I’m getting Fiber!
All of the internet, all of the time
IT’S HAPPENING. It’s finally happening. I’m getting fiber to the property. Hopefully, soon, if I’m lucky. They’re digging up the road in my area and installing the good stuff in my town. Contractors are in, and the work is underway, or so I’ve been told.
I’m currently paying around $62 a month for 145Mb/s down and 17Mb/s up, which isn’t too bad. However, once the optical is installed, I should be able to get 900Mb/s up and down for just $68 a month. The only problem is, I’m still stuck in an 18-month contract, so I may have to wait a bit unless I pay to get out early.
It got me thinking though, that is the top package there. Guaranteed averages of 900 up and down, but do I need it? The line I currently have hardly takes an exorbitant amount of time to download games and software, I stream 4K content over it just fine, there’s a ton of devices connected all over the house working away over the network, and let’s face it, $68 a month is a hefty sum. One that could easily be funneled into a savings account—it’s $1,224 over the course of the contract, to be precise.
The “budget” offering comes in at $40 a month and packs in speeds of 300Mb/s down and up, more than twice as fast as I currently get for downloads and 17.6x faster than my current upload speeds.
Admittedly, I’m a fire and forget kinda guy when it comes to software and OS installations. If Windows isn’t working quite right, I will format the thing and install fresh, backup- free, and then re-download everything in the process. But is that worth paying the extra per month? I’m not so sure.
Then there’s the router conundrum. I want to upgrade my home network too. The Netgear Nighthawk RAXE500 has my attention, a sweet little WiFi 6E number, complete with 2.5Gbps ports, that will go nicely with the Cat7 cables trailing around the house into my office. Pair that with a new NAS and I’ll be golden.
But again, at that point, we’re talking close to $1000 on a network upgrade, for stuff that I may not necessarily take full advantage of.
Eugh! First world tech problems, eh?