I got a flyer in the snail mail the other day that said “surf fiber internet will soon be available to you”. My Mom has fiber internet in another state, and I know it’s fast for her (albeit she has verizon fios). I live in the USA Midwest Chicago area- and I have had comcast xfinity for 20+ years here. They are a ripoff. I am charged 88.95 a month USD. I have no TV or any other services other than basic internet (I think it’s the second lowest speed- they may call it “performance internet”)
What I did notice (and this may be a coincidence) was that they must be doing some construction on my street because they made survey marks on my property and painted where the gas line and water lines are. Could this be because they are putting in the fiber cables?
Thinking of switching but want to get opinions of others. Besides cost reasons, comcast can suck off because they are basically part of other hollywood support corporations that are part of ACE. (this is the other reason I want to do it)
I was in a similar boat just recently. Spectrum in lieu of Comcast. I figured anybody would almost certainly be better than Spectrum. It’s such a low bar, really. Boy was I wrong. Despite the attractive pricing and all the advantages of fiber, the fiber company, Clearnetwerx, was a total shit show. I’m talking about the basics, like, do what you say you’re going to do, make a plan in advance, make an appointment when you need to access the property, call your customer back when they leave a message. Stuff like that. I got so fed up that I canceled my service request. I’ll pay a bit more to avoid the headache of a clown car company. Maybe I’ll try again next year and see if they get their shit together.
I have Surf.
They ran the fiber in the neighborhood in Oct 2023. Then I assume was near the very first to get it installed in Dec 2023. (I live on the side of town where they started the roll out)
There were definitely growing pains in the first 6 months or so. No long outages. There were a few short ones. More of an annoyance, in March 2024 I noticed NTP wasn’t working. It took a few times contacting support to get to someone that could help. Once they confirmed the issue it was a few weeks to get it resolved.
More recently it has been fine.
Not that many people care, no IPv6. From when I asked about it initially I don’t expect that to be a thing any time soon.
I was also on Comcast. To cancel they made me schedule a call. I just told them it was twice the speed and half the price which was basically true. They didn’t give me too much grief. They ask question, put me on hold for 5 minutes, ask another question, put me on hold for another 5 minutes, ask another question, another 5 mins hold, and cancelled.
Comcast service was good in our area. I think I called support 1 time in 10 years and that was my fault. Good IPv6 support.
Switching saved me ~$35 a month so no regrets. I went with 500Mbps.
No idea why these smaller ISPs can’t figure out ipv6. Mine doesnt support it either
When you cancel your Comcast, telling them you’re moving internationally ends things much faster than saying you’re switching providers.
Similar tactic for cellular service: tell them the company you work for is giving you a phone. That has worked for me in the past. It’s impossible for them to compete with free.
Lol when I did this they had the balls to ask me if I knew who was moving into the house I was currently selling so I could move to Germany. Fuck Comcast.
Incredible, right?! Telling them you’re moving internationally speeds up account cancelation, but they’ll still keep you on the phone for like ten minutes!
I assume you have a good story behind this
No idea, but fuck comcast.
Nepo baby operated company that wasted 100 billion dollars on brain dead business ventures while taking money from US taxpayer and failing to invest it as instructed, ie infrastructure. I guess they might be upgrading it now
They suck all around, I would never use them unless they are THE ONLY CHOICE.
I don’t really torrent much, and would use a vpn if I did anything I would worry about- however I do leave my computer up most of the time sharing a ton of old music on soulseek. I have never had a problem.
Hey, look, I found the one and only person who’s never had a problem with Comcast.
We’ve never had a problem with our Xfinity service either. We use both their cable internet and mobile service.
To be fair, I work in IT, we use our own equipment and the service was already hooked up when we bought the house so they just activated it in our name.
We’re a low need customer as I take care of most things myself.
I also work in tech, and was what you’d call a low need customer.
The Xfinity service in my entire neighborhood would go down almost daily, and sometimes more than twice a day. On top of that, it would sometimes cut out just long enough to disconnect my remote shells, causing me to have to reauthenticate. It was horrible, my new (community) fiber is a huge improvement. I think it’s gone down once since having it installed almost two years ago.
Price locked fiber? Crazy
With how tmobile set the stage, price locks are lies.
You probably don’t need 2GB. Maybe even not 1GB. I have 1GB Internet and love the speeds, but unless I’m downloading a game from steam, I never really max it out.
That said, for someone who grew up before the Internet and experienced 28K modems (and slower), it’s hella rude to sometimes just run ookla speed test for kicks.
What is actually being offered here? It says ‘2 gig’ in several places, I assume that means 2 Gb/s? No way that’s actually 2 GB/s, right?
