I’m cheering. Today our local rural electric co-op has finally installed the fiber optic cable for Internet service to our house. Final install will be next week when we get the router and other inside equipment but we will have a full fiber optic connection from our house to the net. For only $80/mo we can get a full 1 gig both up and down! 100 Mbps both ways is only $50 Elevate Internet We’ve had decent Internet with our wireless ISP but this is going to be so much better.
Rural places often are way behind in infrastructure. It’s because we are a local member owned co-op that we are getting this now. Eventualy they will be load balancing our electric use for those folks who allow it. This is on top of a very generous net metering policy for solar systems.
Maybe I should change my username to CyberShepherdess
I’ve had gigabit fiber for a few months and enjoy it. I would not downlevel. Of course, this is on a fast ethernet connection. WiFi will put a ceiling on the gigabit flow at about 30% of the max. Apple TV won’t stream any faster than the provider of the stream is willing to push – you cannot watch a 4K movie at 1,000 any better than at 200… But the true value of gigabit comes when you need to bring down big files or push backups to the cloud – I can backup 200 GB drives to Backblaze in less than an hour, often faster.
Fiber is supposed to be coming to my town later this year but I’m not optimistic about getting it in my neighborhood. Our utilities are all buried and they’d have to get clearance from whoever owns those. With poles, they have to get clearance as well but I’m sure it’s easier.
If the fiber optic company wants to rip up part of my yard to run a line, I’ll hand them the shovel.
That’s the beauty of what we’re getting. The electric company is the one doing the fiber. So they already have an easement for the lines They string it on their own poles.
I have been using a 100/100 for some years now, and it is great. Whenever I measure, I usually get 15-20% more than promised too. I can easily run multiple concurrent video streaming services with no issues. Backups can easily be scheduled to run at times when regular traffic is at a low point.
I would suggest you start with the less expensive option and upgrade once you hit the performance ceiling. $360/- extra over a year is money you can spend on more fun stuff, right?
That’s our plan, we have our house and a guest house on the property so ran fiber to both because the install fee is a low $100 if you sign up now and for a year. So we’ll have both systems running at 100Mbps for at least 1 year although we can upgrade if we have to. We’re going to tie into our barn Ethernet so I’ll have fast speeds at the hay barn which is also where we do all sheep work. LambTracker is designed towork independently of an Internet connection but I’ve wanted to play with automatic syncing of sheep transactions and a fast net will allow some field testing of my ideas.
Wow! I’d love to learn more about your co-op. I’m on the Broadband committee for my little rural NH town and our options are so limited!
/rant on
My current internet speed is 15 Mb down and 1 (count ‘em, ONE) up. It’s only barely viable. I have to drive 15 miles to get to a location where the connectivity is good enough for me to run my webinars. Moreover, each of the 234 towns in the state of NH has been tasked with INDIVIDUALLY solving the broadband problem. As though it were possible to provide fast internet to disconnected islands!
/rant off
EID tags made by Shearwell in the UK. We double tag at birth. EID HW and SW is far too expensive for a small flock like ours so my husband (EE, computer hardware designer) designed a simple EID tag reader you can build for under $100. The tags run $1.50 for paired tags one EID and 1 Visual. My LambTracker SW is open source and free and we run on cheap Android tablets, currently mostly on Kindle Fire devices.
A sheep transaction can be any number of things, evaluations like fleece weight, scrotal circumference, weights, judging scores against the breed standard whether they have missing teeth or udder lumps (lots of data collected on each sheep), drugs or other treatments given with automatic slaughter withdrawal alerts attached to each sheep’s record, tag changes, breeding dates and methods, lambing info, general notes (For example Just tonight, ram farm tag 513 Desert Weyr Wiley was stuck in the fence and had to be removed. Yesterday it was Desert Weyr Thane who was stuck. I track this type of stuff and rams who do this too often go to the top of the butcher or sell list for mangement issues. Any ram that butts any human more than once in his lifetime is butchered. Ewes that are wary or don’t care for their lambs get butchered. They all taste good and life’s too short for irritating sheep.
Problem with syncing is that SQLite, the DB I use, is not designed to handle transactions from multiple sources properly so it will take some finagling to get it to be secure and accurate. Initially I’m thinking just a periodic backup of the entire database wirelessly will be good enough.
It’s an outshoot of the original rural electrification work the federal government sponsored. Now we are a rural electric co-op. Delta Montrose Electric Association.
AT&T ran Fibre cable through my front yard. Literally dug up my lawn and ran fibre cable. i was so excited until they told me it was going to the development down the street and they wouldn’t be bringing it the less than 20’ to my house. Damn AT&T.
As a fellow Aussie, I too have the same internet speeds as @Ben_Lincoln, however many of my friends here are very envious as they are still struggling with speeds in single digits! The downside of being a physically large country with a relatively small population, but living here is worth it!
They string it on their own poles.