All About the Fiber-to-the-Home Gigabit Experience

The Fiber-to-the-Home Gigabit Experience

I’ll try not to make you envious. I have what is probably the fastest home Internet connection in the country – a theoretical gigabit: 1,000Mbps. And it’s synchronous, as fast going up as down. To add icing to the cake, my ISP bill is dropping almost by half while my speed increases exponentially.

To make you feel better, let me tell you that my actual speeds aren’t anywhere near that. And yet the speeds I do get are many times faster than before.

I’m here to discuss the experience of having a fiber to the home (FTTH) Internet service. I’ll tell you how I got this service, the experience of having it, and why you probably can’t get it where you live.

Better Living With Fiber

This is not the kind of fiber you want in your breakfast cereal. It’s made of glass.

Fiber optic cables are extremely thin – almost a hair width – but they can handle huge amounts of data. Just one of these thin strands can carry a gigabit going down on one frequency, and another gigabit going up on another frequency.

Thousands of miles of this glass fiber span the globe, creating a physical, literal worldwide web. But that last mile between the node and your home is usually something with considerably slower bandwidth.

Sonic: The ISP That Made It Possible

Sonic.net has been my ISP for several years now, providing a relatively fast DSL connection through leased AT&T copper lines. It’s a small, local company covering the San Francisco Bay Area.

If you just considered price and speed, Sonic’s DSL is a lousy deal. I was paying $70 (more like $91 after all the taxes and extras) for an “up to” 40Mbps download speed. In reality, my download speeds never quite got to 18Mbps. Uploads hovered just above 2Mbps. Last fall, I came very close to quitting Sonic and going to Comcast or AT&T.

Note: I used Ookla’s Speedtest.net for testing Internet speeds in this article.

But I decided against it. Sonic’s support is superb. Call them, and a knowledgeable person answers the phone. They support net neutrality, and their simple-to-read privacy policy states that “Sonic never sells our member information or usage data, nor do we voluntarily provide government or law enforcement with access to any data about users for surveillance purposes.”

Another reason: I knew that Sonic was slowly expanding their FTTH network, and one of these days, my home would be on it. Once that would happen, my Internet speed would increase exponentially, while my monthly bill would drop by about $30.

Getting the Upgrade

Sonic’s FTTH network came to my neighborhood the second half of April, and I made an appointment for a Sonic Field Service Technician to install my new setup.

I was worried. My office is in the back of the house, and I really needed the modem and router in the office. I didn’t want to rearrange everything if the fiber couldn’t be run to the right spot.

I didn’t have to. The technician was perfectly happy to run the fiber along the side of the house (he was relieved he didn’t have to crawl under it). He mounted a modem – about the size of a deck of cards – to the wall, and connected it to my router and landline.

A couple of problems popped up after he left, but they were more clerical than technical. Sonic gave us a new landline number instead of keeping the old one. And when the bill arrived, they overcharged me. The first problem was solved within a couple of hours. The second one…I’ll find out when my next bill arrives.

The Bottlenecks I Didn’t Know Existed

Soon after installing my FTTH system, the technician plugged his laptop into it and ran a speed test (the same one I was using). Sure enough, he got almost 1,000Mbps both down and up. But I never saw those speeds with my own hardware.

Chances are your hardware can’t handle gigabit speeds, either.

My main PC is a Lenovo laptop without an Ethernet port. I get Ethernet, and other connections, through a Plugable USB 3.0 Docking Station. My download speeds usually run in the neighborhood of 400Mbps. The upload is almost twice that fast.

Another bottleneck: My router, which I rent from Sonic, gets a little more than 200Mbps up and down via Wi-Fi. So for phones and tablets, that’s about the best we can get. (Not that that’s anything to complain about.)

Five years ago, to get a better signal in the front of the house, I ran an Ethernet cable to another router in the TV room. You can read the saga in Filling the Wi-Fi holes once and for all. Repeating my speed tests in the TV room, I found that Ethernet was as fast as in my office. But the Wi-Fi was about 70Mbps up and down – still a huge improvement over the DSL.

That’s what I get for buying a cheap router.

Once your Internet connection is faster than your home network, you find all sorts of bottlenecks. Old Ethernet cables – anything less than Cat 5 – will slow you down.

Even your computer may be a bottleneck. To find out in Windows 10, open Settings, click Network & Internet, select Ethernet in the left panel, click Change adapter options, and double-click your Ethernet connection. If the Speed is less than 1.0 Gbps, you won’t get a gigabit connection.

Not all bottlenecks are in your home. Few websites have the bandwidth to spare gigabit speeds just for you.

The Gigabit Experience

But with all these bottlenecks, I’m still getting vastly faster Internet service than almost anyone else in this country. Websites and file downloads usually move much faster, although occasionally they take their time. After all, your ISP can’t send you the data any faster than they get it.

