1Gbps Fibre Internet Connectivity
14/09/17 09:53 Filed in: Industry
The future of Internet connectivity.
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I live in Central London, and one of the benefits of living here is that the Internet connectivity has always been relatively good. I've had 200Mbps down/20+Mbps up for quite a while, and you get used to such performance. The upload speed always seems to be the restrictor though, doesn't it? Makes things like uploading YouTube videos, and online backups (for example) something you set off, and leave to it.
Anyway, I got the opportunity to upgrade to 1Gbps Fibre connectivity from a company called HyperOptic. That's 1Gbps up and down. I saw it was available, and given the cost at circa GBP50/month, I thought it was a no-brainer. I also kept my existing provider, as something so cutting edge may perhaps not be reliable. I tend to adopt stuff early, and sometimes that can cause some headaches - I couldn't afford any issues with my Internet as I rely on it so much. So much so I've had more than one provider for as long as I can remember. In fact, I wrote about load-balancing multiple connections here:
Load Balancing Broadband Connections
So I've had the service for a good few months now, so thought I'd share my views.
My opinion is a simple one - just wow. It's been rock-steady from a reliability point of view, and the performance just changes the way you use things. Uploading/download stuff feels much the same as it would as if I were operating over a local network. Just simple things like Windows Insider Preview updates come down in no time at all. It just makes my remote working life far, far easier.
Online backups now are far more tenable than they were. I use BackBlaze, and I've found their service very fast, and utterly reliable. You add in a decent connection and all of a sudden I can now backup all of my important stuff and not give too much thought as to how much I backup off-site. I wonder with the advent of such Internet connections whether services like BackBlaze, who offer unlimited backup, may have to reconsider the price point/offer? Mozy went through that pain, and I believe Crashplan has now pulled out of the consumer market? I shall watch that space. I've a ton of cloud storage with my Office365 tenancy and my DropBox area so was considering jumping to that, but the BackBlaze service is just such a configure-and-forget platform it's well worth the money. Backups you have to do sometimes just don't happen. Automating those backups is the winner here.
Anyway, performance. Below is the current performance I'm seeing using the DSL Reports Speedtest. I'm connected over 1Gbps wired-Ethernet at this point.
Seriously, how impressive is that? For comparison, this is the same test but over WiFi.
In this case, it's my WiFi not keeping up with the connection - which is fair enough. I use a Netgear R8000 AC3200 router and am in general very happy with the performance.
Anyways, want to see this stuff working? There are a couple of videos below you may find interesting. I'm incredibly satisfied with the service. Fantastic performance, and a very reasonable price - what more can you ask for?
Oh - as a quick side note - if you do consider the service remember they use Carrier Grade NAT (CGN). CGN can cause issues with stuff like VPNs and the like. My work VPN won't work through it for example. They can give you a static IP address too - I spoke to them online about it, and it was sorted in minutes.
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