Productivity Switching From Copper to Fibre

Note: This is a completely unsponsored post. I have no internet during this installation, so I literally have nothing to do, as I need to update Gradle and Cocoapods on my app development projects - so I’m sitting back and writing in the meantime.

Currently, my internet provider is TekSavvy who runs on top of lines run by Bell or Rogers. With TekSavvy, I’m paying $43/month for a DSL line at 15Mbps down and 7Mbps up, with a 400 GB per month transfer limit.

Beanfield is a Toronto-based company which is routing fibre optic cable along the lake and providing high-speed, unlimited downloads to the condo buildings and businesses on/near the lake.

Beanfield’s cheapest plan is 100Mbps down/100Mbps up with no download limits for $45/month… So this was kind of a no-brainer to try out.

[… Some time later…]

Beanfield installation has completed, and my new wifi router is also setup. Here are the results from my last few minutes of Teksavvy and my first few minutes of Beanfield. For simplicitly, and re-tryability, I’m just running Ookla’s speed test 3-4 times in a row and giving a screen shot of the ‘typical’ test. Scientific? No. Good enough for my purposes? Absolutely.

Disclaimer: One big caveat is that I’m doing this test over Wifi - so the router comes into play, as does… well… WiFi - and my Teksavvy DSL wifi router is about 1.5 years old, whereas my Beanfield router is brand new. I truly don’t believe this was a significant factor in my results, as my results show that I’m at the rated performance I’m paying for in both instances.

TekSavvy’s Copper Results

TekSavvy’s gentlemanly 15/7 performing a little bit over it’s specified rating.

Beanfield’s Fibre Results

As one of my friends questioned, “After what? Tying into the [expletive deleted] matrix?”

Feature Photo credit: PixelPlacebo / Foter / CC BY-NC