But the real change comes with uploads, which in most home Internet subscriptions are much slower than the downloads. Backing up to the cloud is no longer a slow process. Soon after getting fiber, I moved my photo collection (nearly 20GB) to OneDrive. The upload was completed in less than 40 minutes.

When I depended on DSL, I had to throttle OneDrive so that its slow uploads didn’t interfere with other Internet use. Once I had fiber, I turned off the throttle and had no problem. To do so, go to OneDrive’s Settings, select the Network tab, and select Don’t limit.

My television is connected via Ethernet to the cheap router in the TV room, and the TV’s response has improved considerably. Now when I start a program on Netflix, it goes 1%, 2%, 99%, and the show starts. And for the first time, I can watch something in 4K without being told that I don’t have the bandwidth.

Why Don’t You Have Gigabit?

A San Francisco Chronicle article from last March claimed that “Sonic turned a profit after three months and has never had an unprofitable quarter.” That brings up a difficult question: Why aren’t there hundreds of similar companies all over the country?

I asked Sonic CEO Dane Jasper about that. “It’s not entirely fair to say Sonic is alone in this,” he pointed out. “We’re not entirely unique.” He mentioned several other small companies, including Gorge.net in Hood River, Oregon and Socket.net in Columbia, Missouri. But getting a foot in the locked-down ISP industry isn’t easy.

The real problem is that a very few, very large corporations control almost all of the Internet access in the USA, and their control is considerable. According to Jasper, “AT&T is trying to stop their obligation for the open market space.” They’re trying to take down the 1996 law that required them to lease their copper wires to such companies as Sonic. If they succeed, the three-quarters of Sonic customers who live in areas yet without fiber will have to move to AT&T or Comcast.

This monopolistic and duopolistic system affects more than prices and speeds. Jasper believes that if consumers “had even ten choices of ISPs, the market would self-correct when it comes to issues like privacy and net neutrality.”

Hopefully, more small ISPs will install fiber (and protect our privacy). I have great Internet now. That shouldn’t be unusual.

All About Storage Sense in the Windows 10 April 2018 Update

This past April, Microsoft began the rollout of the fifth feature update for the Windows 10 operating system.

As a follow-up to our hands-on and review of the April 2018 Update, we are going to dive a little deeper into many of the updates and enhancements in this feature update. This will help you and those you provide assistance take advantage of these capabilities to keep your system well maintained.

Today we are going to take a closer look at Storage Sense so you can put disk maintenance on auto-pilot for your system.

Storage Sense provides automatic maintenance of your disk space and based on your choices will clean up temporary files, past Windows Updates, and other system files on an as-needed basis. This feature is a replacement for the desktop program called Disk Cleanup that performs a similar functionality in past versions of Windows. Disk Cleanup is still in Windows 10 however, the expectation is that Storage Sense will completely take over for that software in the future as Microsoft continues to move many legacy features and functionality into the modern Windows Settings app.

To get started you access the new options for Storage Settings at Windows Settings > System > Storage > Storage Sense.

Storage Settings in the Windows 10 April 2018 Update

By default, Storage Settings are turned off when you upgrade to Windows 10. You can toggle the feature On and Off from this page and use the underlying default settings for disk maintenance.

If you select the Change how we free up space automatically link just below the Storage Sense toggle you can access the additional options.

Storage Sense Settings in the Windows 10 April 2018 Update

These are the default settings for Storage Sense.

• The drop down under Run Storage Sense can also be set to run at certain intervals including every day, week, or month.
• Under Temporary Files you can toggle the removal of temp files used by your installed apps, set a timeframe for the removal of files from your Recycle Bin (Never, 1, 14, 30, or 60 days), and also set a timeframe for deleting files in your systems Download folder (same as Recycle Bin options).

Under the Free up space now you can immediately remove the backup of your previous version of Windows. This is available whether it was an upgrade from Windows 7/8.1 or from a previous feature update of Windows 10. Note: This option will not be available if it has been more than 10 days since you upgraded the system from that previous version of Windows.

If you go back to the main Storage settings page, that is the first image in this article, you will see another link – Free up space now. If you select that you can handle disk maintenance manually even if you have Storage Sense turned on for automatic maintenance.

Free up space now options in Windows 10 April 2018 Update

After a scan of your systems hard drive, you will be presented a list of directories/files that can safely be removed from your system. You will see a description of those files and the size of the files stored under that area. Some of these will already be selected by default however, you can uncheck those boxes or check additional boxes if you want to remove the files stored in those areas.

Once you have all of the selections made just select the Remove files link towards the top of this page and those actions will be taken.

Bonus Tip

Storage Usage Summary on Windows 10 April 2018 Update

If you go back once again to the main Storage settings page, that is the first image in this article again, and select your main system drive you will see this listing of directories and the number of files stored in them.

By selecting the Temporary Files directory, you will once again be at the Free up space options page that we just talked about.

As is very typical with Windows, there is usually more than one way to get to various features and functionality.