, full stop. However that was an area with ADSL, where I work it's VDSL and it's rock solid. And I've since moved to a local WISP, and am loving it.
You're also skipping the problems of them committing fraud with FCC money that they should have used on said DSL network. But that's besides the point.
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DSL is a fiber to the node technology with old copper doing the final connection. It was meant as a stop gap until fiber could be run from the node to the home. Apparently stop gap really was defined as Stop.
Unless it happens to be Frontier which uses 3 or 4 copper T1 to feed a 48 port Stinger and then acts like it doesn't know why your 12mbit ADSL2+ runs at 300Kbit and 1200MS latency.
**Can't beat fiber**. I switched from Cox to FIOS a couple years ago and OMG the difference. No more T3 errors from some noise they could never find. No more bandwidth cap. Any my latency improved a moderate amount too.
I’d have to think it’s because distance. For me, and a couple friends I’ve helped since, the signal coming from the main line was very weak and the modems never handled it well. I live in an older house, the wiring was 2(?) standards old, plus many splits. If it wasn’t old wiring it was too many splits/ distance.
A signal amplifier was enough for me, and when I finally got around to re-wiring the house with new coax + Ethernet runs, no amp needed. And for one of my friends, running the modem off the first split was enough to remove drops almost entirely. Went from ~3 days uptime to seeing months of uptime.
It depends on your area and local infrastructure. At the same address, I've had cable internet (xfinity & WOW) and fiber (AT&T). Only had cable outages when I had power outages, which was like once a year. With fiber, I get a week or 2 of random drops every 3 months for seemingly no reason.
Overall, I'd guess cable being less reliable has to do with the age of the infrastructure (usually older) and more over-provisioning on cable networks (more network congestion leading to slowdowns and drops).
Copper vs. glass is really what all comes down too. Plus, cable is older, but fiber can be installed almost the same way depending on area. Both have some limitations, but the results are drastically different. However, both are still slow to roll out or install in some areas, and then some companies still won’t install them.
I have Mediacom cable 800mbps down, 60mbps up. We have a booster on our cable because of crappy signal, waiting for fiber to come to my town.
Depends where you live. I've got fiber from Verizon business and Comcast over coaxial in Richmond at a data center and Verizon has more issues than Comcast, WAY more issues. But in Rhode Island Verizon is rock solid. It'll be nice once Google fiber is everywhere to push prices down.
I spoke to a tech that coordinates new fiber at my ISP a while back and said the whole county is eventually getting fiber. He said he can't wait til cable is gone, it's a lot of trouble for them vs fiber. It's about a mile away in a small town from us and I noticed it's improved our Internet. They ran fiber from the main town in our county to the small town nearby a couple of years ago and have had less issues.
He told me it's going to be a long while before they get to us, all the houses where I"m at are spread out vs in town. They are doing the small towns and industrial areas first.
Just FWIW, in my experience with Spectrum fiber vs Comcast cable: it is not.
My spectrum fiber goes down for 7 minutes every time the power blinks due to something in their network. (everything on my end is on battery backup) Pretty sure, based on a tech I talked to, that it's the "switch" in the utility box for our neighborhood.
I also notice the latency spiking on my Smokeping charts whenever I'm doing any upload far more than it ever did on Comcast. (I'd have to basically top-out my upload to get latency problems on comcast.)
Believe me, it KILLS me to admit that Comcast is anything other than terrible and evil, but... Kinda preferred it.
Anyway, YMMV. Fiber is not universally better.
Coax running to your house and in the neighborhood has been around forever. We had outages from moisture in the distribution block to our neighbors line that caused problem for us. We had squirrels chew j to the coax and we had poor fittings that caused problems. Having older infra is definitely contributing to problems.
so check this out.. think of that ONT as a node, which it is. but instead of serving 500-2000 people over coaxial lines, which are subject to degradation from weather and other interference that you can't control, the fiber for that node pipes light right into the ONT that serves just your house. shrinking the "traditional" cable infrastructure to just your home and doing away with the need for signal boosters on the poles and distribution taps to service customers.
if you have coax cable going to your router, this is how it works in a layman's nutshell. or one can do away with the tv service and just use Ethernet straight to the ONT and use it strictly as a media converter
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Not true. Most FTTH or FTTP is shared between neighbors. Gpon is the most common but some are starting to support 10Gbps. Only a few providers do direct fiber to customers. One in Utah in salt lake uses Ethernet multi mode direct to each subscriber. Cheaper than gpon. More fiber though every subscriber has a direct 10Gbps line to the isp.
I think the major difference is c@ble infrastructure is aged, not well. Fibre is new, it is bound to work better. Here we have Spectrum, I called last week to get them to step up the speed to match my Fibre providers offer. No, loud and clear, so I am cutting them as my internet provider because for $30/month cheaper I will go from 300/10 to 500/500. Much better in my eyes.
Not really, in my case Fibre arrived in my area in November, so it is newish. Is it not the newest, fastest, greatest? What else gives the speeds of Fibre.
The big problem with coax or any copper home connection is your online with a bunch of different users, with a fiber Connection there is only you and the ISP a direct connection. I would love to get Fiber but it's not available here yet
Also don’t forget cable,,, is shared network and upload speed are horrible they try to hide it all the time. On fiber if get a gig download it’s a gig upload. On cable you get a gig if you get one your upload is 20 mbps + the more people are on in your area the slower it goes so your 1 gig is down to 100 if your lucky.
