Is Fiber Internet Worth It?
By: Dave Nance, COO
Residential and business customers have a number of options when it comes to internet access, so they explore fiber, satellite, cable, and fixed wireless options. Sometimes it’s just too much information to sift through. Here is a breakdown to help with some of those questions.
Satellite vs Fiber
Kanokla puts its resources into what gives the best results for our customers. Fiber has lower latency. To put that in plainer words:it means fiber carries information fast from the network to your home, and just as important it sends your information quickly from the home back to the network. Internet traffic used to be more like a one-way street, but today it’s more of a two-way street. This new lane of traffic looks like video meetings, online gaming, or uploading your work to a folder. With that kind of traffic, satellites have a bigger delay. What does that look like? Pixelated office meetings or online gaming where you keep losing. If latency is too high, then game over. Fiber has lower latency than low-Earth orbit satellites, and that means the two-way street is working just fine. In satellite vs fiber, fiber wins.
Fixed Wireless vs Fiber
Fixed wireless is a technology that is the main option for some rural areas because it’s quicker to install while fiber construction and installation can take longer. However, there are some areas where customers can choose between fixed wireless or fiber, and that is where some of wireless’s drawbacks come into play. This option is good for one-way traffic just think of streaming television or social media browsing, but it’s not great for two-way traffic. Some other downsides come with the signal strength, which can change based on how close you live to the tower and what the weather is like and whether any trees or structures might be in the way. Reliability becomes an issue. Kanokla buries its fiber, so the reliability of the signal is very good. In fixed wireless vs fiber, fiber wins.
Cable vs Fiber
With cable lines a big concern is reliability. Not every cable company, but–– a lot of them have not continually invested in their infrastructure. The technology they use on either end of it needs to be upgraded more often. Beyond that, speed becomes an issue again for two-way traffic. With cable, if you can do a gig down, you might only be doing 20 or 30 up, depending on what DOCSIS platform you’re on. As customers’ information needs keep growing, that uplink becomes more and more important. It used to be that all anybody cared about was download speeds. Everybody was just going out, grabbing stuff, and bringing it in. Nobody was pushing data back up. But as those habits change, the need for higher upload speeds grows. With fiber we can do true symmetric speeds. Just by the nature of the technology, fiber is the best option. Pricing transparency also becomes a factor since a number of the cable lines also bring with it TV packages, and some of these companies lure you in with a low price and raise it from there. Transparency is key. In cable vs fiber, fiber wins.
What Sets Kanokla Apart?
When a customer compares us to a large internet company, something to keep in mind is that Kanokla
is local. We show up. A lot of people have called us about construction issues—someone left a mess, hit a line, or damaged their sewer—but when we look into it, we find out Kanokla was not in that area. It was one of those large internet companies. In those cases we help that person out by giving them the customer service line to that other company and then wish them luck because it could be a long wait until they talk to an actual live person and even then that isn’t a local person on the other line who is invested in maintaining a relationship. With us you can talk to someone right here, and most of our customers know someone who works here. That’s a big difference. It’s customer service, but it’s also about shared community.