DSL vs Fibre-Optics

Not everyone has both options.
For those that do, it's a no brainer unless you really want to save that $7.

I will go with $50 one. $7 is like 3 cupsTim Hortons. Wait, i heard they increased price recently? Maybe 2.75 cups now.

Fiber any day. Noone picks DSL when fiber is available, unless they really want 1/10th the speed for $7 in savings. Some people are fine with slower speeds too if it's unlimited bandwidth, so there is that too.

For 7$ difference you get 10 times the download speed and 25 times the upload speed. You must be crazy to choose DSL over Fiber optics in this case. Believe me you will need the speed sooner than you think.

kanata2004 wrote: ↑ I will go with $50 one. $7 is like 3 cupsTim Hortons. Wait, i heard they increased price recently? Maybe 2.75 cups now.

$1.98 for a large or $2 cash. More reason to tap with a credit card. Save 2 cents and earn rewards.

Fiber optics is a no brainer. There is no savings with DSL. The perceived $7 savings goes towards the dry loop fee.

Gee wrote: ↑ $1.98 for a large or $2 cash. More reason to tap with a credit card. Save 2 cents and earn rewards.

Fiber optics is a no brainer. There is no savings with DSL. The perceived $7 savings goes towards the dry loop fee.

Thanks, time for me to refill my Tim Hortons card in next visit.

Ticco wrote: ↑ Just a question about the general comparison of these two types of networks and why someone would pick DSL over fibre-ops if they have both options available to them.

Coextra offers a DSL $43 package that's 25mbps down and 10mbps up compared to their Fibre-op plan which is $50 but you get 250mbps down and 250mbps up loll

Just wondering which one is better value - I'm thinking the $50 one BUT there may be reasons one would prefer DSL?

Sorry mods but if you want to delete or merge my Coextra thread feel free.

DO you have fiber to your home? Make sure it's available.

Fibre is much more faster and stable.

Timmy is way overrated, I take McD any day and my wallet is safe

kanata2004 wrote: ↑ Thanks, time for me to refill my Tim Hortons card in next visit.

Ticco wrote: ↑ Just a question about the general comparison of these two types of networks and why someone would pick DSL over fibre-ops if they have both options available to them.

Coextra offers a DSL $43 package that's 25mbps down and 10mbps up compared to their Fibre-op plan which is $50 but you get 250mbps down and 250mbps up loll

Just wondering which one is better value - I'm thinking the $50 one BUT there may be reasons one would prefer DSL?

Sorry mods but if you want to delete or merge my Coextra thread feel free.

You're not serious are you? 10X the speed for $7 more. I mean, come on. How are you even asking this question? You must be trolling...

Mistersprinkles wrote: ↑ You're not serious are you? 10X the speed for $7 more. I mean, come on. How are you even asking this question? You must be trolling...

I'm asking for a friend - obviously if it were my decision I would already choose the Fibre-op package lol

I just wanted to know why they were looking into the DSL one instead - they're not very tech savvy, neither am I but I'm savvy enough to ask and understand your explanations.

Thanks everyone for your inputs!

Ticco wrote: ↑ I'm asking for a friend - obviously if it were my decision I would already choose the Fibre-op package lol

I just wanted to know why they were looking into the DSL one instead - they're not very tech savvy, neither am I but I'm savvy enough to ask and understand your explanations.

Thanks everyone for your inputs!

They were looking into DSL because they aren't tech savvy.

Fibre is way, way better for internet access obviously.

However, home phone over copper is way, way more reliable than home phone over fibre. This is important for those who demand land lines, eg. elderly users, businesses with fax machines, and those with home alarm systems, because you generally can't get home phone over copper if you have fibre through Bell. Dunno about Coextra.

The reason for this is home phone over fibre is reliant on the modem being up. If the modem goes down for any reason, you lose home phone, and this may happen every few months. In contrast, copper-based home phone (POTS) can stay up for years no problem.

EugW wrote: ↑ The reason for this is home phone over fibre is reliant on the modem being up. If the modem goes down for any reason, you lose home phone, and this may happen every few months. In contrast, copper-based home phone (POTS) can stay up for years no problem.

Bell will offer to sell you a battery backup for your Home Hub 3000 to ensure your home phone is running during a power outage.

The reason why POTS stay up is because there is 5 volts on the line from the central office. If there is a major power outage similar to what happened a few winters ago, POTS will go down.

EugW wrote: ↑The reason for this is home phone over fibre is reliant on the modem being up. If the modem goes down for any reason, you lose home phone, and this may happen every few months. In contrast, copper-based home phone (POTS) can stay up for years no problem.

I've always had my modem/router on a UPS and in 10 years, I haven't had a single event when the power went out and my internet stopped working.
All the backend equipment has emergency power. So long as your end does as well, it will stay up.