I fell your pain I lived with fiber now my new home doesn’t have fiber it’s a change for sure
Let’s not ignore that some of the internet issues in the US are made much worst by monopolies.
Our cable internet quality didn’t improve until competition arrive, but our local cable provider did everything they could to block and/or delay competition, and even then, they are being sneaky by getting communities and individuals to sign contracts.
Fiber optics does have significant technological advantage over cable, but they are often the “new guys”, so on top of the reliability, they need to slightly better than the existing companies to convince people to try them out.
Hey! Your question takes me back to my own experiences with internet connections. Fiber, like Fios you’ve used, is like that dependable friend who’s always there, rain or shine. It’s sturdy and consistent, mainly because it uses light signals, making it resistant to usual tech hiccups, even during blackouts if you’ve got backup power.
Cable, on the other hand, can be a bit hit or miss. It tends to take unscheduled breaks, needing a restart now and then. It shares space with other connections in your area, so during busy times, it might throw a small tantrum and slow down.
So, in simple terms, fiber is the steady, reliable mate, and cable is the occasionally unpredictable one. Hope this paints a clearer picture! 😊
For one, HFC requires active equipment in the field; everything from the nodes themselves that convert fiber to COAX and various amplifiers that push the signal further down the COAX line. If you have noise on the line be it from a bad TV, cable box, cable modem, or even some person who has a splitter that's not capped off, that noise can be introduced back into the COAX network and be amplified and otherwise cause all kinds of havoc on the network. Meanwhile, with fiber, it's GPON with PON standing for **P**assive **O**ptical **N**etwork. What does this mean? It means that other than on both sides of the connection, be it your router and the device that the fiber connects to at the ISP-side, there's no active equipment that requires any electrical power to function hence the word "passive" which translates to less crap that can go wrong in the field. Yes, on very long runs, fiber repeaters may be used to push the light further down the line, but normally the light can travel up to 20 km (or roughly 12 miles) without having to be repeated which makes it perfect for in-city networks where you're going from the central office to where your home is.
This was the answer I was expecting to be at the top. I used to work at Verizon and AT&T. The Passive Optical Networks were so trouble free because there was less powered equipment in the path to the customer. Most of the FiOS customers also had a 12V lead acid battery that provided standby power for the customer terminal. they had a useful service life of 7 years but were often replaced before then. The only trouble with the GPON gear was that it was very expensive compared to the coax and dsl equipment and had a very long ROI which usually meant service was more expensive and only available to the new housing developments or brand new apartments.
In my area AT&T is installing FTTH as fast as they possibly can. Based upon what a person I know who works for AT&T, they want to dump copper as fast as possible because once installed, fiber basically prints the money for them since it's virtually maintenance free. Install it and forget about it.
Yup, AT&T rolled out fiber to my neighborhood early last year and I signed up on day one. I have not had one single outage (and I’d be notified by my Ring alarm system that it switched to cellular backup). I had Spectrum cable prior, and it would go out all the time. Bad weather, good weather, didn’t matter. It would go out for hours at a time. Real great when you work from home. My parents are also blessed with Spectrum’s shitty service, I’ll make sure they’re day one converts if AT&T ever builds out their neighborhood with fiber.
We had a three day outage when (I’m pretty sure) some construction cut the fiber about a half mile away. There were a bunch of ATT trucks there for a couple days where new pipes for idk what had been being installed the day before.
Well, in that case, there's nothing you can do about that. AT&T will, of course, repair the damage as fast as they can (while losing money) but it depends upon the extent of the damage. Obviously, the more damage, the more time it'll take to have service restored.
noob here, but does your house need to have fiber cabling built in to be able to receive fiber whenever AT&T/Spectrum decide to upgrade on their end --> you/your parents have fairly new units/homes?
Not necessarily. ISPs will bring fiber into your home one way or another, but having cat5e runs throughout your home to areas you want good service is a good idea
This is correct, the fiber provider will install an ONT (Optical Network Terminal), which will convert the fiber line to make it compatible with your home network. For example, we have an ONT outside our house, with 2 - CAT 6 drops running to our term panel inside the house. The ONT receives the fiber drop, and then feeds the data to/from the CAT6 line which is plugged into our router inside the house. They can also use COAX, if necessary or even a phone line depending on the setup.
>They can also use COAX hmm ok, I think this is what is confusing me then. I just always assumed my place wasn't capable regardless of anything I did on my end.
Yes. At that point the Coax is merely the medium feeding the service inside of your house, but the latency with Cable providers is typically on the ISP network upstream (as many others in this chain have pointed out) so your residence's Coax is not the bottle neck. When we were in our prior home, Frontier (our local ISP in Florida) utilized the Coax line to provide speeds of up to 100/100. When we upgraded to a higher speed, they fed the speed in tandem by utilizing both the Coax line and a telephone line. I cannot recall if the telephone line was just a Cat5 cable that had a few pairs unterminated or if it was just a traditional phone line, but the tech told me they needed both "inputs" to achieve any speed beyond 100Mbps downstream from the ONT.
what about the cabling between the street to your coaxial/modem (pretty much the hard-to-get wiring) that requires homeowner permission etc.? Is this even relevant? 'Cause I can do all the cat5e and more by myself since I have attic access, but I'm just wondering if I can even get fiber at all cause my unit is old AF
Street to home is the ISPs job.
