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MDA
Auto Negotiating
Premium Member
join:2013-09-10
Minneapolis, MN
Netgear CM600
Asus RT-AC66U B1

4 edits

MDA to Kasoah

Premium Member

to Kasoah

Re: [Price] Current FiOS subscriber trying to determine if worth the switch

said by Kasoah:

Switching from FIOS to Comcast? That's not a good idea.

With FIOS you get less than a ms of jitter in your pings, you get a lot less ping to the first hop. Things will definitely load faster on FIOS than Comcast. Yes you might get better peering on Comcast, but that isn't worth it.

Also the picture quality if you watch TV is worse on Comcast than FIOS.

I'm not a Comcast advocate or anything, but how is comcast any worse (or more evil) aside from upload speed and pricing of certain packages than Fios?

Speaking from experience, I get 5ms to my first hop which is negligible. You should only worry if it's higher than 20ms. The jitter is the same as you described Fios having, being as low as 0.15ms-1ms (wired of course. I used freeola's line quality test that shows sub-1ms variations ). Remember comcast runs an HFC network so half use fiber already and then it depends on CMTS congestion for the last mile coax portion.

The router you are using will have the most impact due to the speed of it's processor and efficiency of its routing engine/firmware. In fact, I just replaced a year-old Dlink dir-636l with a year-older dir-632 because the jitter when pinging was a difference of 5ms (I know it's not the worst, but you will notice that variation when gaming). Routing is the slowest form of networking.

And peering is EVERYTHING with routing on the internet. Just take a look at what the outcome of being on a bigger backbone than Fios for gaming (less of a need for peering) and Netflix having to direct connect with comcast just to get decent speed (unnecessary need of peering, in ny opinion) are.

Care to elaborate with PQ on cable versus Fiber? Comcast and Verizon are sending digital (which is lossless) broadcast streams to your STBs so PQ is not actually determined by the carrier, but the station who cares to provide enough bit rate for its channel.

In the end, who better serves your bottom dollar is the winner.

Geot
@96.226.95.x

Geot

Anon

I'd go with Comcast given the OPs comments.

I was on cable for years and really looked forward to getting FIOS last year. I had it my head that fiber is way better than cable. Unfortunately it isn't. Same ping, same speeds down. Now you do get much greater up speeds on FIOS but who needs that in a residential setup?

Internet has really become a commodity, all most people want is reliable internet. I've had 2 tech out since getting on FIOS to fix things in less than 1 year (both outside of the house), which is too high, but could be just bad luck. Finding out before you buy how reliable a company is in a given neighborhood is what I would try and figure out.
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