View from the Mountain

A New Router, Just What The Geek Ordered

The Internet and I got to be friends almost 30 years ago and as I wrote in the article, Connecting Electronically Wasn’t Always So Easy, my Internet speeds and connectivity have struggled to keep up with my business needs. 

In the fall of 2013, I was getting 22.51 Mbps down and 5.26 Mbps up. By 2020, the best cable service I could get managed 481 Mbps down and 22.8 Mbps up.

That might look fast but those highly asymmetric cable speeds just did not allow for easy, consistent video conferencing or the quick transfer of very large files to and from the cloud. Those two things define my business life.

Fortunately a move to a not so remote area and buying a new home in a subdivision with fiber (which I like to call a Fiberhood) changed everything. Having symmetrical fiber made a huge difference in what I can do from my home desk.

We got  our symmetrical 500 Mbps service the day after we moved in the house. We never even bothered to sign up for cable at our new house  but we have gotten very good at streaming so television has not been a problem. An inexpensive VOIP service gave us another phone line besides our smartphones.

However, technology marches on and as I got more bandwidth, I wondered if I would notice even faster speeds as we seem to be generating ever larger reports- a recent one was 139.6 MB.  I happened to find out that my service provider (I am not on a network with any involvement from our company, WideOpen Networks) had lowered their pricing.  I called and found out that I could could get symmetric Gig service for less than I had been paying for symmetric 500 Mbps service - which proves there is nothing like competition to drive down prices.

I quickly signed up for symmetric Gig service and within a couple of days I was disappointed with the speeds that I was getting.  This is not my first time around the Internet block and I have a good idea of what speeds the networks that we build deliver.  I had been getting close to 480 Mbps up and down with my 500 Mbps hard-wired connection via our Gig Ethernet switch.  With my new Gig services, my hard-wired speeds were rarely above 680 Mbps up and down. I called customer service and got the  suggestion that it was just overhead from my network. She told me switching to a different router would have little impact.

Luckily, I have a son who is a system administrator and network architect.  I called him and he explained to me that the advice of a few years ago to buy your own router was outdated.  He said new inexpensive chips allow fiber service providers to lease to customers excellent high-end routers that are more than capable of providing great speeds and reliability for home users.

I was initially skeptical since my very reliable Google router with mesh network was only two or three years old, but I did some research.  I found out that my provider was using Calix Gigasphere routers which I knew were on the short list for ones that we are planning on offering for own WideOpen Networks’ customers.

That sealed the deal.  I called up and arranged to get one of the Calix routers. A few days later the technician arrived and just as I hope our technicians are, he was even five minutes early.  I had the name and password of my old WiFi network ready. That was important since we have twenty-five devices on our network, many of them wireless, ranging from my original Kindle Fire to our garage door opener.  The technician unplugged the old Google router and plugged in the new Calix one. I downloaded the CommandIQ app from the Google Play store to my smartphone, created a new account, logged into it, gave the new WiFi network the exact same name and password as the old one.  Next we tested the wired connection on one of my hard-wired computers.  Even at noon the speeds were a huge improvement.

Then I did wireless tests that mostly involved me running the network speed test on the Calix CommandIQ app in every room.  The wireless tested fine. Even better than the speeds, there seems to be no need for a mesh network.  All our devices worked fine, including our LG television, the iPads, the Chromebooks, all our Macs, Windows computers, even my Linux computer and the WiFi on both our smartphones. I did not get locked out because I still able to open our WiFi-enabled garage door using my smartphone.  Our speeds are now regularly in the high 800 Mbps even during busy times of the day.  In the not so busy times, we hit over 900 Mbps.

You can go crazy running speed tests especially if you are trying to do it wirelessly with computers and have no idea what kind of WiFi connectivity that the computer has. I easily ran over half a dozen different speed tests and never got the same result twice. As my son likes to say, at speeds of anything over 500 Mbps per second, there is either something between you and the test server impacting performance or the server cannot handle higher data rates. In any case with a new router it is more than likely something beyond your network keeping your from hitting over 900 Mbps.

Good advice is sometimes hard to come by but I think that I am safe in saying that if you have fiber and your speeds are not where they should be, maybe it is time to look at one of the routers supported by your service provider. If they are good fiber provider, you will likely be pleased with the results and there will be no pointing fingers at equipment since it came from the service provider.

