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Cable internet vs fiber for small shops, am I the only one who thinks fiber is overhyped?
I run a 12 person marketing firm in Columbus and we switched from a 500 Mbps cable line to a 1 Gbps fiber line six months ago. The sales pitch was all about latency and upload speeds, but honestly our daily work is email, video calls, and cloud docs, not hosting servers. Uploads went from 30 Mbps to 500 Mbps, sure, but we never maxed out the old line anyway. Meanwhile the fiber install took three weeks and cost $200 more per month, and we had two outages in the first month. Cable was rock solid for two years. I get that fiber matters for dev shops or media houses, but for a typical office crew, I think the price jump is hard to justify. Am I crazy, or has anyone else gone back to cable after trying fiber and found it perfectly adequate?
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parker_palmer441mo ago
Did your friend ever try just calling the cable company and asking for a better deal? I ask because a buddy of mine runs a small insurance office, about eight people, and he did the exact same switch you did, fiber for six months, then went crawling back to cable. His story was almost word for word yours, the upload speed sounded great on paper but nobody in his office ever touched it, and the outages drove him nuts since his whole team works off cloud files all day. What got me was he said the fiber guys kept blaming his router and his wiring and everything else, while the cable tech who came back just fixed the old line in an afternoon. For a shop doing email and video calls, I really do wonder if the extra cost buys anything you can actually feel.
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