Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2025 21:36 Post subject: Hehe; Cable is faster than Fiber
In my area cable was king for the past several decades, having changed companies three times from cox-internet to suddenlink to optimum. They were all different flavors of shit, but suddenlink brought DOCSIS 3.0 gigabit cable a few years back.
Since then, a new player has jointed the neighborhood: fiber. Ooooooo fiber!
ALL the neighbors switched to fiber, myself included, however the cable company convinced me to keep my current flavor of cable internet for the time being.
Bandwidth-wise, for downloads, there wasn't much difference between them. Upload, fiber raped cable in the ass: 35 mbit vs ~930 mbit.
I ran both for a while; my cable provider insisted they couldn't unbundle me and instead put some stupid (temporary) discount. I was running fiber as my main ISP on my network for a while, but occasionally I'd get network outages having to do with the WAN DHCP not providing an IP in any reasonable amount of time, and I would switch back to cable.
Well sonofabitch: the cable was faster in day-to-day tasks, and not just by a little bit. I think the local fiber ISP is especially shitty: they expanded too quickly, and didn't invest in the necessary network/switch/whatever infrastructure. Cable on the other hand has all the infrastructure for the neighborhood, but I'm just about the only user. (The Fiber company says I'm the last person on the street without fiber). I've got their whole network architecture for myself. The responsiveness of requests was faster on cable, page load times faster, packet handling and UDP streaming less stuttery.
This won't be universally true, in fact my area could be the exception. What's especially interesting: I found no quantifiable test to demonstrate this; you're going to have to take my word for it. That said, on cable now, I've found myself almost smiling to myself at the speed with which web pages load.
So there: cable beats fiber lol _________________ Google is Spyware
As you might now, Coaxial/Docsis X is a shared medium.
People share their bandwidth. If all tones are busy, there isn't much to do, except splitting the outmaxed trees into several smaller segments.
As many customers switched to fiber, more capacity is free to use.
Similar can be encountered on fiber.
If your ISP uses GPON (max 1.2Gbit/s up, 2.4 down) or XGSPON (~10Gbit/s down, 2.4Gbit/s up) and decides to cheap out there, too --> the line is satuated with customers and no one gets what was paid for. Passive splitters split one line towards multiple customers, this ends in slow speed for everyone fast.
I never saw any bandwidth limitations directly, but did see a packet handling and packet request handling difference. _________________ Google is Spyware
Joined: 14 Dec 2015 Posts: 777 Location: 127.0.0.1
Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2025 7:57 Post subject:
Nice to have options,
Back when cable first came around our area, I was working for a company that contracted out to Time Warner. Down was 5 mb, up was around 500 Kb. This was before DOCSIS.
When they rolled out fiber (Verizon), we were all like whooo hooo!
Well, they stopped it just 30 miles from us. Even though between their end and here, there are two medium sized cities.
So. Only thing around here is now Spectrum, 2 years ago they started offering Gb speed. That is 1 Gb down, 40 Mb up.....
That is where we are now, except you go an hour west of here, they got to test the new 1 Gb up... So now its out of testing, still not here, and there they pay 50 bucks less a month than we do.
So we are stuck with them, unless you want satellite, or 5G home internet..
Just one last story, as I and all the other techs were doing installs one day, we were talking on Motorola cellphone/walkie talkie with the same problem. I sat and thought why would all of us be having this problem?
Then I had a thought, I called the direct number to Level 3 support. I said get me Greg. He said what's up? I said all of us are unable to get an IP. Are you guys out of addresses?
He goes uhh, one minute. OH SHIT! He said you are right I gotta make a call to buy more, tell the customers it will work within an hour. Plus why aren't you working for us directly???? _________________ Tutorial for flashing WRT series WRT Installation,Upgrade & Basic Setup–Cliff Notes
r62606: WRT3200ACM (No wireless)
r59045: WRT1900ACv1 AP
r62192: WRT1200ACv1 IoT subnet
Random things turned into AP's
Spectrum - 1000/50 (B/S for now)
Security Onion IDS, Fingboxes, PiHoles, NEMS, Cacti, rpisurv
Fiber *should* be full duplex, but it's not in a lot of cases. It may be a single sheathed cable pair for fiber. I've never seen fiber optic anything use a single "conductor", not even fiber optic LAN.
Get with the times, LOL you can buy BiDi SFP's off Amazon for under $20
BiDi is getting very common in city cabling plants because the carriers are running out of fiber pairs and they don't want to pull new fiber bundles with more pairs.
The same issue can also exist in company network cable plants. I'm doing a brand new building for example where they have 2 wiring closets and ran glass between them and then lit up 3 pairs, 6 strands. Plenty of glass, right? Uh, no. The security camera people ended up needing a pair, I used a pair, the landlord used a pair for the building systems network. (hvac, lighting controllers, irrigation, etc.) The guy who pulled the glass could have terminated more pairs out of the bundle but didn't think we would need all that glass, and that costs money and he left them unterminated "for the future" Well, one of these days if someone else comes along that needs fiber between the closets - do you think they will lay out $40 for 2 pairs of BiDi SFPs or $500 for a fiber splicer to come back and terminate the dark glass?
Joined: 08 May 2018 Posts: 16695 Location: Texas, USA
Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2025 13:24 Post subject:
I don't think you were inside my head to read the full context of my comment, to be frank. And quite honestly, anyone that is running glass inside a building for more than appliance to appliance connections within a rack itself is wasting money simply because glass is more susceptible to damage due to ambient vibration over time. Why they installed fiber runs on ships, I have no idea, but it's just asking for problems that aren't related to EMP. _________________ "Life is but a fleeting moment, a vapor that vanishes quickly; All is vanity"
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anyone that is running glass inside a building for more than appliance to appliance connections within a rack itself is wasting money simply because glass is more susceptible to damage due to ambient vibration over time. Why they installed fiber runs on ships, I have no idea, but it's just asking for problems that aren't related to EMP.
fiber is run due to exceeding Ethernet distance limitations. Copper Ethernet runs may not exceed 100 meters, including the patch cables at each ends of the run, or the signal starts to degrade. Fiber OTOH has much further distance limits. OM4 multimode which is the most common run in buildings these days, can go 550 meters for 10Bgt. Singlemode can go a couple of kilometers
Typically in racks 10Gbt copper ethernet is used to connect switches together.
They make armored fiber ruggedized for high vibration environments. That's probably what is used on ships.
In buildings it's not so much the vertical distance that's the problem as the horizontal distance. You can easily exceed the limit in a building that occupies a city block.
Also, precut and preterminated fiber lengths are comparable in cost to copper. A 1000 ft spool of cat6 is around $100 nowadays, a 300 ft preterminated fiber spool is about $50.
There's also a huge amount of misinformation about distance limits of Ethernet even within the industry. For example a month ago I had a wiring contractor do a building run that was around 50 feet long and he asked if I wanted to run fiber. I was like "it's only around 50 feet" and he mumbled something about distance. I realized he must have been confusing 100 meters with 100 feet and but kindly said nothing. (It was kind of a nasty filthy dirty run after all)