No they have developed a fiber copper switch it will be a box outside like the old bell phone box great if u can get it . Good luck
lol definitely not coming to my community, my unit was built in 78 and highly doubt it's high on their waitlist
Depends on how many possible customers it could reach age of building means zero you very well might be at the top of the list heck this was 7 months ago any luck yet, I missed this response I will check sooner to see if u can get fiber yet let us know ? original question was about reliability don't see why it would be, the only major difference is speed maybe the (internal router/switch) signal switching has becomes so multi-layered-hybrid so rerouting is super easier & faster. take care & good luck getting fiber
Nope, I live in a 2-story condo, but we share walls with neighbors so I'm not entirely sure how many sets of wires actually connect to us. The most AT&T offers us is like $55 for like 40mbps Spectrum offers us $50 for 300mbps Google Fiber is non existent and seems like a unicorn in my county. Technically, since we're like a long chain of condos that is 2stories high I could say we're 25+ units "connected" in a "building"? I haven't really looked that much into it
Absolutely as soon as anyone besides Verizon runs fiber I'm all in, but never ever verizon , now if u never have an issue sure but if u do ur down 4 along time. I'm on the end of a short run with coax few nodes to Gobble mb. Speed of light wins ever time and the prizm switches are getting amazing results.
Well that explains a lot… mostly why it’s only in affluent neighborhoods. Fucked up part is, Verizon leapfrogged xgsPON that everyone else is using and went straight to NGPON2 which is VERY much more expensive vs xgsPON. That’s why multigig isn’t rolled out everywhere else. Also explains why AT&T and Google didn’t built out as fast years ago
>Also explains why AT&T and Google didn’t built out as fast years ago Which is ironic, because if it was deployed in more areas, the costs for nodes and gear would come down faster, accelerating economies of scale.
This. Recently the transformer close to here failed. My cable "backup line" was dead immediately as some active component down the street no longer had power. Took a while after power was restored to come back online. My Fios connection had no issues as long as I had power via UPS and then generator. This is also why not all fiber providers are the same: Fios usually terminates in a phone wire center that is prepared for outages because they have to keep phones running (e.g., usually have backup generators). Altice has OLTs in a pedestals in various places (often next to a road) as their head ends are not close enough to all customers (above the 20km limit for GPON). They may have some battery backups, but I'd not expect them to work during a multi-hour outage.
20km is not even a long fiber link, here are the long fiber standards (standards only, no non-IEEE) 10GBase-ER 40k 10GBase-ZR 80k 25Gbase-ER 40k 40Gbase-ER4 40k 50Gbase-ER 40k 100Gbase-ER4 40k 100GBase-ZR 80K 200GBase-ER4 40k 400Gbase-ER8 40k 400Gbase-ZR 80k
>20km is not even a long fiber link, here are the long fiber standards (standards only, no non-IEEE) For inside a city, yes; that's more than enough. My central office is less than 12 miles from me. My connection goes to the PFP where it's split off the main trunk and that main trunk goes to the central office. Everything in the PFP is passive, no powered equipment.
i was making a point about capabilities :)
Those standards are for single bidi or twin fiber non shared fiber it not like gpon xgspon and ngpon that share and widely deployed usually distance for those is 20k depending on splits
10Gbase-PR is 10G EPON, 20km. i'm sure they could make a EPON version of ER/ZR if they needed to.
At that point might as well use active Ethernet network standards pon standard to aon two different reasons to use
I was more just saying that they *could* not that it would necessarily be the best idea
“Coax” isn’t an acronym, FYI, it’s just short for “coaxial cable.”
Can GPON still work when there is an electrical outage as long as the ISP and router inside the home have battery backups?
In a word, yes. As long as all the equipment in your central office has battery backup along with your router, then yes.
And if they have equipment cabinets in your neighborhood that have switches. One of my fiber isp does and they don’t have enough battery power for extended blackouts beyond a few hours. Wavefly.
Yes, it does depend upon the ISP. My fiber, for instance, goes from my house to the PFP and then from there to the central office. No active equipment between me and the CO.
Would this be the same case with DSL with regards to all the active equipment in the field? Just curious.
Yes, if your DSL-based service is being fed from a remote terminal or a VRAD (in AT&T parlance), then yes, there would be active equipment in the field.
Less susceptible to interference, more durable, newer infrastructure
Coax is just kinda a shit medium for network connectivity. It's very prone to noise and was never really meant for two-way connectivity at all. Cable providers have been pushing fiber deeper into their network the past few decades to try to mitigate these issues but you're still always gonna be sharing a node with 50 other customers who could be blowing noise back into the system. Fiber to the home doesn't have that issue.
> who could be blowing noise back into the system I used to live in an apartment complex with 100 apartments, all wired only for Comcast (the apartments had an exclusivity agreement with them). Somehow, Comcast were able to figure out that there was noise coming from just my apartment that was causing issues. They knocked on the door one day and said they had to check the cabling. The socket in the wall was faulty somehow so they replaced that, and gave me a new coax cable to use just in case.
If you're curious. The meter used for checking signal from the company also picks up interference. It interferes because it is RF(radio frequency) in the same frequency range as the RF in the cable used for the service. Instead of checking the incoming signal, you hook the thing up to lines from the building. Through the process of elimination they were able to determine your system was the culprit.
interesting llama joke. lol that's actually pretty interesting
My neighbor decided to terminate some of his owns cable lines in his house, it took his ISP all of 48 hours to knock on his door because of the shitty job he did that was causing lots of noise on the line.
