Greenlight Networks
Greenlight has been slowly installing fiber-optic cable in Rochester for a few years now, neighborhood by neighborhood, and last fall, they finally got to mine. Today they hooked my house up to the trunk line and it is amazing!
Today, I finally got to replace Spectrum cable Internet with Greenlight fiber-optic Internet! For decades, Spectrum (AKA Charter, Time Warner, and RoadRunner) has had a monopoly on Internet service in Rochester, and it blooooows. The speeds we get from Spectrum are laughable compared to what people I know in other parts of the country get from their ISPs. During the pandemic, it got slightly better since NYS put pressure on them to increase their speeds so people could work from home, but it still hasn't been great.
Greenlight has been slowly installing fiber-optic cable in Rochester for a few years now, neighborhood by neighborhood, and last fall, they finally got to mine. Since then, I have been eagerly waiting for them to come and hook my house up to the trunk line they buried near the road. Well, today was that day, bitches!
Here is the speed test for my old Spectrum service. The cable modem and router are in my office so there is no interference. Pretty meh, right?
Now here's the after. Rather than try to fish the fiber-optic line to my office, they put it in the living room (on the first floor on the opposite side of the house). Not ideal, but what are you gonna do? The cable lines were run when the house was built so they didn't have to worry about fishing them behind the drywall. Now things are more complicated so running the fiber line up to my office isn't really an option. Regardless, I'm getting much better speeds right out of the gate.
For roughly the same monthly fee, that's a huge improvement. And that's actually pretty slow compared to the rest of the house. There are a lot of physical barriers between the router and my office so I'm losing a bunch of speed due to interference. If I stand with an unobstructed line of sight to the router, then I get over 400 Mbps both up and down.
And if I hardwire into the router then I get nearly 1 Gbps both up and down.
So I might play with some Wi-Fi extenders and whatnot to try to improve things in my office, but even if I don't, this is still way better than Spectrum.