Fiber is Very Good
Last month I was finally able to have fiber internet installed. After years of being on waitlists and punching in new zip codes as I moved, I am now paying AT&T to use the speed of light and lasers for my internet connection.
It is glorious.
Spectrum 1GB coax on the left, AT&T 1GB fiber on the right
Earlier in the year, I spied AT&T trucks roaming around my neighborhood, digging up dirt and laying cable. My suspicions were confirmed one afternoon when they were working on the telephone pole behind my house.1 They said to check with the company in May or June to see if service was live.
The weekend of May 9, 2025, our Spectrum internet flat out died for the entire weekend. The earliest appointment was that Sunday afternoon, two days later. After a few hours of searching, the technician identified a wire that appeared to be fried. One swap later and we seemed to be back in business. The Internet was intermittent on Monday. This led to an immediate call to AT&T and, with a stroke of luck, fiber was now available.
The fiber install took the advertised 4 hours. While the one guy did the install, a sales rep showed up and talked with me about why I should swap my phone service over to AT&T, as well as the many benefits of Royale Caribbean's Club Royale program. It was a nice, albeit long, conversation that went places I did not expect.
At the end of the install, we could not get the AT&T device to talk to my Ubiquiti gear. The AT&T man left since his work was done and I technically had a connection if I used their router. One sleep and a slew of searching later, I found a helpful guide that solved my problem, which was configuring an IP passthrough on the AT&T device. Side note, the direct fiber connector is not proprietary like the install man said. This did not solve my problem, since the AT&T box does some sort of handshake. Apparently, you can fake that though. It just felt a smidge too far outside my comfort zone.
Once we were up and running, I called to cancel with Spectrum. You still have to do the dance of calling a representative on the phone and verbally cancelling. This should be illegal. Oh wait. It's supposed to be. They do the whole spiel of offering to lower your price (if it could have been lower this whole time, why wasn't it?). They tried to explain that they also have 1GB internet (I know, I paid for it). They ignore your every declaration that you want to cancel service. It is a conversation of attrition.
Then at the end of May, I got an email saying my bill for June was ready. They never cancelled my service. Even after saying it was complete on my initial call. Despite this, I had to call again and cancel again. What an absolute joke and scam.
The fiber life is everything I hope it would be. Uploading my videos or backing up my drives takes minutes, not days.2 Every time I upload a video and it takes seconds, I giggle. I wonder if this feeling will ever go away. I suppose it will someday. I wasn't giggling with Spectrum and a gig down is marvelous. It is the upload speed that is the game changer. That'll take getting used to. I can't go back.