Fibre-x quick way to get up to speed
There’s a lot of hype surrounding ultrafast broadband (UFB) and many Kiwis, including myself, are keen to get connected.
I thought I’d have a long wait but recently signs popped up around my neighbourhood announcing Chorus was installing UFB. Before long, men in fluorescent safety vests were digging up the streets and excitement was in the air.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Chorus stopped laying fibre four houses down from me. It turns out that like a number of other frustrated users, I wasn’t to get fibre for at least another 24 months.
When all seemed lost, Vodafone launched Fibre-x, which offers similar speeds to fibre but runs over the cable network located in Wellington, Christchurch, and the Kapiti Coast.
Finally, my clunky ADSL connection with a 9Mbps download and 0.91Mbps upload speed was being replaced with cable which should be a lot faster.
Why the need for speed?
Anyone who streams online video has a good reason for wanting a super-fast broadband connection.
Not only is streaming smoother, but the quality is much better too. If you have a fast enough connection you can access Netflix HD and 4K content with almost no buffering.
A growing amount of 4K and HD video is also available on Youtube. The big thing here is that I now spend less time waiting and more time watching.
Provided you have a monitor or TV that supports HD/4K, everything looks that much better too. Another driver was capacity. If (like me) you’ve got multiple people using the same broadband connection as well as a bevy of broadband connected devices, you’ve probably already noticed that performance sometimes tanks.
A quick network audit revealed 20-plus broadband consuming gadgets connected to my home network. When they, me, and others use the home network at the same time, things slow to a crawl. As more devices get connected, available capacity and speed decreases. Since getting Fibre-x this has been a non-issue.
Then there’s the not so small matter of latency (that’s the time in milliseconds it takes for data to travel between my network and a remote server). Low latency times translate into a responsive feeling connection. Conversely, high latency times makes everything feel sluggish and slow.
Then there’s also the not so inconsiderable matter of upload speeds. This is particularly noticeable with my smartphone. Its dual cameras shoot great photos and videos. Uploading these to social media or even Google Photo used to take several minutes owing to my sluggish upload speed. With Fibre-x, uploads now zoom along at 97.83mbps. Photo upload times are now measured in mere seconds.
Getting set up
I’d heard horror stories from friends who’d had UFB installed. Getting permission from other tenants or for shared access to be dug up and so on. Getting Fibre-x installed proved to be hassle free.
Downer (the company contracted by Vodafone to do the install) called and confirmed what I was getting installed and an install date/time. On the appointed date, a technician arrived and tested the cable connection. After plugging in a cable modem and router, I was up and running.
Vodafone is offering a three-day Fibre-x install guarantee or a $100 credit. It isn’t hard to see why. That said, my install was probably more straightforward than most as I had an existing cable connection to my house.
Performance
Running Fibre-x over a wireless connection delivered around 81-149Mbps downloads and 37-59Mbps uploads according to the Ookla online speed test. Speeds increased/decreased depending on my proximity to the router.
Connecting directly to the router using gigabit ethernet delivered a significant improvement. Download speeds rocketed up to 296Mbps and uploads were a healthy 98Mbps. Ping time was a respectable 5ms.
It mightn’t be delivering gigabit speeds, but going to Fibre-x has still resulted in a massive improvement over the snail-like 9Mbps downloads, 0.91Mbps uploads and 42ms ping I’d been getting via ADSL.