Choosing Your Internet: Broadband, Dedicated Fiber, Fixed Wireless, or Satellite—Which Is Best for You?
Hi. I'm Max Clark. I'm running through some q and a. And this question is, what is the difference between broadband versus dedicated fiber versus fixed wireless versus satellite? And what should I use?
Speaker 1:First thing we should talk about is with an Internet service provider, that Internet service provider is going to sell you something that is a marketing, branding, or trade term. And AT and T U verse product, for instance, Verizon Fios, which also became Frontier Fios. The first thing you need to understand is what you're actually getting and how does that equate into that ISP's world. We classify these things as we classify broadband dedicated Internet access as a big difference and go into the weeds on this one. Okay.
Speaker 1:So a u verse circuit could be a fiber based, which what's gonna be a GPON circuit, or it could be a copper or DSL circuit. Same thing with Verizon files. You could be buying a fiber optic based circuit, or you could be buying a DSL based circuit. So just off the get go, you need to understand what you're actually getting. Are you getting fiber?
Speaker 1:Are you getting DSL? The way that you can tell if you're getting fiber or if you're getting DSL is fiber will have much higher bandwidth. It's gonna have a symmetric upload and download. DSL is much have a lower bandwidth and it's gonna have asymmetric download and upload. So if you have a phone company, mind you phone company, not cable company.
Speaker 1:If you have a phone company that's selling you a service, a circuit that's like 5 megabit download, 384 kilobytes upload. I mean, geez, if you've got this, I'm so sorry for you. That's a DSL line. Don't buy DSL. Go get a cable modem.
Speaker 1:There's no reason to get DSL in today's world. In the GPON is the fiber optic broadband, and it is symmetric. You have a single fiber optic line cable that comes into your location that then runs in through splitter, and that splitter that goes into a switch and then there's other infrastructure in there. What GPON does is it enables the service provider to have a lot of subscribers on one piece of infrastructure. Let's just say it that way.
Speaker 1:And it does sharing. So it's a shared bandwidth product across whatever that base of fiber is. And the GPON technology is getting faster so you can get 10 gig GPON now. It also is scaling with how many subscribers can be on a port. Now it's 64 and 64 is common.
Speaker 1:So let's just say you're sharing bandwidth with 64 other people. This is the classic cable modem thing. Right? What's a cable modem? Cable modem is what the cable companies use to deliver bandwidth on top of their cable infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Cable is typically really fast download, very slow upload. That is a quirk of a couple of things. It's a quirk of line amps and filters that could put on to the cable lines by the cable companies. And as they go through and replace all their lines and replace their amps and filters, you're gonna see the upload bandwidth start to come up in neighborhoods. Same thing.
Speaker 1:A cable modem is a shared service. So whatever is in your segment that goes to your head end for that cable is shared. This does not matter if it is residential or business cable modem. You're still shared with whatever that infrastructure is. And the classic cable modem issue, of course, is everybody coming home from work at, you know, 6 o'clock in the afternoon and getting on the Internet and then boom, the cable just sucks.
Speaker 1:A lot of people experience and saw this in COVID when they went to work from home and all of a sudden their cable was just terrible because everybody was home at the same time and people on Xbox and people trying to work, people on Zoom and Teams and everything and just everything everything going out the window residential versus business broadband so this could be whether it's a cable company cable modem or a phone company GPON system the difference between those is how much you're paying if you can get fixed IPs what kind of SLA is given to you defaults residential service SLA is if the light turns green we've we've we've given you what you're paying us for there's no speed targets if you have an outage there's no guarantee on restore I had a personal issue with frontier where they service went down and they quoted me, like, 3 days to get somebody a tech out inside. I mean, we literally just called it the cable company and had cable installed that afternoon. We already had the line, already had a modem. We just had to have it activated. When you go into business broadband, you're gonna get an SLA that's actually gonna give you a mean time to respond.
Speaker 1:So if you have an outage, they're gonna have a person there within a set amount of time, usually 4 hours where they're gonna start working on restoring the problem for you. So if you're in a business, you definitely wanna spend a little extra bucks to go into a business based product versus a residential service. And by the way, you know, if you're working from home and it's a home based business and you can figure out how to get a business based circuit on a broadband, absolutely do it. Go for it. Dedicated circuits.