There's no reason to cling to POTS in 2017 on fears that [insert new tech here] might go down. After all your, POTS might go down when that car drives into a pole. Or a crew is digging and severs the wire. We have multiple redundant systems available to us today to keep you connected. Pole down/wire cut? Use a cell phone. Bell is down but rogers isn't? Ask for your neighbour's wifi password to bridge network temporarily.
For the price they charge for POTS these days, I'd sooner subscribe to both bell AND rogers to have both available than to waste money on that. And if all you care about is 911, any cell phone must connect you to 911 using the best available band, even if not activated/in service.

Gee wrote: ↑ Bell will offer to sell you a battery backup for your Home Hub 3000 to ensure your home phone is running during a power outage.

The reason why POTS stay up is because there is 5 volts on the line from the central office. If there is a major power outage similar to what happened a few winters ago, POTS will go down.

Trust me. I have FTTH with a Home Hub 3000, with battery backup. It still goes down every couple of months. Remember, a battery backup is useless if the modem locks up...

aqnd wrote: ↑ I've always had my modem/router on a UPS and in 10 years, I haven't had a single event when the power went out and my internet stopped working.
All the backend equipment has emergency power. So long as your end does as well, it will stay up.

There's no reason to cling to POTS in 2017 on fears that [insert new tech here] might go down. After all your, POTS might go down when that car drives into a pole. Or a crew is digging and severs the wire. We have multiple redundant systems available to us today to keep you connected. Pole down/wire cut? Use a cell phone. Bell is down but rogers isn't? Ask for your neighbour's wifi password to bridge network temporarily.
For the price they charge for POTS these days, I'd sooner subscribe to both bell AND rogers to have both available than to waste money on that. And if all you care about is 911, any cell phone must connect you to 911 using the best available band, even if not activated/in service.

...and when the Home Hub 3000 goes down, it takes home phone with it, which also takes my home security system down. It's pretty irritating when it happens at 3 am and starts the alarm system beeping and wakes us up. See above about how often it happens.

Yes, I could get a cell based system but it would be roughly $900, plus $10-15 per month.

Also, up until earlier this year, I needed fax support. It works with the Bell fibre-based home phone... until the line goes down of course. This was never an issue with POTS. Luckily, I don't need it anymore, as of this year. However, many businesses do.

---

BTW, the other problem is when the Home Hub 3000 goes down, it also takes TV down with it for the entire house. This is not an issue with Rogers cable internet.

I personally love the speed that FTTH provides, and overall I prefer Fibe TV over Rogers Cable TV (although Rogers Cable is higher resolution so I miss that), but Bell still has some serious issues with its FTTH service. Lots of growing pains. I'm actually already on my fourth Home Hub 3000. Two of them just died out of the blue. A third one was also replaced because of TV issues, but it turned out it was because of the IP configuration, not because of a modem problem. Bell doesn't seem to even tell its techs this, but Fibe TV often won't work reliably if you have the modem IP range set to anything other than 192.168.2.x. If you do change the IP range to something else (as the modem allows you to do), the TV receivers will still link up just fine, but you will get occasional TV disconnects, and when you call Bell, they won't have any clue as to why, because the modem is still working fine as is stuff like Netflix through the TV receivers and internet access on computers.

I may have to get yet another Home Hub 3000 replaced, or either the modem or the battery anyway. The HH3000 reads the battery as being 99% charged, but if the power is disconnected, the modem immediately shuts off. Obviously, the battery backup is doing nothing. I'm not surprised though. I had to get the battery replaced on one of my previous Home Hub 3000 units. The situation there was that Home Hub 3000 indicated there was a battery fault, and a replacement battery fixed that. Clearly, Bell/Sagemcom doesn't have very good QA for these units.

Oh, and when the modem goes down, and sometimes even when the modem doesn't go down, the remote TV receivers will occasionally lose their pairing. One of my two receivers needs to be re-paired every month or two. It's really irritating. You sit down and turn on the TV only to get a big blue screen telling you to re-pair the receiver. 10 minutes later, then you can watch TV. These are hard-wired with Ethernet, with a direct line from the Ethernet port on the back of the modem direct to the TV receiver. After telling Bell about this, their answer? They don't recommend using hard-wired connections, just WiFi. WTF? Well, for one of the TV receivers, WiFi is unreliable because it's through a cinder-block wall so obviously that is not a good solution. And for the other, WiFi works... but then will lose the connection too, so that's not a solution there either.

With all these service visits, I've spoken to several different install technicians now obviously. They say the Home Hub 3000 now is much better than it used to be, but its still an immature product in 2017. But during the initial rollout with the early HH3000 firmwares, it was awful apparently. They told me they feel the HH3000 was pushed out way earlier than it should have been, because Bell's initial beta testing was woefully inadequate in their opinion.

The good news for people getting it now though is that we guinea pigs have worked out a lot of the kinks, so there should be fewer going forward. But with all things, YMMV.

Sounds more like a problem with a single model of modem, not to say the entire technology should be considered garbage and unreliable because of one bad apple.
Could even very well be an issue with your local equipment.
There's not a lot of fibre where I am, but everyone I've spoken to that has it has not had your issues at all. Both Bell and Rogers. Not even a reboot required.