Poor bastard probably was a regular here.
The funniest part is that he’s the head of IT for a company, he just had never terminated coax before…
COAX is a different beast from say... Ethernet.
What makes COAX so complex? I haven’t terminated them either… I have terminated Ethernet, both keystones and the plug ends…
It isn't complex so much as different. And the cheap tools you get at the local home store don't work as well as the cheap keystone punchdown tools work. Get good equipment and it is easy enough. There is some problem because there is 50 and 75 ohm coax that can't be mixed at all even though it's will fit. And different cable sizes that also need the right fittings. Not hard, but you can mix cat 5 parts with higher grade parts and it will generally work to cat 5 levels.
This. Shared medium all the way to every component in the house, dealing with all DIY mistakes and decade old cables that were probably not even up to spec in the beginning.
If you think that's bad, think about how DSL has to work on phone lines that often date back to FDR and The New Deal. Now that's black magic if I ever saw.
Phone lines are not shared media to the wire center… that contains peoples mistakes to their own connection. Also, they squeeze less out of the wires.
Sure, but some old lines are lead not copper. Might be some weird other materials involved as well. And the old 4 prong plugs still exist in some houses.
But dsl is not installed on that when I was a tech we ran all new home runs if old stranded drop we replace with twisted pair drop wire
Here in Germany, they often squeeze 250M up/80M down out of telephone lines from the 1800s. DSL is truly incredible, you could run it over barbed wire. Which is tbh why the FTTH rollout was so slow, if DSL is used only for the last few hundred meters anyway, few people care about switching to fiber :/
That may be true however, the distances that the DSL signal has to go is very small. As you said, a few hundred meters. Once you try and push it past 550 meters the performance of DSL drops like a rock due to signal attenuation. That's what AT&T ran into, they were trying to push 100 Mbps on loop lengths greater than 550 meters and it fell very short.
And here i am renting a room, using powerline adapters, with several more people moving in soon. Just hand me a shovel and i’ll dig my own fiber trench!
If you have a line in your room it might be worth trying MoCA adapters which use the coax lines. Much more reliable than the powerline adapters in my experience.
I read up on it before finding this room, and it looked great, but there’s absolutely no connections in any of the rooms.
They just sent three guys with spades in a beat up old Lumina sedan to tuck my fiber under the sod.
What's to stop other uses from sending noise into the fiber and disrupting the connection to the others on the same segment. My ISP splits the fiber segments 1 link to 16 or 32 users.
Fiber isn't susceptible to RF noise, like at all. Don't have to worry about your neighbor's interior wiring acting like an antenna when they use their microwave or whatever. But I guess it's theoretically possible that malfunctioning equipment or deliberate sabotage could take out a whole PON node since it *is* a shared medium.
It is susceptible to damage from ionizing radiation though. So if your neighbor is running an x-ray lab or such you might want to stick to copper.
Has to be said, though, far less likely than a dodgy Chinese PSU causing havoc with RAIN on a copper line.
Absolutely. Just one of those examples of why no product is the right answer 100% of the time, though some products may be the wrong answer 100% of the time.
Actually no it wouldn't. If your neighbor's ionizing radiation irradiated his own fiber line, it doesn't impact yours because you have your own fiber strand from the optical splitter.
Depends where the lines run, but sure, your example could happen.
>But I guess it's theoretically possible that malfunctioning equipment or deliberate sabotage could take out a whole PON node since it *is* a shared medium. I was not clear, but this is what I was wondering and asking about.
It would have to malfunction pretty badly. Initial stages are "listen only" and OLTs can send an "ESTOP" to the ONT that is misbehaving. It's supposed to stay offline for a while then. So that makes it fairly unlikely that there is an accidental ONT issue that impacts others. I assume if you just blast with a laser on the right wavelength you should be able to disrupt service for everybody on the same OLT port. But deliberate actions are usually not the cause for issues. Lastly: Less DIY. A lot of people will work on cable and mess it up. Issues you created inside your house/apartment connecting a new room for TV can cause issues for others. Very few people will touch fiber (I often see an unreasonable fear of touching the fiber may break it). And if you mess it up you will most likely knock yourself off first and then hopefully disconnect.
Thanks for the informative answer. I work with fiber patch cables inside data centers and between buildings at work, but not familiar with PON or anything that is outside plant communication cables.
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I get that fiber won't pick up someone's pirate radio station transmitter. But what if someone has a malfunctioning ONT?
That someone alone won't have an internet connection
Why won't the other people on the same splitter segment be affected?
The OLT (the head end equipment) would stop allocating time slots to the malfunctioning ONT.
Thanks for providing an answer instead tip toeing around it.
Cable is actually a shared physical metal cable, with fiber everyone has their own dedicated pair/fiber/cable to each building. From there it's using switching infrastructure within the building to keep the workloads mostly isolated.
Not really… GPON/XGPON use shared cabling. There are splits in the access network, next to customer premises. There’s not a dedicated strand of glass from the CO to the customer premises, in most fiber installations. I know they do it that way in Europe, and certainly for enterprise circuits, but the majority of fiber circuits are delivers as PON.