Speaker 1:Okay. So the big difference when you get into a dedicated Internet product, this could be called DIA dedicated Internet access. Some people called it, like, high speed Internet access. Some cable companies called it fiber Internet access. The big thing that it all comes back to is dedicated Internet access as the umbrella product umbrella service.
Speaker 1:This is delivered via fiber. You're getting a pair of fiber delivered to you, you know, so transmit and receive. You're getting whatever bandwidth that they're selling you is guaranteed to you. So if you buy a circuit, a 1000 meg, if you buy a 10 gig circuit, whatever you're buying, that service provider has gone through facilities and engineering and capacity planning to make sure that if you buy a 1,000 meg, if you buy a giggy, you're getting a giggy. There is no sharing going on within that capacity.
Speaker 1:You have a much stronger SLA. You have a blower MTTR. You'll have SLAs around packet loss and jitter. You actually get a professionally delivered service. If you're running a small office, if you're an SMB, listen, broadband could be great for you.
Speaker 1:And by the way, there's a cost delta. I mean, it's not significant at this point. You're gonna probably pay 4 to 5 x the broadband to get into a dedicated product. Dedicated products will scale much better for you if you've got lots of users on it. If you've got a bigger operation, if you have more office, if you have critical infrastructure, if your operations are critical, these are all things that go into a dedicated circuit.
Speaker 1:You're gonna have a much better experience with versus if you're on broadband. And broadband, it's gonna work fine until it doesn't work, and then it's just not gonna work. And you're gonna have whatever issue that you have to deal with. Dedicated is great. Fixed RF.
Speaker 1:You hear this could refer to as microwave. People call it high cap because there's so many different nonsensical acronyms for these things. And by the way, there's good fixed RF and there's bad fixed RF. So there's shady operators out there around the world that are selling garbage fixed RF products. Fixed RF is easy.
Speaker 1:You have a base station with an antenna. I mean, if you've ever seen a satellite antenna, you know, for DIRECTV on the side of a house, it is a dish typically between 12 and 24 inches in diameter. Right? So it could be a square, be a 12 inch square. It could be a 24 inch diameter dish.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be on a base station. So top of a building, on a tower, something along those lines, and it's gonna be pointed horizontally. And on the other side, there's gonna be another dish. This is what gets installed at your location. You know, by the way, the dishes are called the ODU, the outdoor units.
Speaker 1:And that dish then has a cable that runs into a box which is the IDU, the indoor unit. And then that is what you plug your connection into fixed RF if you can get it as awesome. It's phenomenal. There's this misconception that wireless is bad. I believe that comes mainly from people having garbage Wi Fi in their homes, in their office and having experiences with it and then thinking, oh, we're getting wireless for Internet access and it's going to be a terrible product.
Speaker 1:In actuality, fixed RF is a fantastic product. You can't go as fast. You know, your cost to deliver fixed RF is higher than your cost to deliver fiber. You're not going to see 400 gig fixed RF. You can see 10 gig fixed RF.
Speaker 1:It's going to cost a lot of money to get delivered. And at that speed, it's much better to get terrestrial fiber based product, DIA product brought in. But, you know, thing also about fixed RF, it's really nice is a latency. It's it's faster than fiber. So the actual time it takes for a packet to go across that link is less than in a fiber optic cable.
Speaker 1:And to prove the point in New York and Chicago and between New York and Chicago, there are fixed RF networks specifically for brokerage houses and high frequency trading. And they used fixed wireless and not fiber because it is faster. So if it is good enough for people trading 1,000,000,000 of dollars in high frequency trading and in brokerage houses, it is good enough for you for your office because it's going to be fantastic for you. Issues with fixed RF. If you're in locations where you don't have line of sight, fixed RF isn't going to work.
Speaker 1:If you're in locations with a lot of atmospheric interference, so clouds and rain that can be a problem for you a good service provider is going to do a link loss calculation and they're gonna calculate rain fade and it's gonna say basically what it is is you look at the coordinates of the two links and by the way they don't do this. A computer does it all for them. They use piece of software for it. And it's going to say, you know, average seasonal rainfall is this. And therefore you need to get a bigger dish with more power.
Speaker 1:And what the boxes do is when there's any sort of interference or rain fade, the units on both sides just up their power output to overcome whatever that air interference is. So if it's a cloud or if it's rain, they'll just pump the juice. Now, if it is a typhoon, you're going to have an experience with fixed RF. So that could be a negative for you. By the way, never plug a fixed RF unit into a UPS system.