My Theory of Soil

As I wrote in November 2021, there has been dirt on my hands for many years. I started serious gardening in the summer of 1972 on our farm in St. Croix, Nova Scotia.  It was grass pasture that we turned into a garden. It was plowed with my John Deere tractor and its three furrow plow. It was then harrowed, covered with old chicken manure. The next spring we tried beating it into submission with a tiller with front-mounted tines. It was a bone jarring experience.

We were young and strong so it still became a great garden. We grew so much broccoli that I am still traumatized if I eat broccoli more than once a week. We moved to New Brunswick where we raised cattle for ten years. Not only did we garden, I also planted twenty acres in oats most years. We did not harvest the oats as grain but green chopped them in the fall to extend the pasture season. The oats were a cover crop for reseeding an old field in grass and clover.

The garden spot that we inherited on the old farm in Brunswick had been used for quite a while so it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from our garden spot in Nova Scotia. It was also rocky, well-drained soil while the Nova Scotia soil was heavy clay once you got down over a foot.

If you a trying to grow new grass where mostly weeds and brush grew, you work the land hard. If you are trying to build up a worn out soil, you hardly work it.  What did do was apply as much rotted manure to the old garden as we could. We never plowed. We would use a disc harrow to work the composted manure into the soil.  Then I would till it in the spring before planting with my tiller that now had rear-mounted tines.  Towards the end of our time on the farm in 1984, the garden really did not need tilling.  The soil structure had been restored.  You could easily stir it with a three-tined digger. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about the rocks. As the old-timers were fond of saying, the most reliable crop in the area was rocks.

Since the farm we have lived and gardened on a mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. Next we did the same along the marshes at the North Carolina coast and finally here on ridge in the North Carolina Piedmont.

The recipe for good soil has always been the same, plenty of compost, mix it with the soil so the air, soil, compost, and moisture can do their thing.  This year our soil needed stirring, I used a broadfork to lift and break the soil a little. It was not turned over like with a plow. I figure three or four years of this and I will be able to stir it with my three-pronged digger. As for no till gardening, it can work if your soil is in good shape. As for no-till farming, I am all for the no-till not so much for all the chemicals.

How To Be A Sensible Streamer

Streaming your choice of video channels is what the future holds. I spend a good chunk of my day job looking at the prices of Internet services across the county.

I studied cable, DSL, and fiber services in dozens of counties and communities last year.  That along with my personal experience with prices and as an early streamer starting several years ago has helped our family to continue to save money after switching from cable and its expensive packages to fiber and streaming services.

The way we handle our streaming services is to keep them on a budget.  We budget $40 monthly for streaming services.  We are Amazon Prime members so I am not sure we would allocate the full $8.99 (stand-alone cost) for Prime video but as you will see, even when we do that, we are still well under budget.

Our four current services for a fee are Prime Video at $8.99 monthly, Paramount+ $5.99 monthly, Britbox $6.99 monthly, and PBS Masterpiece $5.99 monthly for a total of $32.96 for all our streaming services.  We also subscribe to the free version of Peacock.  I recently canceled Netflix and Acorn  while adding Masterpiece and Britbox.

We stream so much that it is easy to run out of new, watchable programs in two to three months.  I manage most of our channels on Amazon prime so it is easy to see them and the costs  all in one place. You also have the advantage of being able to snare some Amazon specials like HBO Maxx or Starx for $1.99 a month for two months.  You just have to remember to cancel them.  The picture at the top of the post is what you see in Amazon’s Video channels management console.

My studies across the country along the current Hulu and YouTube pricing I see tell me that about $70 a month will get you full range of video services.  So if you are paying $70 or more for your streaming services, you are not saving money and it is time to go on  a streaming budget. 

Adding Fiber To Your Life

Fiber connectivity can make a huge difference in your life. When we started planning our move, my first requirement was that we find a home with fiber connectivity. It was not a snap decision. My work career in technology will hit four decades in 2022, and all of those years have revolved around a home office. Recent changes in what is expected from home office workers have reinforced the lessons learned from years of trying to stay connected enough to do my job.