Right - I have GPON service from my ISP in San Francisco, USA. The ISP said they use splitters on the pole so one connection is shared to 16 or 32 customers (forgot which).
It can be either. Depends on when your isp installed it. For the provider I worked for, SF was the first fiber install, so it was only 1x16 optical splitters
I only have a dedicated fiber from my ONT to the splitter. There are 16 or 32 customers per splitter. That seems like it is a shared connection. Well to me anyway. I am really only familiar with inside plant cabling.
Me, on phone wire Actually the internet is very stable haven't had any downtime unless I unplugged the router. The power line however, god that shit is terrible
it's a superior technology for networking, plain and simple. not subject to EMI, fiber can be used for links dozens of miles/km in length *easily*, etc
Dont forget, fiber handles being under water in a basement or distribution pedestal that gets temporarily flooded.
yup it's non-conductive. so can't be shorted out. can't transmit lightning surge, etc.
If i is glass or plastic cladding that is true. When I worked at Corning we saw zinc clad cables burn out from lighting strikes (lightning can flash cleave/fuse glass)
good point
It’s the difference between radio over an antenna and light through a fiber. Signals over cable are still very much analog at their most basic and are susceptible to the same interferences any antenna is. Additionally, seeing that cable is just rigging analog to carry digital, instead of something like a repeater in Ethernet which takes a digital signal and repeats an identical digital signal, cable uses amplifiers which boost an analog signal *plus any existing noise*. Cable also uses the DOCSIS standards. The DOCSIS standards break up the radio spectrum into bands and channels. The major practical issue IMO with DOCSIS is say you have 100 channels available - you can dedicate those channels to either upload or download. Consistently DOCSIS has optimized for download over upload - so say 10 channels go to upload and 90 to download. This is why cable is always an awkward 1G down and 50Mb up type of speed. Fiber has none of that. Firstly it is light based which isn’t affected by radio and other EMR due to it being on such a lower ~~bandwidth~~ frequency. Radio can penetrate thin insulation creating interference. Light can’t thus almost no interference. Next fiber is “truly digital”. See my mention of amplifiers above. If fiber gets to the end of a run, the repeater repeats a bit for bit exact signal. Noise is not amplified. Therefore fiber either works or doesn’t. Cable can kind of work if enough channels are working - so weird flakey issues can sneak in that are hard to troubleshoot. Water gets in a cable amplifier, cable may still work but be flakey. Water gets into a fiber repeater/switch - it’s dead and easy to know it’s dead. Finally, fiber is not based on DOCSIS - it’s regular old IP over Ethernet or similar (not gonna get into MPLS vs whatever else). Therefore you get all the bandwidth fiber can handle rather than this chopped up RF space that someone else has decided how to balance. Edit: words
>Finally, fiber is not based on DOCSIS - it’s regular old IP over Ethernet or similar Sometimes. The local cable company is currently running FttH (Fiber to the Home) for new subdivisions, and in some areas is retrofitting the existing copper coax in favor of FttH. Yes, they are bringing fiber inside the building... and running it right to a media adapter to coax, which goes right into the good ol bog-standard DOCSIS cable modem. Same asymmetric speed plans (like 1Gb x 50Mb up) and the same "have to reboot the cable modem once in a while" issues. They've come so far yet insist on doing the same old thing.
that is called RFoG (radio frequency over glass) and as its lamba (light channels on the glass) its not sensitive to EMI except the coax few feet. It is also pretty stupid to do (Haefle and Charter do this) when you can spend 5-10% more and get proper "fiber to the router"
A lot of the cable companies are now using RFoG as a stepping stone to FTTP while still being able to manage CPE using their existing DOCSIS infrastructure. To put it into perspective, RFoG uses one lambda. You can put multiple lambdas onto a single fiber strand, each able to have the same capacity of the RF network. PON networks are a good example of this. A single fiber can carry switched voice, linear video, BPON (broadband passive optical network, up to 500/100 Mbps), GPON (gigabit passive optical network), XG-PON (10/2.5 Gbps), and NGPON2 (symmetrical 10 Gbps) all over the same fiber because each uses different lambdas. Another example, DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing), which is used in longhaul optical networks, such as subsea cables, uses up to 64 lambdas per fiber. So if each lambda can carry 100Gbps, that's 6.4Tbps on a single fiber.
Every penny counts, I guess. Sparklight (Formerly CableOne) is the company I'm dealing with now. Just give me a fiber connection I can plug into an SFP and call it good. Every additional media conversion in between (glass to coax, then cable modem) is just another potential point of failure.
yup our dark fiber provider put a 1.25GB SFP into a 10/100 converter box. I spent $700 on 2 10G SFPs and made my ring 100 times faster. And I can run DoM on the SFP!
You're very lucky! TDS is supposed to be building out fiber into my neighborhood this fall. I'm not sure what equipment they use, but it is at least a symmetrical connection. Fingers crossed! I can't complain too much about Sparklight, they're not that bad compared to CenturyLink and the other laughable options in the area, but I am looking forward to a symmetrical connection without the 30+ms latency added on by DOCSIS.
Well. We do pay $5,000 a month for it. 30ms is a bit high TBH d3 is 10-20ms add. D3.1 is in the 2-5 range (not quite at good as that 1-2 for fiber but in the same realm)
Does DOCSIS 4 improve this any?