They can go ahead and work out the bugs on you, so when they finally wire up my neighbourhood, we're good to go

aqnd wrote: ↑ Sounds more like a problem with a single model of modem, not to say the entire technology should be considered garbage and unreliable because of one bad apple.
Could even very well be an issue with your local equipment.
There's not a lot of fibre where I am, but everyone I've spoken to that has it has not had your issues at all. Both Bell and Rogers. Not even a reboot required.

They can go ahead and work out the bugs on you, so when they finally wire up my neighbourhood, we're good to go

Sure, it's a problem with the Home Hub 3000. And no it's not an issue with the local setup. Techs have confirmed they have replaced a lot of the HH3000 units, because of flaky behaviour.

I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with fibre optics. In fact, most of the POTS infrastructure is actually fibre based these days. I was talking specifically about our experience with the consumer-oriented Home Hub 3000. People were saying that fibre is automatically better than POTS-based DSL for home use, but I was just illustrating that it isn't always the case for some specific needs.

I would still recommend FTTH over FTTN DSL for most users, but I'm just saying that if you depend upon home phone for a fax machine or have a wired home alarm system, you might want to think twice before the making the decision to switch to FTTH, because current implementations of FTTH can sometimes be quite problematic for home phone, and if you get FTTH, they usually disconnect your copper POTS landline.

It's too bad too, because FTTH based home phone would be a perfect replacement for POTS... if current FTTH implementations were reliable. It's still way, way, way better than third party VoIP solutions though. Those are often completely unusable for home alarm systems, and are very problematic for fax machines, and often are even less reliable.

EugW wrote: ↑ It's still way, way, way better than third party VoIP solutions though. Those are often completely unusable for home alarm systems

http://forums.redflagdeals.com/free-pho ... #p21992603

fastlayne wrote: ↑I use FPL and The Monitoring Center with an old DSC PC3000. I have two FPL numbers - one for the house phone system and one for the alarm.

I connected the DSC directly to a dedicated VOIP ATA. I did not want the DSC seizing my phone line and for $40 the extra ATA isolates any problems. If I needed to tweak the DSC ATA, I did not have to change my house phone ATA.

I had some problems initially with the useless Cisco SPA112, but have not had any problems with the Obi100.

(Disclaimer: I assume all risks in using VOIP for my alarm system. Thanks to everyone that is worried about my well being.)

http://forums.redflagdeals.com/need-lan ... #p23753017

fastlayne wrote: ↑My Freephoneline, Obi100 ATA, and DSC PC3000 (?) all play nice together.

It is very easy, at least for DSC, to use a RJ45 straight coupler to connect directly to the ATA with a short length of RJ11 cable.

This creates a dedicated configuration without having to play with any house wiring or the RJ31X and gives the alarm system its own "phone line".

http://forums.redflagdeals.com/carrytel ... #p27166801

kanata2004 wrote:I use freephone line + Grandstream HT502 and it works great with my alarm company (ADT). Also I tried the Fido home phone (gsm based) and it works fine too. I went with Freephoneline way since no monthly cost. I tried FPL + Obi200 device and it works just fine too. Search RFD if you want know more obi200 and Freephoneline . There are thousands of posts.

You can make the alarm system work first and switch internet after.

Anyway, clearly, it's possible:


http://forums.redflagdeals.com/voip-ms- ... st16144590

mintchoco is using voip.ms with The Monitoring Centre with an Obihai ATA.

http://forums.redflagdeals.com/voip-ms- ... #p22798293

Willyburan is using Callcentric (another popular VoIP service provider) with an OBi110

http://forums.redflagdeals.com/voip-hom ... #p16383484

c-ditty is using voip.ms with a Linksys PAP2T

http://forums.redflagdeals.com/grand-al ... #p17534879

Pianoguy wrote:I would make the argument that an alarm system connected to a POTS line is not reliable. If your demarc is mounted outdoors, an intruder could simply disconnect the line.

Instead, why not buy a system that connects to the monitoring station via cell, and perhaps also via IP so you can monitor it from your phone?

If you have a smartphone, this device will allow you to monitor your alarm with it. No fees beyond equipment purchase and installation:
https://www.eyez-on.com/EZMAIN/envisalink3.php

You can receive a text message when your alarm trips, and there are no monthly fees. The downside is no police dispatch, but (at least in Vancouver) it's slow enough that there's not a great deal of value there.

EugW wrote:and are very problematic for fax machines,

I have a 100% success rate for incoming faxes with Freephoneline and Fongo Mobile, which uses T.38 fax protocol, once the call has been picked up by their voicemail system. I've never had an incoming fax fail. With FPL, incoming faxes, once answered by its voicemail system, are automatically converted to PDF and can be emailed automatically to you. Probably the only reason I like Fongo Mobile is because I can see the incoming fax directly in the app without having to check email. I've never had a problem with outgoing faxes within Canada. For international faxing, Anveo's web based fax portal has been more reliable for me than POTS, which also uses T.38 fax protocol on its backend.