By Kenn Murphy,
Manager of Network Engineering
I’m sure you’ve heard that Valley Communications is rolling out fiber to the community, and maybe you’ve thought about switching. It’s the same cost after all, but you don’t need the extra speed, and you don’t have time to wait for contractors to show up to run the cables and get everything set up so why bother? Everything is fine just as it is. Well, aside from the speed increase there are lots of good reasons to switch to fiber from wireless Internet.
Reliability
First and foremost being reliability. Wireless Internet can be affected by anything that comes between the radio on your roof (or mounting pole) to the base station on the tower. Rain, dust, your neighbor’s new trees. All of these can affect the speed of the connection. If it’s windy, it can nudge either the radio at your house or the base radio on the tower out of alignment, which will reduce the signal strength and lower your speeds. In the heat of summer, the poles on which the base radios are mounted can twist, reducing the signal strength and lowering your available speeds.
Latency
The second thing that’s better about fiber is latency. Latency is the amount of time it takes for you to talk to a server on the Internet and for that server to send the reply. The base radio has to scan across multiple subscribers and if they’re further away, it has to increase signal strength and spend a longer time focusing on that subscriber. This will reduce the amount of time it has to focus on all the other subscribers, which will increase the latency. On fiber, there is still a time slot for all the subscribers, but it happens much faster because there is no need to increase the signal strength to any particular subscriber.
Power & Backup Systems
The third thing that’s an improvement over wireless is power. All the equipment between the base OLT (optical line terminal) and the ONT (optical network terminal) at your home is passive and does not require power to operate. The base OLTs are at Valley Electric substations and have battery backups and generators to provide power in case of an outage. While the radios on the wireless towers have battery backups, they are much lower capacity than at the substations because there is only so much space in those cabinets.
Simpler, More Efficient Network
Finally, there are just less devices overall for VCA to maintain. We are able to replace hundreds of base radios on towers with several OLTs. This makes it easier to keep up with maintenance on the base devices. The OLTs are modular as well, making it easier to add new capacity onto the system without having to take a maintenance window to do the work.
Built for the Future
Overall, the technology for fiber is newer and has a greater capacity. It is easier to upgrade to support higher speeds and more throughput. It also supports symmetrical speeds, meaning that your upload to the Internet is faster, so sharing those videos and photos with friends and family will be much quicker and video calls will be higher quality as well.