The news is filling up with stories about office workers trying to work from home. The most interesting thing I have seen is a report from the Utopia network out in the Salt Lake City area, which said that they have had a 20% increase in requests for fiber service in the last week.
No one is going to call for a new network connection in the middle of a crisis like this one unless their current network connection is not meeting their needs.
Cable Internet networks have not been designed to support massive data traffic during the day, and with schools sending kids home at the same time, if you are trying to work from home right now and have a cable connection, then every day is going to be a snow day--meaning your cable Internet service is going to slow to a crawl.
Well-designed, modern fiber networks do not have the same capacity limitations as the old fashioned copper-based coaxial cable systems. Improvements in the DOCSIS software that the cable companies use to manage their networks have enabled them to increase the download speeds to support video streaming, but they have to steal bandwidth from the upload side. Upload speeds on cable networks have become so embarrassing that the cable companies won't even publish them any more. We noticed this starting about a year ago, when we could no longer get any information on upload speeds from any of the cable companies. Formerly, they did publish this.
The corona virus may finally be a tipping point for a switch to fiber networks. Want fiber in your community? Give us a call (www.wideopennetworks.us).