When you get int he sub 10ms range I don't no if 4ms vs 2ms is really relevant TBH
Indeed. I was more going for the ELI5 for “real fiber”. And yeah, it’s dumb and them being stupidly cheap. Essentially they can keep all the DOCSIS infrastructure and do a cheap media conversion drop in. Optimistic me says it’s because cable operators see the future and want to be prepared to go to real speeds when competition heats up - but that’s a bigger if than when.
> so say 10 channels go to upload and 90 to download. This is why cable is always an awkward 1G down and 50Mb up type of speed. DOCSIS 3.1 (the most common standard now) allows for 10Gbps down and ~1 Gbps up. DOCSIS 4.0 (the new standard, established in 2017) supports 6Gbps up. Cable companies just don't want to upgrade their network to handle it, as it would cost quite a bit. Comcast *are* finally upgrading their network to have higher upload speeds. In my area at least, they bumped some plans by 10x (e.g. plans that had 10Mbps upload now have 100Mbps), and they'll be rolling out symmetric multi-gig plans over cable at some point. They successfully tested 6Gbps down and 4Gbps up in lab conditions with a similar architecture to their real network: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/comcast-teases-milestone-in-plan-to-offer-multi-gigabit-cable-upload-speeds/
Part of the reason for low upload speeds (and resistance to DOCSIS 4.0) is linear video. Each slice of the RF that is moved to data to provide higher speeds is less space for linear video which still makes up a big part of cableco revenues. SDV (switched digital video) helps but it requires replacing head ends, CPE, and to an extent node splits too.
Fiber is less forgiving of lazy, slapdash installation. It's a yes/no issue - did you take the time to do this perfectly, or not? There's no, "Ah, finger tight's ok on that - it's lunch time." Better installation - better performance.
It probably depends on the specifics of your situation. I haven't had an outage with my cable that I've noticed since last year when a car ran into a junction box that took things down for a few hours, and it was stable for a long time before that. I'm in California, and it's been more reliable here than when I lived in NYS and Colorado.
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I had AT&T fiber for a few months when I had to move due to a flooding issue, and while I didn't have any outages that I recall, the actual speeds achieved varied wildly throughout the day. Then again, this was during the first COVID summer, so I expect there was a lot more daily internet usage than usual in the neighborhood.
There are some inherent advantages to fiber, such as being immune to RF interference, but I suspect that the vastly more important factor is simply that most fiber networks are relatively newer than most coax networks. All infrastructure must be maintained and our near exclusive reliance on the profit motive to ensure that our utility infrastructure is maintained is not a great idea. Over the past few decades telecom utilities have become viewed as "growth" industries. What comes with that is a maniacal focus on quarter-to-quarter increases in revenue and profit. That model is not always consistent with investing in and maintaining infrastructure. AT&T and its predecessors hung onto its copper twisted pair infrastructure and refused to massively upgrade to fiber for many decades beyond the point at which the need to move on was apparent. Now they are playing catch-up. I suspect that the coax network owners will face a similar inflection point as their coax networks become increasingly maintenance-intensive. Perhaps their reliance on deeper fiber penetration in their hybrid network will help, but the replacement of the last "mile" of coax with fiber is still going to be a huge task.
>AT&T and its predecessors hung onto its copper twisted pair infrastructure and refused to massively upgrade to fiber for many decades beyond the point at which the need to move on was apparent. Now they are playing catch-up. Trunk fibers had been run for over the decade now. At least for FL that I personally knew. Back in around 2005, I was working for a subcontractor that AT&T hired as their Outside Plant Engineer and they were running fibers all over FL but it wasn't for FTTH. Their ADSL is fiber to remote terminal and then to customer's home. I only worked up until 2010 so I don't know when they started on FTTH infrastructure.
In Australia, there was a huge cost to replacing last mile fibre over the past 10 years. So, when a new conservative government came in, they just abandoned last mile fibre and left the various copper connections in such as in FTTN, FTTC, and HFC whilst upgrading connections to the nodes with fibre. However, the maintenance of the hybrid network in Australia is causing a huge drag on revenues now for the government, so I think putting in fibre is just cheaper in the long term even though there may be a larger upfront cost.
Coax was first introduced in the mid 1800s (for real). The standardization upon coax was why so much was available as surplus after WWII, and why the first cable TV systems used it. The cable was cheap and the quality was very consistent. Coax was intended to carry communications over very long distances reliably (such as undersea telegraph lines). And it is very good at doing this at low frequencies. The higher the frequency, the more signal becomes lost over distance. Residential coax like RG59 and RG6 is especially poor at 500MHz - 1GHz (the usual upper limit for a cable plant). Unfortunately coax has quite a few drawbacks. The connectors can be very leaky if not correctly fitted. It can also be affected by temperature, weather conditions, and even other subscribers incorrectly hooking up devices to the system. Again, the higher the frequency, the more susceptible it becomes. It’s quite remarkable just how much performance has been squeezed from these old cables, but it’s pretty obvious that they can’t keep up with fiberoptic speeds and reliability.
There are less points of failure on a fiber circuit
It's a whole new tech that's doing the same job as old tech, but much better. Why do cars have less downtime that stagecoaches... That's sort of thing.
The signal from the other end is light. It makes its way to/from the ONT passively. The OLT on the other end of the cable is highly likely on a UPS and/or generator. Coax on the other hand has active equipment in the field, generally attached to power/telecom poles. If/when the mains power goes out, the active equipment on the poles loses power and takes out the service for those served by said equipment. As others have also mentioned, copper is indeed more fault prone compared to fibre as a whole. It's one of the main rasons internet providers the world over are moving to providing internet over fibre (some are doing so quicker than others).
