Goodbye Comcast, Hello Google Fiber

A couple of months ago I had construction trucks in my neighborhood laying down Google Fiber. They told us it wouldn't take long before the service would be available and we all assumed 6 months to a year. Then a few weeks ago, I got a card in the mail saying it was ready for installation, should I be interested. I was and so I scheduled an appointment for them to bring it into my house.

A week before the scheduled installation, a worker showed up and dug a shallow ditch in my front yard so he could lay the cable up to my house. While it was the easiest path for him, I would have preferred the fiber-optic cable enter my house on the other side. They would have moved the box on the outside of the house if I put in a change request. Instead, I came up with a better solution and brought the line into part of my unfinished basement. They can run 250 feet of fiber optic cable without any problems and that allows for a lot of flexibility.

One nice thing about fiber optics is that you can run it next to electrical wires and there won't be any interference or signal loss. That made it very easy to snake the cable through the truss beams in my basement and bring the access point all the way to my office where we set up a WiFi access point. Google then set up another access point in the family room.

Both Comcast and Google claim to be providing Gigabit speeds and so the service should be the same. Unfortunately my first speed test with Google Fiber came back 10 times faster than Comcast. I am not sure why the speeds differ that much for the same service but I have a few ideas. Unfortunately it would be speculation so let's just assume that not having to worry about electrical wiring solves a lot of problems when it comes to Internet speeds.

So what caused me to switch Internet service providers in the first place? It boils down to the price I was paying and the notoriously poor customer support from Comcast. I'm saving myself $22 per month in costs and Google showed up within 6 minutes of when they said they would. Comcast gives something like a 4-hour window of when they will show up at your house. Now I hope I don't need to rely on that customer service ever again but it is nice to know it is there if I need it. I'm very happy with the switch and Comcast lost a 25-year customer.

The Internet is Down

This week I have changed my regular routine and am flying to California on Tuesday instead of Monday. That is because I will be flying home on Friday so I can attend my company's winter hackathon. That means I spent Monday working from home instead of being at the office. Things were going well and I got a lot done until all of a sudden the Internet stopped working. I had a virtual private network (VPN) into my office and it immediately told me about the problem. Then I checked on my personal computer, which is not connected to the VPN and it had a problem too.

Having my home Internet down really cut into my immediate productivity. Rather than worry about troubleshooting the problem, I just turned my work phone into an Internet hotspot and kept working. Unfortunately that meant the rest of the house still couldn't use the Internet but I was the only one home and so it didn't matter. When my wife got home from work, I let her know that we had a problem and she remarked that we had a Comcast truck in the neighborhood and he must be working on it.

I headed up to dinner and we still didn't have an Internet connection. At this point I felt an obligation to troubleshoot the problem as it was irresponsible to head to California without fixing the issue. The first thing I checked was to make sure our signal booster had power. Not all Internet connections require a signal boosters but ours does (thanks Comcast). A tripped circuit breaker has caused problems in the past. Then I reset the cable modem. That didn't change anything. Ultimately I just needed to wait for the Comcast technician to finish his work as that really turned out to be the problem.

Sometimes there is nothing that you can do when your Internet is not working. You should be proactive about solving the problem though. One more thing I could have done is to call my Internet service provider and asked about an outage in the area. If you do end up calling and a technician comes out, don't be surprised if you get charged for the service call should it be determined that you are at fault.