I hate imprecise language in advertisements, smh
Quite likely it is 2Gb/sec (250MB/sec)
I am on a “1 Gig plan” (fiber,but with another provider) and I am able to upload AND download at nearly 1Gb (more close to 970M).
Main advantage over garbage like Comcast is the upload speed, which most US companies slash, trying to turn Internet into “consumption focused” medium, rather than exchange medium.
Network speeds are pretty much always advertised in bit/s not bytes so yes.
Ah, by the way, no imprecise language. Lowercase b = bit. Uppercase B = Byte. Gigabit and Gigabyte.
To get Gigabyte bandwidth, divide the Gigabits by 8 (8 bits in 1 byte)
So, 250MB per 1sec, or 2GB in 8sec.
Yeah, GB and Gb are clearly defined. But the flyer says “gig”
I’m closing in on 50, so I remember my 14.4 modems! I had aol! I don’t use steam even when shower, if I do it would be too hot! Honestly I only play 2 games, they are both for MS-DOS and I’m an avid linux user. Rather than play new fancy games I reverse engineer and modify old ones. My executables are like 1mb each. I am learning x86 dissasembly.
Well spill the beans ya old goat, which two games?!
more power to you m8 that is not so easy. I took intro computer architecture with one of the guys who wrote the manual for the first x86 processors at Intel and I still had a hard time
I scoured their website and they completely fail to explain what they are actually doing on a technical level. I assume it would probably be a GPON network, just based on the offered speed. Not the best type of fiber connectivity, but probably pretty normal for the USA market.
That said, single mode fiber is absolutely the way forward and if you replace the devices on the end it can scale almost indefinitely. So I would jump on the occasion of having some laid to your house.
They don’t have IPv6 and they don’t offer static IPs which both kind of sucks, but it might be acceptable: https://support.surfinternet.com/surf-broadband-fiber-faqs No data caps is good at least.
Concerning your question about the markings, they spell out their process on this page, it does include marking existing utilities: https://surfinternet.com/fiber-optic-installation-process/
According to their “About Us” page, they were a small business that is now financed by Post Road Group and Bain Capital. Creating competition for Comcast is a great thing, but I’d bet over the years those capital partners are going to demand enshittification for profit. I’d still drop Comcast like a rock though.
The excavation in the street sounds like the same thing Google Fiber did in my neighborhood, microtrenching fiber in the street along the curb. Has worked great for me for almost 10 years now
It would take literal decades of enshitification to be as bad as Comcast 🙏
Dunno, decades of enshittification might happen overnight, like a singularity. A shitgularity, as it were.
But Comcast/Xfinity is truly, truly horrible. Their tech support sucks and there are some account-related things you need to talk to them for. I feel stressed just thinking about it.
Bain capital? Run. Just run away as far as you can. Never ever do anything with them. They fuck up the world.
I’d go for it. Fuck, I’d go for anything right now. I’m paying $60 for a an average speed of about 1 mb down from T-Mobile, and that’s the best option here.
Rural?
Semirural.
You may as well call them and ask. Main things you want to find out are what plans/prices they offer and if they have any data caps. And/or if it’s still under construction definitely ask to be put on their list of interested customers.
Honestly just about anything fiber is going to be an improvement over Comcast cable internet… if I were you I’d at least inquire if they have a 1 gig download/upload plan and work from there. Good luck!
You would probably get better answers by looking for reviews of their service. Seems Surf Internet is a regional ISP, so it’s unlikely there are many of their customers here.
I wish I could get fiber. I’ve got pretty solid coax internet, but my upload speeds are maxed out constantly. Backing up my server can take days at 40mbps(max).
Call them and ask.
My block has buried lines. A block away, they have overheads. The new local fiber provider is only running lines along overheads for now, with plans to tackle buried lines in another few years. Despite sending me half a tree worth of mailers, they won’t run fiber to my house yet and the only way I was able to find that out was to call them up and talk to them.
I don’t know anything about this company, but fiber is almost always better than cable. Lower latency, more reliable, and it’s usually symmetric (upload speed is the same as download speed).
must be doing some construction on my street because they made survey marks on my property and painted where the gas line and water lines are. Could this be because they are putting in the fiber cables?
It’s possible! Those marks means that some sort of digging/excavation is happening nearby. The company that wants to do the work calls a “dial before you dig” service (811 in the USA) and all the utility companies come out and mark their lines.
I don’t know this company but fiber came into my area (central WI) a few years ago and I couldn’t be happier.
Prior to that the infrastructure I was on for cable internet was old and would have frequent problems.
The brand new infrastructure is figuratively worth its weight in gold, imho, even if the company itself is just as crap and your price ends up the same.
Even better, the fiber cables run underground, so other than having them severed when digging, they won’t go out unless there is a major widespread outage. No random branch taking out your service in a wind storm or whatever nonsense.