Speaker 1:You know, if one side goes down because of whatever reason, the other side is going to just nuke the UPS. I mean, like, we'll blow it up. By the way, horrible, funny story. We had a link, a fixed RF link, and it was going down periodically and we couldn't figure it out. We're troubleshooting this for a while.
Speaker 1:And I had a person standing on the building looking the tower and was trying to figure out it looked like somebody had climbed the tower recently. And we thought that they had knocked it out of alignment. And he was standing there. We were talking on a cell phone and and he was just standing there on the roof and a construction crane. He watches a construction crane that the boom arm goes like this and swings out.
Speaker 1:And, you know, it's not in the path. So he's not thinking about too much. It's like, okay. Well, you know, there's a construction crane and then he swing and then the construction crane swings the other way and this enormous and as it swings the other way, this enormous flag that's hanging off the back of the crane with the construction company's name flaps in the wind and it's just right in front of the path for this RF and we had to go bribe the foreman at the construction site to, you know, solve that problem and it worked out just fine. It's amazing what some beer will do satellite.
Speaker 1:Now there's 2 types of satellite. There's StarLink and there's everything else And the everything else world when we're talking about like ViaSats and Hughes before that, you know, the original satellite systems just sucked. They would get you bandwidth in the middle of nowhere. But what you were getting was you were getting a decent download speed from the satellite. And then usually you had a modem with dial up for your upload or for your control signal that was actually determining what information was being delivered to you.
Speaker 1:This was a path of least resort thing. You don't see that very often anymore. The Viasat satellites have decent performance up and down. Chances are you're in a location. You could probably get a Starlink based satellite which I mean smokes it's phenomenal like it's more expensive than the ground based stuff for now seems like x is gonna push that price down as quickly and as aggressively as they can you're gonna have higher latency than these other things but in most cases it's probably gonna be just fine for you.
Speaker 1:High latency isn't necessarily an issue as long as you have a lot of jitter. You know, consistently high latency is okay. So in the satellite world, maybe, you know, you're looking at a via SAP based solution, totally fine. Starlink, amazing. And you're off to the races.
Speaker 1:Didn't talk about actual wireless LTE. And this is what the phone companies try to sell or are trying to push people into. Why? Because then they don't have to have any infrastructure connecting their buildings and your building, and they can just do it over cell phone towers. LTE is getting fast.
Speaker 1:You know, 5 gs, like, real 5 gs. I don't even know that there's a such a thing as real 5 gs, but real 5 gs is pretty fast. And the issue with 5 gs and LTE wireless based Internet in most locations is you're on some sort of meter or capacity based plant you get so much download and then the cellular network has the right to cap you so they can kneecap your download and upload speeds we're still seeing very commonly you know metered where you're paying per byte of transfer up and down I don't really like those billing models we use LTE in places where we know we have low capacity, low utilization. Maybe it's an application for pots replacement for firelight safety systems or an elevator analog line for a parking garage that has to be replaced. LTE is phenomenal for those things.
Speaker 1:LTE could be used as a as a as a tertiary backup or secondary or tertiary backup. So maybe you have a primary line with a critical thing, like you have a point of sales terminal to actually process credit cards and you want that to always work. Well, you can have a broadband circuit and an LTE circuit and you can plug that into an SD WAN and you can configure the SD WAN to only use the LTE when the broadband is down. And then you've got backup for your point of sale system. Really quickly, as a note, we use these things in combination all the time for redundancy.
Speaker 1:So we use dedicated Internet plus fixed RF for redundancy. We'll use dedicated plus broadband. We use broadband plus broadband. We use dedicated plus LTE, fixed RF plus LTE, broadband plus LTE. We'll use these in and every combination you could possibly think of.
Speaker 1:Dedicated plus dedicated plus fixed RF plus LTE. You know, like we've had applications that just either need that capacity or that sensitive. You can couple and buy these and put these together all you want. Important thing is just think of it in terms of like, you know, you've got broadband, a dedicated Internet access, fixed RF really fits into that dedicated realm. And then you've got satellite and LTE as different categories.
Speaker 1:I'm Max Clark. Hope that helps you. If you have further questions or clarifications or wanna share your story, comment below. Let me know.
