Fiber-to-the-Home is steadily winning the hearts and minds of subscribers in the US, according to a new report commissioned by the Fiber-to-the-Home Council in which more than 1,000 FTTH and 600 other broadband subscribers were surveyed.
Fiber-to-the-home services were available to more than 16% of North American homes and were connected to nearly 6 million as of April this year, according to the FTTH Council.
Median FTTH download and upload speeds have increased 219% and 350%, respectively, during the three years the survey has been conducted, reaching 16.6 Mb/s and 4.5 Mb/s. That’s 1.5 times faster than cable modem and 5.7 times faster than DSL on the download end and 3.2 times faster than cable modem and 5.7 times faster than DSL when it comes to uploading, according to the report, which asked participants to measure and report their Internet connectivity speeds via www.speakeasy.net.
Researchers at RVA LLC also found that recognition of FTTH is growing: 41% of subscribers recognized the term compared to the 28% that did so in a similar 2009 survey. Moreover, 71% of FTTH subscribers said they were “very satisfied” with their Internet service compared to 53% for cable modem subscribers and 52% for DSL subscribers. Seventy-three percent of FTTH subscribers were “very satisfied” with their HDTV service compared with 61% for satellite service subscribers and 45% for cable subscribers. Respondents cited Internet speed, video picture clarity and consistency of results as the greatest benefits of FTTH.
OMG you can NOT compare offerings based on speed tests, period. Please stop confusing consumers.
Anyone running DD-WRT, OpenWRT or Tomato firmware on supported device (hardware firewall/router) can tell you with 100% certainty that as soon as the speed test ends, the bandwidth gets throttled. For Cable providers, it gets throttled to next to nothing, well below the FCC definition (768Kbps) for broadband. I would love to get input from a FIOS user to see how badly they get throttled. If your service is not bi-synchronous with minimum bandwidth guarantees than you are probably throttled, limited, restricted.
I pay over $50 per month for cable modem Internet access, the highest Internet ONLY option that is available to me based on where i live. There is no competition and that is a shame. They market 16Mb/2Mb and you will see this EXCEPT during the speed test. Sometimes during the speed test you will see over 16Mb down, but NEVER more than 2Mb upstream…never. However the very second after that speed test finishes, the cable provider throttles the bandwidth down to less than 101Kbps/ 30Kbps. Often its throttled as little as 40Kbps/4Kbps. Its just awful.
DSL at 1.5Mbps/384Kbps would be over 3 X faster than Cable Internet…at half the cost.
You can complain, they might even come out and replace your cable modem, but they will never fix the problem…which is their software restricting bandwidth at their router…they have no incentive to change. Even in the face of hundreds of thousands of customers leaving them each and every quarter. They believe (rightly in many cases, sad) that they have you by the short hairs and you will not leave, if you do, you will be so dissatisfied with their competitors (as they all do it) that you will eventually come back.
Cellular companies have the exact same customer no service attitude.
I for one can not wait to live in an area that has Fiber To The Home (FTTH), User Owned Fiber (Utopia) and I hope and pray that they believe in net neutrality. No censorship, no redirection, no throttling of bandwidth, no DNS poisoning, packet hi-jacking, no Quality of Service (QoS) evil changes, etc… all of which would be in my definition of Net Neutrality.
Probably most important is we need a minimum bandwidth guarantee for 99.9% of our usage. Hello FCC are you listening?
Any service that provides so called speed test and/or bandwidth information can be set to a higher Quality of Service with no restrictions on bandwidth for the duration of the test in a number of ways.
Speed tests are not effective for determining anything about bandwidth capability. The most you can say is during that second of time, the bandwidth allowed me to get the advertised bandwidth. That is all.
If you are not monitoring your bandwidth in real time, DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato firmware all you to do this, you simply do NOT know. FYI
You can run DD-WRT firmware on a residential router costing from $15 to $200 per firewall/router. Just make sure you check their website and that your firewall/router is supported before you buy any hardware.