Like many people who have been on a cable modem for decades, my experience has been a roller-coaster with some very frustrating experiences. Our most recent home before the move was in a new subdivision serviced by a national cable company. By the time we moved in February 2021, our speeds had increased to 488 Mbps down and 24 Mbps up. Because of bundling our phone service also was delivered by cable modem. The numbers looked impressive on the surface.

However, with a job that involves clients in over twenty states and a home office over seven hours driving away from our corporate office, experience had taught me that I could still expect problems with video conferencing which had become critical to meeting the needs of our clients since the pandemic.

Video conferencing with our cable modem, even with the best speeds that my cable modem company could deliver, involved using both the phone and my computer to establish a video conference link. Other collaborative tools like Slack were not consistently reliable when making phone calls or sharing screens. Even worse, sharing files was anything but instant since many of the proposals I prepared often reached sizes that were unimaginable just a few years ago. I depended on tools like Box for sharing files and an unreliable Internet connection is a nightmare when sharing files or screens in real time.

When we got to the point of making an offer on a new home, we had two homes with fiber connectivity and one with DSL. We quickly discarded the DSL home and bought one of the fiber homes. Having a symmetric 500 Mbps fiber connection provided by our local telephone company has taken connectivity worries out of my life and office. Now when I am joining a video conference whether through Zoom, Teams, or GoToMeeting, all I do is click a link for crystal clear voice and video. I no longer tie up our home phone line for audio in what can only be described as often frustrating video conferences where my participation was often flaky because of connectivity problems.

My biggest worry beyond office connectivity in making the switch to fiber was my wife and how she would take to streaming. What we could get through streaming turned out to be far more flexible and entertaining than I expected. While my wife cannot see all of her favorite shows live, she has not had to give up any shows and and she has found a far broader choice of shows. We get local live television through Paramount+. We rotate through a number of streaming services, cancelling them sometimes for several months until their content has been refreshed. My wife who is somewhat reluctant with technology changes has learned how to stream the shows that she wants without help from me. 

In our previous home, our cable service had the most basic TV service, the best Internet, and nationwide phone service. It took constant vigilance and regular arguments with the cable company to keep our bills under $180 per month. By the time we moved, our efforts to stay within the $180 meant we not longer had PBS, and saw only a very few sports events. Even the Weather Channel had disappeared from our service.

In addition to the monthly expense, an average of once a month, I went through an often frustrating reset of my cable modem due to loss of connectivity. I also had to switch out my cable modem every few years. At least twice during those switches, I lost connectivity for a day or more due to problems getting the new modems configured.

I do not miss my cable bills or the headaches. I love our fiber connection.

Our current costs with symmetric 500 Mbps (which not everyone needs- we have 29 connected devices in our home), nationwide/Canadian VOIP telephone service and a monthly budget of $40 in rotating streaming services is $140. Every service that we have now is better than what we had before. The almost $500 in annual savings is certainly a welcome bonus. We experimented with streaming while we were on cable, and there is no doubt in my mind that streaming is far better with the fiber than what we had in our previous house. We just don't have buffering issues now. I have also found that a simple large battery backup allows me to run our fiber network during power outages. There have been NO connectivity battles and I have not even talked to our Internet service provider since I signed up for service ten months ago.

With all that and what fiber to the home can provide now and in the future, I do not see us ever buying another home without fiber.

David Sobotta is a VP and Senior Broadband Analyst with WideOpen Networks which is currently building fiber to the home in Blacksburg, Virginia. He and his wife live in a very rural subdivision in Davie County near Mocksville, NC.

Streaming is Like Self-Serve Fuel Pumps

Technology changes like ATMs and self-serve gas pumps arise not because they were designed to immediately make our lives easier. Technology change almost always puts more pressure initially on the end users than it does on the people deploying the changes. In the case of ATMs and gas pumps, a lot of people lost jobs. I suspect it took most people a while to get used to both changes and that does not include the people without jobs. I know it me a while to adjust.

It had been easy just to drive up to the gas pump and not worry about getting gasoline on my hands or clothes before a sales call. It was also easy (at least when the Cable was working) to spend years in the simple-minded world of cable TV. When we first started using cable TV, there was no cable Internet. We got our first Internet connection through a dial-up modem on a telephone line.

A number of years ago, I started streaming with a Roku box. Netflix was the first service we tried. Since those early years, I have used many streaming services and devices but we always could fall back on cable TV.

