A Bit of an Internet Upgrade

Did a bit of an internet upgrade.

I noticed when we moved into this house in December that 5 Gbps fiber internet was available. But I don’t keep up on the latest consumer networking gear, and I thought that to use it you’d need fiber runs in the house to every device you wanted to have access to that much bandwidth.

Since this is an older house, I didn’t want to go to all that trouble, so we went with normal 1 Gbps fiber and an Eero mesh wireless network. It worked fine—no problems except for a few multi-day outages that seemed to be caused by AT&T equipment somewhere else.

But I’ve since learned that 10 Gbps networking is now possible over regular copper-based Ethernet, and the equipment is pretty cheap. A 10 Gbps NIC for a normal PC is under $100, and the same goes for a 10 Gbps USB-C Ethernet adapter for a Mac.

And the latest Eero Max 7 mesh wireless system can do up to 4.3 Gbps. Nice.

So I had AT&T come out on Monday to do the upgrade. The tech installed all the equipment but couldn’t get the fiber to register. Eventually, at 5 p.m., he gave up and left us with no internet, saying someone should be by in the morning to finish up.

The next morning, no one arrived. When I called, they said the tech had completed all his work and connected me with some AI that tried to walk me through resetting the router and all that. Knowing that wasn’t the problem, I had to schedule another appointment, and that tech arrived this morning.

This tech seemed better trained, but it still took him several hours to find the problem.

When we bought the house, the fiber was already installed, so we have no idea when it was done. But the tech this morning found a tightly coiled run of excess fiber in our crawl space. One thing you can’t do with fiber is make sharp bends. He was surprised it worked with our previous 1 Gbps service. But the 5 Gbps service uses a different wavelength, and it apparently couldn’t deal with the tight bends in the line. He ran new fiber, and we were suddenly in business.

A quick test plugged directly into the router showed just over 5 Gbps, so we were good.

After I got home from work, I installed the new Eero Max 7 stuff. I got two units: one for the base and another for my office. The previous 6E units still work with the mesh network and provide lower bandwidth—but still up to 2.5 Gbps—to the Apple TV in the living room and such.

My office is on the second floor, and there’s a lot of wood, brick, and roof between me and the base station on the ground floor.

But even with that, I’m still able to get 3.5 Gbps.

Not too bad.