A year ago, alert reader “06880” – and Westport MakerFaire mastermind Mark Mathias – emailed us about Altice/Optimum’s latest offering: fiber for the home, with 1 GB internet access.
Mathias had it installed. He ditched all other services – including broadcast and cable TV channels – to buy only internet service.
It got symmetric 1GB (same upload and download speeds) for $79 per month. This introductory price included equipment, taxes and more.
Its speeds are “generally very fast”. Here’s a test from the other morning:
Typical wire speeds are 300 Mbps down and 50 Mbps up, Mathias says.
“Why is this important? ” he asks.
He answers his own question: “Most people use Netflix, Disney+ or similar services. Higher resolutions, such as 4K, require more bits to create an image. If multiple people in a home or office are consuming this high-bandwidth digital content, fast internet speeds are needed.
“But what I love are the increased download speeds. Where it used to take hours to back up to a cloud service like Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive, it now takes minutes. Posting video content to YouTube, Vimeo or something similar is also much faster.”
Still, Mathias thinks $79 per month is too high. He found 2 other companies “claiming to offer home fiber optic internet service“.
GoNetSpeed is new to the area and is rolling out fiber to nearby towns.
Frontier also advertises fiber internet speeds of up to 2 Gbps. However, Mathias says they cannot give him an availability date.
“The good news is that real high-speed internet is currently available in Westport,” he said.
“Hopefully the competition for our business won’t be far behind.”