Then we moved in February 2021. As part of our move we cancelled our cable service on February 1. We never even made contact with a cable company when we moved. There was no need because we were relocating to a home with a great fiber Internet connection. We signed up for a 500 Mbps symmetric fiber Internet connection and went all in on streaming.

The world of streaming in not as easy as turning on the TV and changing channels with a flipper. However, it is not impossible even for those less technical than me.

The first thing you need to do is to buy a new smart TV unless you have bought one in the last year or two and have yet to be able to figure it out. It might well be all you to embrace streaming. The next step is to cancel your cable subscription at the end of the month. Going cold turkey is an important step. Otherwise you might fall back into what is easiest but not cheapest. Your Internet will likely cost you more once you stop “bundling” with the cable company but you will still end up saving money.

Unless you pick an all-encompassing streaming service like YouTube TV, your choices of streaming services should be viewed as more whim than long term commitment. With a couple exceptions, most of our streaming choices only last a few months.

One of the exceptions is Paramount+. Because we can get live local TV for the news, we have yet to cancel Paramount+. Other services, even Netflix stay on a rotating schedule. We subscribe when we hear something interesting is about to be broadcast. Sometimes we ignore a service for months.

The other exception is Amazon’s Prime video. It comes built into our Prime membership. One of the other tricks to streaming is that we manage many of the subscriptions through Amazon. Now it doesn’t always work because there are raging battles for position in the industry. I believe HBO Max and Prime just had a falling out. You cannot get Apple TV on Amazon Prime because Apple wants you to manage your subscriptions on their Apple TV hardware. However, if you do use Prime, you can sometimes find channels on sale. We have tried a couple for 99 cents per month.

Currently, we subscribe to Britbox, PBS Masterpiece, Acorn TV, Paramount+ and Apple TV. The average cost is $5.99 per month for a total $29.95. When added to our $84. 99 symmetric 500 Mbps Internet , our entertainment expense without telephone or Prime Video is $114.94. Prime membership costs us $119 a year and I feel comfortable allocating it the same $4.99 a month that I pay for Apple TV.

With that our entertainment costs are $119.98 monthly if you allocate all of the Internet costs to entertainment. However, I work from home and use the Internet for work at least three times as as much as I use it for watching TV. I could easily say my entertainment Internet cost is $21.99 a month and my business cost is $63. Using that logic, streaming services (Britbox, PBS Masterpiece, Acorn TV, Paramount+, Apple TV & Prime Video) cost $34.94 and Internet for them costs $21.99 for a total of $56.93 per month. If you throw in the full Internet, the services rise to total of $119.98 monthly.

A lot of people use their cell phones for home phones, but since we have fiber, we bought an Internet VOIP service. It costs us $12.67 monthly for unlimited calling to the US and Canada. It includes voicemail, fax, and a number of other features. The line is used almost exclusively for outbound business calls.

However, if you are looking to compare a complete triple play cable modem Internet, cable TV and phone system to ours, our total cost with all entertainment & Internet costs would be $119.98 plus $12.67 for a monthly total of $132.65.

There are three or four months out of the year when we watch Netflix now at $17.99 per month. However, we work to keep our streaming costs under $40 per month so we will pause two or three of the other services when we are using Netflix.

Before we moved our typical cable bill for Internet, phone, and as little TV as we could get was close to $180 per month in 2020. Even then we were still using Amazon Prime Video and some Netflix on top of that. Our costs for all of it was around $200 per month.

Conservatively, we are saving $65 a month from our previous bills. On top of it all we have better Internet service and our phone calls are crystal clear. I can also do multi-point video conferences straight from my computers. The saving are almost identical to the $65 a month we are saving on our two cell phones after we switched from Verizon to the Google FI service.

Our total communication charges are now less than $200 a month including cell phones. At one time it was over $330. We are saving over $1,500 a year.

Today we have a more flexible system. We often watch our local news on an iPad Pro on the kitchen table. You have to be smart about streaming and it takes some learning but with a little practice, you can watch a very wide variety of shows and save significant money. Just like ATMs and self-service gas pumps were in their day, streaming is the wave of the future. You can embrace it now or cling to the old ways until they practically disappear.

