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Switching from Cable to Fiber internet

A

ASecondChance

Junior Member
Hello, could someone explain to me if its worth to switch from a 5mb residential cable connection to lets say 2mb fiber one?

when im downloading from a 1mb cable internet it will download @120kb/s and from what understood from 1mb fiber one ill get 1mb/1mb?
please some help to understand this would be appreciated (in the simplest possible way)
 
1mb/s is 100kBytes/s. A 2mb/s fiber connection (that's one slow fiber connection) will download around 220kBytes/s. My fiber is around 80mb/s so you may want to see if they have faster speeds.
 
Bandwidth is bandwidth, switching from one technology to a different one doesn't just change bandwidth. I'm also not sure why you mention 5mb residential and then refer to 1mb. Do you have 5mb or 1mb? Please give us the companies that you are considering and what company you currently have and what location you're in, then maybe someone with experience can chime in.

Here are some other things to consider
1) Make sure you understand the difference between kb/s and kB/s or Mb/s and MB/s. Lowercase b is bits. Capital B is bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte. So a 1Mb/s connection is the same as a 125kB/s connection. Most ISP's will advertise their speed in bits, most file downloads are reported in bytes.

2) Different technologies may have different latencies. If you image the internet like a highway, the bandwidth is the amount of cars that traverse a given section per second, however the latency is the amount of time it takes for a single car to get from point A to point B on the highway and back again. For most ISP's, this probably won't have a big impact. However, if you have some extremely time sensitive application (for example, if you're a hardcore twitch based gamer) you may want to research general latencies for different providers. ATT ADSL and comcast cable typically have 10ms-20ms latencies to their nearest servers. ATT Uverse typically has 30-60ms.
For web browsing, streaming video, downloading files, etc, this has very little effect unless you get some ISP with higher then 100ms general latencies. Generally this speed is not advertized by ISP's, so if this is important to you then you will have to do some digging.

3)ISP's don't advertise the speed you guaranteed for residential internet, they're just a ballpark. With ATT dsl i was on their 3Mb/s plan, but I usually got about 2.4Mb/s. With comcast I'm on their 6Mb/s plan, but i get anywhere between 6Mb/s upto 10Mb/s.

4) ISP's will provide both a download and an upload speed. THe download is the bandwidth that packets have to get to your house from the internet, the upload is the bandwidth that packets have to leave your house to get to the internet. For most people upload isn't as important as download, because they usually aren't hosting files or websites, however it is something to consider depending on your applications. Typically these two different seeds are separated by a slash, like download/upload = 6Mbps/1Mbps, sometimes it's not advertised
 
kevnich2 said:
1mb/s is 100kBytes/s. A 2mb/s fiber connection (that's one slow fiber connection) will download around 220kBytes/s. My fiber is around 80mb/s so you may want to see if they have faster speeds.
Click to expand...

serpretetsky said:
Bandwidth is bandwidth, switching from one technology to a different one doesn't just change bandwidth. I'm also not sure why you mention 5mb residential and then refer to 1mb. Do you have 5mb or 1mb? Please give us the companies that you are considering and what company you currently have and what location you're in, then maybe someone with experience can chime in.

Here are some other things to consider
1) Make sure you understand the difference between kb/s and kB/s or Mb/s and MB/s. Lowercase b is bits. Capital B is bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte. So a 1Mb/s connection is the same as a 125kB/s connection. Most ISP's will advertise their speed in bits, most file downloads are reported in bytes.

2) Different technologies may have different latencies. If you image the internet like a highway, the bandwidth is the amount of cars that traverse a given section per second, however the latency is the amount of time it takes for a single car to get from point A to point B on the highway and back again. For most ISP's, this probably won't have a big impact. However, if you have some extremely time sensitive application (for example, if you're a hardcore twitch based gamer) you may want to research general latencies for different providers. ATT ADSL and comcast cable typically have 10ms-20ms latencies to their nearest servers. ATT Uverse typically has 30-60ms.
For web browsing, streaming video, downloading files, etc, this has very little effect unless you get some ISP with higher then 100ms general latencies. Generally this speed is not advertized by ISP's, so if this is important to you then you will have to do some digging.

3)ISP's don't advertise the speed you guaranteed for residential internet, they're just a ballpark. With ATT dsl i was on their 3Mb/s plan, but I usually got about 2.4Mb/s. With comcast I'm on their 6Mb/s plan, but i get anywhere between 6Mb/s upto 10Mb/s.

4) ISP's will provide both a download and an upload speed. THe download is the bandwidth that packets have to get to your house from the internet, the upload is the bandwidth that packets have to leave your house to get to the internet. For most people upload isn't as important as download, because they usually aren't hosting files or websites, however it is something to consider depending on your applications. Typically these two different seeds are separated by a slash, like download/upload = 6Mbps/1Mbps, sometimes it's not advertised
Click to expand...

oh man i was so wrong, thank you very much.

i just had this idea that fiber was full speed they meant when they said 1mb speeds etc

again thank you very much
 
ASecondChance said:
Hello, could someone explain to me if its worth to switch from a 5mb residential cable connection to lets say 2mb fiber one?

when im downloading from a 1mb cable internet it will download @120kb/s and from what understood from 1mb fiber one ill get 1mb/1mb?
please some help to understand this would be appreciated (in the simplest possible way)
Click to expand...


I never seen such a low speed for fiber, maybe you are confused.

1Mb/s versus 1MB/s

1 Megabits per second versus 1 MegaByte per second

1MB/s is roughly 8Mb/s, the math makes my head spin too much to do to get precisely so.. estimates are us.

But no matter what you can download at from the ISP, the slowest or weakest link is always going to be the ultimate determination of your speed, IE lets say the upload server can only do 120Kb/s then no matter what speed you download at above 120Kb/s your only going to get data from that server at 120Kb/s the end. Unless you download speed is slower than their upload speed, increasing your download speed will have no effect for that server.
 
Last edited:
"Bandwidth is bandwidth, switching from one technology to a different one doesn't just change bandwidth."

*Some technologies have actual bandwidths closer to their theoretical bandwidths than others, eg 1.2gbps 802.11ac is not faster than gigabit ethernet, a guaranteed 1.5mbps T1 is faster than a residential "1.5mbps under best conditions" connection. These don't really apply here though.
/pedantic
 
Cabletek said:
I never seen such a low speed for fiber, maybe you are confused.

1Mb/s versus 1MB/s

1 Megabits per second versus 1 MegaByte per second

1MB/s is roughly 8Mb/s, the math makes my head spin too much to do to get precisely so.. estimates are us.

But no matter what you can download at from the ISP, the slowest or weakest link is always going to be the ultimate determination of your speed, IE lets say the upload server can only do 120Kb/s then no matter what speed you download at above 120Kb/s your only going to get data from that server at 120Kb/s the end. Unless you download speed is slower than their upload speed, increasing your download speed will have no effect for that server.
Click to expand...

lagokc said:
"Bandwidth is bandwidth, switching from one technology to a different one doesn't just change bandwidth."

*Some technologies have actual bandwidths closer to their theoretical bandwidths than others, eg 1.2gbps 802.11ac is not faster than gigabit ethernet, a guaranteed 1.5mbps T1 is faster than a residential "1.5mbps under best conditions" connection. These don't really apply here though.
/pedantic
Click to expand...

hmmm i honestly thought that when they uppercased the "b" was just for it too look better haha....
and bandwidth doesnt change even if you change the technology , got it

thanks for the replies , everything is clear now.. i just had a very vague notion of this subject
 
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