Here’s a picture of when the electrician pulled the fiber from the building entry endpoint (BEP) in the basement into my flat, from March 2014: Switching to fiber7 Hence, I ordered Swisscom fiber to get things moving as quick as possible, and figured I could switch to a different provider later. One wrinkle was that availability was only fixed in the Swisscom checker, and it was unclear when EWZ or other providers would get an updated data dump. This is not a state that the online fiber availability checker can represent, but once you know it, the fix is easy: just have Swisscom send out the form again, have the owner sign it, and a few weeks later, you can order! Either the owner of my apartment never signed it to begin with, or it got lost. The issue was that there was no permission slip on file at Swisscom. In Zürich, I managed to get a fiber connection set up in my apartment after fighting bureaucracy for many months. There, you can upgrade both ends to achieve higher speeds. Higher bandwidth (possibly Gigabit/s?) and typically the connection wasĮstablished via ethernet (instead of PPPoE). TheĪdvantages are numerous: lower latency (ADSL came with 40 ms at the time), much The dream was always to leave ADSL behind and get a fiber connection. We’ve had to set up (and tune) traffic shaping, and coordinate when large downloads were okay. When I spent one semester in Ireland, I had a 9 Mbit/s ADSL connection, and then later in Zürich I started out with a 15 Mbit/s ADSL connection.Īll of these connections have always felt limiting, like peeking through the keyhole to see a rich world behind, but not being able to open the door. The ADSL connection at my parent’s place started at 1 Mbit/s, was upgraded first to 3 Mbit/s, then 6 Mbit/s, and eventually reached its limit at 16 Mbit/s. The different connection speeds and characteristics have always interested me, and I used several other connections over the years, all of which felt limiting. But, because it was a flatrate, it made possible new use cases for my dad, who would jump on this opportunity to download a number of CD images to upgrade the software of his SGI machines. It was a massive upgrade in download speed (768 kbit/s!), but a downgrade in upload speed (128 kbit/s). I still vividly remember the first time that ADSL connection synchronized. Luckily, his approach to solve this problem wasn’t to restrict my internet usage, but rather to buy a cheap, separate ADSL flatrate line for the family (from Telekom, which he hated), while he kept the good SDSL metered line for his business. These two facts combined resulted in a 3000 € surprise bill for my dad! During the aforementioned file sharing experiments, it never crossed my mind that down- or uploading files could result in extra charges. The second surprise was the concept of a metered connection, specifically one where you pay more the more data you transfer. I learnt this while making first contact with file sharing: people kept asking me to stay online so that their transfers would complete more quickly. At the time, even DSL connections with much higher download speeds were asymmetric (ADSL) and came with only 128 kbit/s upload. The first surprise was that the upload speed (also 256 kbit/s - it was a symmetric connection) was faster than other people’s. I encountered two surprises with this internet connection. It wasn’t particularly fast in terms of download speed - I think it delivered 256 kbit/s or something along those lines. My dad was an early adopter and was connected to the internet well before then using dial up connections, but the SDSL connection in our second house was the first connection I remember using myself. The first internet connection that I consciously used was a symmetric DSL connection that my dad († 2020) shared between his home office and the rest of the house, which was around the year 2000. (Feel free to skip right to the 25 Gbit/s announcement section, but I figured this would be a good point to reflect on the last 20 years of internet connections for me!) Last week, the point of presence (POP) that my apartment’s fiber connection terminates in was upgraded, so now I am enjoying a 25 Gbit/s fiber internet connection! My first internet connections My favorite internet service provider, init7, is rolling out faster speeds with their infrastructure upgrade.
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