Our TV hardware includes the following, LG - 65” Class CX Series OLED 4K UHD with Smart webOS TV and a Fire TV Cube — 4K Ultra HD - 2019 release. The Fire TV cube is under $100 and allows you to control some of the TV with your voice. There are TVs with Fire TV/Alexa built-in. We tried the LG Web TV interface but preferred the Fire TV interface that we were already using on another older TV. You can buy less expensive Fire TV devices. I am not sure how they compare. There is no exact way to put all this together and when you sign into the services make sure that you keep your passwords straight. I guarantee you will need them especially when you start turning services off and trying new ones.

Connecting Electronically Wasn't Always So Easy

Many of you do not remember the days before the Internet was always on and always with us. However, people did communicate electronically before the Internet but it was done with proprietary systems that had limited access. I worked for Apple in the eighties. At the time we communicated with a computer via modem to the mainframe. We ran a terminal session on the mainframe to get our mail.

We eventually migrated to a sophisticated mainframe communications system called AppleLink. It had a wonderful graphical user interface and some great features like the ability to unsend an email. However, you had to have some connection to Apple to have an account. There was no communicating with other companies or people. You also connected to it with a modem. There were places all over the country where we could dial in with a local phone call.

The first services that allowed noncorporate people to communicate were Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). A BBS is a computer server running software that allowed users to connect. My children who are in their forties began their online lives in AOL chat rooms and with BBSs.

Around 1993 Apple first started making use of the Internet. First, it was just a bridge from AppleLink and then we moved to pure Internet mail. I even used Eudora for a while. One of Apple's current Mac product managers worked for me at that time as a system engineer. He was convinced to move to Blacksburg because we were able to get him two Ethernet connections to the Internet in his Blacksburg apartment. It was something that he could not get even in Cupertino at the time.

However, most of us were stuck with modems at the time. When I built my home office, I put three phone lines in it. One was only used for a modem. For a while, I used just modems which got faster over time, then we moved to a dual system that had a line of sight antenna on the roof to Tinker Mountain with a coax cable/modem for downloads and was paired with a phone line and a standard modem for uploads. Then I went to DSL via phone line and a cable modem with Internet connectivity in our Roanoke home. While I had both for a while, neither was very reliable or fast. Eventually, cable modems improved much more than DSL and I dropped my DSL line.  The cable modem was still a hassle with a period of two or three months once until we found where the copper line had corroded.

Getting the Internet through a cable modem still was not a complete solution. We were lucky. Early on we had networked the house with Apple's LocalTalk cabling so everyone could print. Not long after getting on the Internet, we switched out our wiring for Ethernet. Wireless home networking was not introduced by Apple until July 1999 when they rolled out Airport cards and the Airport base station.

Getting to the Internet when traveling also presented a lot of problems before wireless became pervasive. Until 1991 when Apple introduced its first laptops, we lugged some pretty heavy computers like the original Macs into hotel rooms just to get our mail. I had a Mac SE/30 that I used for a couple of years. With its keyboard, an external modem, and carrying case, it weighed over 20 pounds. Fortunately, laptops, in Apple's case the Powerbooks, that were lighter and better for travel came along just about when the Internet started getting really popular.

Probably the most interesting product that I ever accessed the Internet with was a Newton 2000 (pictured at the top). I was using a Newton when Steve Jobs announced the first iMacs which were marketed as being the easiest computer to connect to the Internet. That's its internal modem card pictured at the bottom left.

In 2013. when I wrote an article for ReadWrite Web about how slow and expensive US Internet connectivity was, my Internet cable modem connection was 22.51 Mbps down and 5.26 Mbps up. In 2020, I had 481 Mbps down and 22.8 Mbps up. That is a download to upload ratio of twenty-one to one. Cable companies assume that I want to download more stuff than I want to upload. That is often not the case with someone like me who works from home and handles a lot of large files.

I still do not have the kind of connectivity that I need to do everything that I would like from home via the Internet. My connectivity has struggled to keep up with my business needs. Obviously, it is a lot easier to get on the Internet with Smartphones, WiFi, and easier to set up cable modems. It is still not plug-and-play as we all dreamed about years ago. However, we are getting a lot closer. My next move will be to a fiber neighborhood (a Fiberhood), I might just get to see the future and just plug an Ethernet cable in to be connected.

Update: 2021 We did move and found a Fiberhood in Davie County, North Carolina. Read about it in this post, Adding Fiber to Your Life.