The Ultimate in Speed
Who would want cable when fiber is on offer?
WHEN I LIVED IN LOS ANGELES, I had a 500/500 megabits down/up fiber connection: speed with incredibly low latency. After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area—Silicon Valley—I was left with cable or DSL. Cable took me down to 250/25Mb/s, which is a huge hit on the upload side. Forget about DSL in the bay. AT&T only offered a maximum download speed of 1.25Mb/s. Yes, one-point-two-five. Google Fiber isn’t available in most places, and any chance of getting fiber was limited to office buildings.
Last year, Comcast announced it would be deploying its multi-gig fiber service in the San Jose area, but only in select areas. I kept calling, emailing, and tweeting the company in the hope that it would bring the service to my zone. Getting things up and running took several weeks. Because the area I live in doesn’t have the latest wiring infrastructure, Comcast had to apply for permits to tear up the sidewalks, because the old underground cable network was going through straight dirt, and it needed to put in underground conduits.
A year later, fiber is in the ground from a node down the street, and runs directly into my house. It’s so fast that there are no consumer routers that support it. I had to use a Comcast-provided 10-gigabit enterprise router by Juniper Networks. Thankfully, I’m wired for 10-gigabit.
The only problem: The Juniper router only has two 10-gigabit connections, and both are SFP+ fiber. Thankfully, I have a Netgear xs708e 10-gigabit switch with one SFP+ and eight copper ports. The Juniper unit plugs into the Netgear, and the rest of the house is wired to the Netgear. There’s also no wireless routers or access points that can take advantage of Comcast’s multigig service, so any devices on Wi-Fi are limited in speed. But that’s OK as long as the wired systems have 10-gigabit Ethernet.
So how fast is my new connection? A blazing 2Gb/s in both directions—you can download a 14GB file in just one minute. That’s faster than you can burn a Blu-ray disc, or transfer files to a thumb drive.