Bye-bye FiOS

[Abu Riyah]

[nick]

Good luck with Spectrum. I've had TimeWarner for over 10 years, they (and now Spectrum) suck just as badly. Just like all major providers (and the minor ones piggyback on the majors' networks anyway). With local monopolies nothing else could be expected.

[d33pt]

I'm hoping in a few years 5G will put some pressure on the local cable/dsl/fiber providers for pricing and service. Unfortunately, some of them will be one and the same like Verizon and AT&T.

[Robotron2k84]

If you have only so-so fiber providers and only one or two choices, don't get your hopes up about 5G.

There is a huge disconnect in the next rev of cell technology. To date all cell service has hovered around the 800-1.4GHz spectrum. This has had a normalizing effect on tower construction, placement and backhauls. With 4G there might be extra capacity in the backhauls, but trenching more fiber gets expensive. Tower addition is already too slow.

Now, 5G is going to make that problem at least 3x worse: the 13-15GHz spectrum that 5G will run on requires towers to be 3-5 times as dense for the same number of subscribers per sq mi. Couple that with the increased speeds and it will require a massive addition of fiber backhauls to enable the service. As said at the top: if there are few fiber players in your area, don't look to the TelCos to ramp this up: it's probably too cost prohibitive.

In that case, the towers will remain at 4G-speeds for the foreseeable future.

.02

[Cokebottle]

I've had great luck with Spectrum. Only a couple of short outages that were resolved before I got off the phone with them.

Similar experience with Frontier (I was on DSL).
I canceled service, since it was just after I had paid my bill, I had a positive balance.
They issued the refund on the 3rd billing cycle after I canceled.
Funny... it didn't take them 3 months to take it out of my account.

[Cokebottle]

Couple that with the increased speeds and it will require a massive addition of fiber backhauls to enable the service.

Yes and no.

They have not invented a transceiver that can push more data over a strand of SMFO than it is capable of handling.
The issue is the connection hardware being limited to 100 gigabit.

[Robotron2k84]

^ The throughput of fiber is entirely dependent on the optical property and spectral absorption of the media. Many types of fiber can be multiplexed via frequency, and single mode via polarization angle, and photon amplitude, but the fiber already in the ground is biased towards only a few frequencies, making multiplexing only ideal over shorter distances where attenuation is not excessive.

If not multiplexed, then it's simply a serial connection and only as good as the speed of the xcver.

Femtosecond pulses, however are probably the limit to serial photonic communications, as the light interacts with the atoms of the media at pulse widths smaller than 10e-15.

There are 5G specifications that only backhaul to 4G infrastructure and utilize MIMO and low-band to aggregate speed. That seems to be the other direction from what Verizon and AT&T have suggested they will build: mid-frequency from 3.6 GHz. At this frequency, MIMO is a requirement for the 500 Mb/s targets of 5G service. That will split the number of new towers down by a factor of 2 or so, but then each tower can only handle 1/2 to 1/3 of the traffic at full data rates, leading back to the problem of backhaul utilization.

It's an interesting thing to watch in the US as the same distance-related infrastructure challenges keep rearing their heads. In major cities this won't be much of an issue, but I don't expect much 5G penetration beyond city cores for twenty years or more. Even if towers are running 5G radios, they will have to restrict users speeds without sufficient pipe to the rest of the network.

[the86d]

I tried Spectrum.

Buffering multiple times in the middle of EVERY EVEN SD Youtube videos show how terrible their service was, for me, even AFTER trying even switching to my prior Asus router, it was their service...
THIS WAS ON A CAT5 "WIRED" CONNECTION, direct to their router, then later tried the same wired pipe to mine at their recommendation (using their modem as only a bridge, and the SmartTV is wired), same issue.

Check how many programs you can record at the same time with a Spectrum/Time Warner box, it was less than any other DVR, from any other provider.

Spectrum was worse than old DSL, and Spectrum Internet didn't last 5 days being used in my house, and after calling multiple times to have it fixed, AND then having them switch to using my router that never had issues on FiOS, I happened to have a day off in the middle of the week, and consolidated that day to return they equipment. They sent a Check for the refund, and it was only HALF of the money-back guarantee they stated when signing up. Called and complained about only getting 1/2 the refund, and about a month after canceling I got the rest of the refund.

I don't have time to take more days off work for them to come out and troubleshoot, when I took one off just to get it installed, so I am sticking with FiOS for now. Luckily I knew enough to be able to switch back to FiOS cables on my own... but I feel for the people who don't.

I hit my home rigs from work about every day, and with FiOS it has always been reliable.

[wpage]

We switched back and forth from Fios to comcast to take advantage of intro offers. They all have glitches.

[Pofoo]

I've had great luck with Spectrum. Only a couple of short outages that were resolved before I got off the phone with them.