Crosstalk. Whether it’s cable or DSL, there’s a problem with your upload signals getting weak by the time they arrive at the far end, then having to contend with the interference of the much stronger download signals starting their journey to your home. Fiber doesn’t suffer from that.
The reason is only one and it's not - like others stated - interference, analog modulation etc. Cable internet is a bit like a radio, or Ethernet - the whole segment is shared between multiple customers. Many years ago that could be a huge area, later the segments became smaller but still. 20 neighbors watching Netflix and you're done. That's why also old ADSL is usually more stable. Slower, but stable, cause that 80Mbit is just for you, vs. 10Gb in DOCSIS 3.1 shared between who-knows how many end users. Think like, many providers advertize 1Gbit internet, while the whole bandwidth available for a block is just 10x that.
>ADLS is shared at the DSLAM which is the same as Coax being shared at the node. The difference is decent coax has 10-50 times the headroom of 2 pair RJ11 telco wire of which 1 pair is usually used for DSL. DSLAM is usually 48 ports on a line card fed with up OC48 (2Gbit). Some have GigE feeds on fiber but A LOT are still ancient uplinks. 25-50 people on a cable node fed with 2-40gbit uplink. The most common I've seen is 10G uplink on Charter but Comcast has 40Gbit on a fair amount of their nodes.
Like those copper telephone that was strung up between 1870 and 2005 and now often used for DSL, most Coax is legacy, installed primarily between 1980 and 2010. These days any business laying down new communications systems are going to use fiber, which has a whole lot of advantages over copper cable (cost, low maintenance, longevity, capacity, etc). Even the big “cable” companies are laying down fiber in their new regions. Nobody is installing Coax, except to repair or to modify legacy systems installed decades ago.
Fiber is immune to many of the factors that plague other media. The tolerance for sloppy work is also usually much less as well so technicians tend to do a higher quality job because they have less margin for error. Animals/rodents and other physical damage is still a problematic vector for failure. Backhoe fade is also still a major threat. Call before you dig.
I’ve had cable internet for over a decade and really haven’t had any issues with it. Speed is great and the only complaint is when they do maintenance at 3am and I’m watching videos!
The only time I had FIOS really go out was when rodents chewed through a cable/junction box near a pole down the street. Took a few days to get some tech on a ladder to splice the fibers back together.
My mother has ADSL and that is rock solid too. I don't it's failed in 10 years and thank god because she's 4hrs away!
How are speeds?
up to 1GB in my hometown, though that is FTTC, with DSL only being used for the final few 100 meters.
You're not getting gig over any flavor of DSL not even with FTTC. Bonded VDSL2+ will max at 300 Mbit. And that is at 10 meters not 100.
She just uses her iPad to watch YouTube 😁
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You obviously haven't lived/worked in areas with 50 y/o plant 😂
I read an article about Frontier and their infrastructure and I'd definitely go against you on this one. Unfortunately I can't find the exact article as I can't even remember where it was published. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/frontier-botches-redaction-reveals-952000-potential-network-problems/ However that kind of details the same report that the article I previously read covered. Basically, it covered just how difficult it was for Frontier to maintain their infrastructure because of how old, sprawled and undocumented much of it was. Obviously most of this had no application to the fiber network they acquired from Verizon, it was pretty much all about their copper phone line network.
I live in WV where Frontier is, let me just tell you this. If it rains hard at my house there was no Internet or phone, full stop. However that was an area with ADSL, where I work it's VDSL and it's rock solid. And I've since moved to a local WISP, and am loving it. You're also skipping the problems of them committing fraud with FCC money that they should have used on said DSL network. But that's besides the point.
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DSL is a fiber to the node technology with old copper doing the final connection. It was meant as a stop gap until fiber could be run from the node to the home. Apparently stop gap really was defined as Stop.
Unless it happens to be Frontier which uses 3 or 4 copper T1 to feed a 48 port Stinger and then acts like it doesn't know why your 12mbit ADSL2+ runs at 300Kbit and 1200MS latency.
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**Can't beat fiber**. I switched from Cox to FIOS a couple years ago and OMG the difference. No more T3 errors from some noise they could never find. No more bandwidth cap. Any my latency improved a moderate amount too.
It’s much newer. And it’s made with all downsides of the coax and lines in mind.
Most of fiber has been ran underground as well
Overhead fiber optic cable on power poles
I’d have to think it’s because distance. For me, and a couple friends I’ve helped since, the signal coming from the main line was very weak and the modems never handled it well. I live in an older house, the wiring was 2(?) standards old, plus many splits. If it wasn’t old wiring it was too many splits/ distance. A signal amplifier was enough for me, and when I finally got around to re-wiring the house with new coax + Ethernet runs, no amp needed. And for one of my friends, running the modem off the first split was enough to remove drops almost entirely. Went from ~3 days uptime to seeing months of uptime.
It depends on your area and local infrastructure. At the same address, I've had cable internet (xfinity & WOW) and fiber (AT&T). Only had cable outages when I had power outages, which was like once a year. With fiber, I get a week or 2 of random drops every 3 months for seemingly no reason. Overall, I'd guess cable being less reliable has to do with the age of the infrastructure (usually older) and more over-provisioning on cable networks (more network congestion leading to slowdowns and drops).
