Internet Speeds
- Thread starter AgronAlum
- Start date
Mediacom in Ames has become very stable and much cheaper since metronet came to town. The key is that you have to purchase your own modem and be willing to call every year to get promo pricing again. I've paid $60 per month after taxes and fees for 1 gig internet for the last 2 years.
We've had Metronet for a year now here and it's garbage compared to Metronet we had in Rochester. This is our 4th outage.
Do not have them bury your line if you get their service. The team that buried ours used a lawn edger to "trench" the line in. One of our outages was due to "buried" cable being struck by someone stripping our lawn with a flat shovel.
Plainly stated, Metronet isn't ready to be a primary business communications company. I'm beginning to think they have no redundancy built into their network. They're basically just getting as much user base built up as they can to get top dollar from one of the national telecommunications companies.
I think we only have access to Colo Telephone Company, Metronet, and soon Mediacom. CTC is STUPID expensive. Hopefully Mediacom can get their service live here soon. They just did the underground work.
Do not have them bury your line if you get their service. The team that buried ours used a lawn edger to "trench" the line in. One of our outages was due to "buried" cable being struck by someone stripping our lawn with a flat shovel.
Plainly stated, Metronet isn't ready to be a primary business communications company. I'm beginning to think they have no redundancy built into their network. They're basically just getting as much user base built up as they can to get top dollar from one of the national telecommunications companies.
I think we only have access to Colo Telephone Company, Metronet, and soon Mediacom. CTC is STUPID expensive. Hopefully Mediacom can get their service live here soon. They just did the underground work.
Fiber cut near Mason city last night has essentially knocked out all of Iowa. Concerning that they don’t seem to have any built in redundancy.
Altoona here. 1 Gig Metronet. Internet is OK, just a tad slower than usual. Speedtest does not show the Ames Metronet server being available for tests. I get fine speeds to Rochester and Davenport Metronet servers. Downdetector shows that service might be coming back slowly for Ames.
https://downdetector.com/status/metronetinc/
https://downdetector.com/status/metronetinc/
We've had Metronet for 2+ years and I don't recall a single outage that lasted more than perhaps a minute - so fast that I couldn't even confirm that it was Metronet's problem vs. my own equipment. My primary complaint was that they hand-buried my fiber line so it was severed when the lawn got aerated. I had to really hound them to bury the line properly the second time around.
What's annoying about this outage is the lack of communication. I get text alerts from them every couple of months about outages, none of which have ever affected me, but now that there's a major outage the only way to learn about it is logging in to their web site, and even then it's a post from hours ago with no ETA or updates since.
What's annoying about this outage is the lack of communication. I get text alerts from them every couple of months about outages, none of which have ever affected me, but now that there's a major outage the only way to learn about it is logging in to their web site, and even then it's a post from hours ago with no ETA or updates since.
I don't have any issues with Metronet normally, outside of major outages like this which are pretty rare, all I know is it's 100x better than my Mediacom ever was.
For whatever it's worth, T-Mobile is buying Metronet. No idea if that's a good or bad thing.
Back up in Ames. Metronet is by far the best option in Ames. Rarely ever do they go down.
I refuse to pay for Metronet's garbage $13/mo "Tech Assurance Fee". The sales guy stopped coming to my house after the 3rd time of me saying I'd sign up if they waive it and I agree to pay for a tech to come out when I needed one.
Mediacom with my own modem and I consistently get above the 500Mbit down I pay for
Mediacom with my own modem and I consistently get above the 500Mbit down I pay for
I love being able to use a local Co-Op like South Slope.
Note: It is fiber run all the way to the house. I'm only paying for the 250 level. They can go FAR higher. The monthly cost is around $80.
Note: It is fiber run all the way to the house. I'm only paying for the 250 level. They can go FAR higher. The monthly cost is around $80.
Went with Metronet 1 Gig introductory offer when they came to Altoona. It's $53/mo including tech fee, fixed for 3 yrs, going up $5/mo every 3 yrs until $73/mo fixed, plus a $200 gift card. It's been pretty good, I'm getting around 950 Mbps up and down.
This is way more than you asked but things to consider if you're bored
. I feel like nerding out to avoid more important things right now.
A couple things to keep in mind...
. I feel like nerding out to avoid more important things right now.A couple things to keep in mind...
- Even in streaming heavy households, very few people even come close to 100Mbs of bandwidth across their entire house at the same time.
- A 4K stream can use up to roughly 25Mbps, multiplied times how many simultaneous streams you have going - many streams are still 720 or 1080 and upscaled.
- IOT devices, even cameras, use very little bandwidth. Most live recording to the cloud only uses roughly 3Mbps per camera.
- Most devices send/receive brief bursts of data (not including some of the above).
- The type of line matters almost as much as bandwidth. Fiber for instance allows for less latency than say DSL, critical for video calls, gaming, etc.
- I run 2 home servers, have 8 cameras recording 24/7 to the cloud, 72 devices connected to the network, typically 3x 4K video streams, conference calls all day, etc. I have symmetrical, active (not passive) gig fiber and even all of that could be handled with 1/4 of the bandwidth.
- WiFi has a million different variables.
- Channel, RSSI, Noise, etc
- Congestion and overlapping channels
- Wire vs wireless backhaul if mesh or access points (always wired if you can)
- How many hops, using repeaters/extenders (barf) vs access points, wired mesh, etc
- Router/access point WiFi standard (n, ax, ac, be, etc)
- Device WiFi standard support
- Distance between device and router/access point
- Frequency being used - 2.4Ghz is slow as **** but long range, 5Ghz is very fast but shorter reaching, 6Ghz is largely new, very fast, but very short reaching
- 20, 40, 80, 160, 360MHz bandwidth
- # of simultaneous data packets (i.e. do you need QOS or not - typically 500Mhz is the dividing line)
- Double NAT situations
- Deep packet inspection turned on/off (very impactful)
- A bunch more but running out of time
- Don't waste money trying to get WiFi "7" as MLO and other things need a lot of work still, range is very short on 6Ghz, and will be many years before enough devices to support it.
- Consider how many devices, and what kind you will be running to try and estimate the bandwidth you need at peak times.
- Change from a carrier router or put in bridge mode if all possible.
- I always recommend a wireless (wired only) router with a switch that then links to your downstream WiFi devices of choice. I have to drop this recommendation if you aren't a nerd.
- Order of preference for setup:
- Wired router with wired access points (more is not always better for # of APs)
- Consumer router with wired access points
- MoCA (has come a long ways)
- Consumer router with mesh APs
- Asus has best consumer routers
- Mesh recommendations below
- Netgear is improving the hardware but every feature is extra money and devices crazy expensive
- Mesh systems (dedicated backhaul frequency/channel preferred)
- ASUS AIMesh is really maturing
- Eero is very easy and pretty reliable
- Orbi can be great or terrible, $$$
- Google is very easy and pretty reliable
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