Similar experience with Frontier (I was on DSL).
I canceled service, since it was just after I had paid my bill, I had a positive balance.
They issued the refund on the 3rd billing cycle after I canceled.
Funny... it didn't take them 3 months to take it out of my account.

Pretty close to my experience. During the change, I was without home phone service for about 3 weeks. Frontier out and out lied about fixing the problem. They even went so far as to schedule a repairman to come to my house. Never showed up. I found out later that they didn't even have repair technicians available and did not (legitimately) make home visit appointments.
Eventually, 3 wks later, when my name came to the top of the list, a technician contacted me on my cell phone, and then did a software change that restored my service. It took about 10 minutes.
So, Frontier bought or was sold a incomplete package. Rather than acknowledge their problems and tell us that they would fix it eventually, they just lied, lied, lied.
Spectrum service has been 100% so far. Pricy, but it works.

[hermosabeach]

Friend had frontier go out.
They no showed for the appointment.
Then showed up the next day... no one was home.

We called spectrum... everything was switched- faster speed - less money

[The War Wagon]

Glad I still got Fios Quantum here in da' 'BURGH.

[Abu Riyah]

So....I went in to the office today and was just about home this afternoon when I got a call on my cell phone while driving. The guy says that he is a technician with Frontier and he'll be at my house in 10 minutes. I asked him what was going on and told quickly that I had cancelled my service already because they told me no one could come out until the 30th.

Anyway, I told him that he's welcome to work on it and if he can get it back up and we can cancel my disconnect order, I'll be a happy camper. He gets there five minutes after I do and is super nice. He told me that he and the other techs working today already cleared all their assigned tickets and were just going into the queue and pulling more so they'd have work for the rest of the day.

I told him all the testing I did on my own and what the phone people did made me think everything is okay with the equipment at the house and I'm just not getting the WAN connection from the fiber though the actual fiber looks fine from the pole to the house. He agreed, found that I was getting nothing over the fiber to the house, so he put his test gear on the end of the fiber at the house and took off to go to the distro point at the end of the block.

He came back, reconnected the fiber into the ONT ( the optical network terminal) where it gives me the Ethernet connection into the house and asked me to check it. It was up and working. He said that my fiber had been connected to the wrong port at he distro point and had been ever since it was put in...some recent new install or service change killed my line.

He told me that he could not see that the disconnect order had ever been entered into the system, but said I should call customer service tomorrow to be sure they don't turn me off. I'll be calling Spectrum too to cancel the new install from them. Despite everything, I'm happy because I enjoy having 170 mbps upstream speeds and the 150 mbps down is just fine too.

All's well that ends well, but their phone support/field support/dispatch communication really needs work. I'm still surprised that there was zero attempt to retain me as a customer when they were losing an 8 1/2 year customer due to their inability to respond to an outage in an acceptable time frame. No one would accept their electricity being out for a week or more with no one coming to fix it.

[Marauder2003]

Are you aware of the Frontier forum?

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/frontiernet

Plus the direct forum where you can communicate privately with Frontier directly

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/frontierdirect

So....I went in to the office today and was just about home this afternoon when I got a call on my cell phone while driving. The guy says that he is a technician with Frontier and he'll be at my house in 10 minutes. I asked him what was going on and told quickly that I had cancelled my service already because they told me no one could come out until the 30th.

Anyway, I told him that he's welcome to work on it and if he can get it back up and we can cancel my disconnect order, I'll be a happy camper. He gets there five minutes after I do and is super nice. He told me that he and the other techs working today already cleared all their assigned tickets and were just going into the queue and pulling more so they'd have work for the rest of the day.

I told him all the testing I did on my own and what the phone people did made me think everything is okay with the equipment at the house and I'm just not getting the WAN connection from the fiber though the actual fiber looks fine from the pole to the house. He agreed, found that I was getting nothing over the fiber to the house, so he put his test gear on the end of the fiber at the house and took off to go to the distro point at the end of the block.

He came back, reconnected the fiber into the ONT ( the optical network terminal) where it gives me the Ethernet connection into the house and asked me to check it. It was up and working. He said that my fiber had been connected to the wrong port at he distro point and had been ever since it was put in...some recent new install or service change killed my line.

He told me that he could not see that the disconnect order had ever been entered into the system, but said I should call customer service tomorrow to be sure they don't turn me off. I'll be calling Spectrum too to cancel the new install from them. Despite everything, I'm happy because I enjoy having 170 mbps upstream speeds and the 150 mbps down is just fine too.

All's well that ends well, but their phone support/field support/dispatch communication really needs work. I'm still surprised that there was zero attempt to retain me as a customer when they were losing an 8 1/2 year customer due to their inability to respond to an outage in an acceptable time frame. No one would accept their electricity being out for a week or more with no one coming to fix it.

[ac398]

Its crazy to think in this day and age somehow the companies think its ok to tell you to live without internet for a week. Sounds like you got lucky