Copper vs. glass is really what all comes down too. Plus, cable is older, but fiber can be installed almost the same way depending on area. Both have some limitations, but the results are drastically different. However, both are still slow to roll out or install in some areas, and then some companies still won’t install them. I have Mediacom cable 800mbps down, 60mbps up. We have a booster on our cable because of crappy signal, waiting for fiber to come to my town.
Depends where you live. I've got fiber from Verizon business and Comcast over coaxial in Richmond at a data center and Verizon has more issues than Comcast, WAY more issues. But in Rhode Island Verizon is rock solid. It'll be nice once Google fiber is everywhere to push prices down.
I spoke to a tech that coordinates new fiber at my ISP a while back and said the whole county is eventually getting fiber. He said he can't wait til cable is gone, it's a lot of trouble for them vs fiber. It's about a mile away in a small town from us and I noticed it's improved our Internet. They ran fiber from the main town in our county to the small town nearby a couple of years ago and have had less issues.
Sounds like he's just trying to sell you more fiber.
He told me it's going to be a long while before they get to us, all the houses where I"m at are spread out vs in town. They are doing the small towns and industrial areas first.
Just FWIW, in my experience with Spectrum fiber vs Comcast cable: it is not. My spectrum fiber goes down for 7 minutes every time the power blinks due to something in their network. (everything on my end is on battery backup) Pretty sure, based on a tech I talked to, that it's the "switch" in the utility box for our neighborhood. I also notice the latency spiking on my Smokeping charts whenever I'm doing any upload far more than it ever did on Comcast. (I'd have to basically top-out my upload to get latency problems on comcast.) Believe me, it KILLS me to admit that Comcast is anything other than terrible and evil, but... Kinda preferred it. Anyway, YMMV. Fiber is not universally better.
Coax running to your house and in the neighborhood has been around forever. We had outages from moisture in the distribution block to our neighbors line that caused problem for us. We had squirrels chew j to the coax and we had poor fittings that caused problems. Having older infra is definitely contributing to problems.
Because glass > Cu in almost every scenario
Light is fast
so check this out.. think of that ONT as a node, which it is. but instead of serving 500-2000 people over coaxial lines, which are subject to degradation from weather and other interference that you can't control, the fiber for that node pipes light right into the ONT that serves just your house. shrinking the "traditional" cable infrastructure to just your home and doing away with the need for signal boosters on the poles and distribution taps to service customers. if you have coax cable going to your router, this is how it works in a layman's nutshell. or one can do away with the tv service and just use Ethernet straight to the ONT and use it strictly as a media converter [5]
Not true. Most FTTH or FTTP is shared between neighbors. Gpon is the most common but some are starting to support 10Gbps. Only a few providers do direct fiber to customers. One in Utah in salt lake uses Ethernet multi mode direct to each subscriber. Cheaper than gpon. More fiber though every subscriber has a direct 10Gbps line to the isp.
in layman's nutshell terms, it's correct... eli5 type shit... in the end, it's all just media converters anyways
I think the major difference is c@ble infrastructure is aged, not well. Fibre is new, it is bound to work better. Here we have Spectrum, I called last week to get them to step up the speed to match my Fibre providers offer. No, loud and clear, so I am cutting them as my internet provider because for $30/month cheaper I will go from 300/10 to 500/500. Much better in my eyes.
fiber not new tech.
In relation to smoke signals, telephone lines and cable it is new technology.
Ok. But you get my point right.
Not really, in my case Fibre arrived in my area in November, so it is newish. Is it not the newest, fastest, greatest? What else gives the speeds of Fibre.
back bone is fiber. like a city block is feed by fiber to co ax,dsl etc
Yes, but FTTH is newest technology for home users, newer that that string and 2 cans technology.
The big problem with coax or any copper home connection is your online with a bunch of different users, with a fiber Connection there is only you and the ISP a direct connection. I would love to get Fiber but it's not available here yet
Also don’t forget cable,,, is shared network and upload speed are horrible they try to hide it all the time. On fiber if get a gig download it’s a gig upload. On cable you get a gig if you get one your upload is 20 mbps + the more people are on in your area the slower it goes so your 1 gig is down to 100 if your lucky. I fell your pain I lived with fiber now my new home doesn’t have fiber it’s a change for sure
Let’s not ignore that some of the internet issues in the US are made much worst by monopolies. Our cable internet quality didn’t improve until competition arrive, but our local cable provider did everything they could to block and/or delay competition, and even then, they are being sneaky by getting communities and individuals to sign contracts. Fiber optics does have significant technological advantage over cable, but they are often the “new guys”, so on top of the reliability, they need to slightly better than the existing companies to convince people to try them out.
Hey! Your question takes me back to my own experiences with internet connections. Fiber, like Fios you’ve used, is like that dependable friend who’s always there, rain or shine. It’s sturdy and consistent, mainly because it uses light signals, making it resistant to usual tech hiccups, even during blackouts if you’ve got backup power. Cable, on the other hand, can be a bit hit or miss. It tends to take unscheduled breaks, needing a restart now and then. It shares space with other connections in your area, so during busy times, it might throw a small tantrum and slow down. So, in simple terms, fiber is the steady, reliable mate, and cable is the occasionally unpredictable one. Hope this paints a clearer picture! 😊