Spectrum Dedicated Fiber Price Decrease

xmd

Hi everyone - I just migrated over from DSLReports. Bummer that it’s gone.

I’m one of the weird ducks who has Spectrum Fiber installed in my residence.

[Edit to clarify: this is Spectrum Enterprise Fiber - there is no Spectrum residential fiber in my area]

It’s been great in terms of reliability, super low ping times, but I’ve been paying $375/month for 25mbit symmetrical.

Every 6 months for the past … 5+ years, I’ve been asking them for more speed, but the quoted costs have been insane.

Until recently - I just got a quote for 100 mbps for $450/month, which seems almost reasonable compared to the $700-$1000 they were quoting me for the past five years.

I have seen other fiber companies (ATT, Ting) getting closer to my neighborhood, so I wonder if this means they are fearing competition?

Janus67

out of curiosity, why are you paying that much for that slow of speed? you could have their 1gbit download with a higher upload (although not by much) for less than a third of that cost. Is that all that’s available to you?

MacLeech

xmd It sounds like you’re paying for an Enterprise Fiber service offering, not residential.

xmd

Correct - this is Enterprise Fiber. A big motivation was ping, as I was running some servers on a protocol that was very latency-sensitive. The 1-5msec from Spectrum fiber was so much better than Spectrum Business (DOCSIS) which seems to be 20-30msec. A somewhat unique/special situation. Since my clients were paying the bills, I wanted to make them happy.

So that’s “business”

I also have “pleasure” internet, which is also Spectrum DOCSIS cable - 400/20. It’s cheap, in all senses of the word.

I’m curious what will happen if/when High Split comes to town, as that may change things quite a bit.

alpine_56

That’s a crazy amount to be paying for such slow speeds to me! I wouldn’t spend much more than the $80 a month I do now for symmetrical Gig fiber with Spectrum. But it isn’t enterprise level either, just regular consumer grade. My pings almost never get above 8 ms which is nice too.

SPC-Texas

Your post makes no sense. Are you trolling us?

xmd

@SPC-Texas - it’s not clear who you are accusing of trolling. so that’s not a very useful comment. Care to clarify your concern or confusion?

xmd

alpine_56 I wouldn’t spend much more than the $80 a month I do now for symmetrical Gig fiber with Spectrum.

Absolutely agree, but when you live in a neighborhood that basically has one provider (Spectrum), you take what you can get.

Also, I’m guessing on your $80 plan you don’t have a SLA, you don’t get more than one IP address, etc.? Or is that $80 for a business-level plan?

SPC-Texas

Sorry, I guess I didn’t know fiber could be that slow and the price is outrageous. It seems they are really soaking it to business customers. I confess I don’t understand why ping is that important and it doesn’t seem like 25 meg bandwidth would support multiple customers. My residential service is now about 900 × 900 on high split for $100. And competition is a big factor. in addition to Spectrum high split, there are two fiber lines running up the alley behind my house.

xmd

This was for a particular use case where latency was critical, but in general I think people often underestimate the importance of low latency in making a connection feel “responsive.”

A high bandwidth connection with bad ping time will often feel subjectively worse than a lower bandwidth connection with faster ping time, in many situations.

But yeah, if I could have high bandwidth and low ping time without paying a fortune, I’d be all in!

jma89

SPC-Texas This is what’s known as DIA - Dedicated Internet Access. That circuit does not share bandwidth with any other customers, hence the “dedicated” part. (Edit to add: This means the 25 Mbps he’s paying for has been engineered to exist (and is thus reserved) from his DEMARC all the way to edge-of-network when it hits some sort of peering location.)

It also comes with some pretty strict SLAs that provide contractual obligations for service uptimes and performance characteristics.

(It also has 0 of the “don’t host stuff” restrictions that a residential service may have. While Charter doesn’t have those restrictions on their Business DOCSIS plans, their Enterprise Fiber is geared to be competitive against the big-boys in the B2B space: AT&T, Sprint (yes, really), Frontier, Level3 (or whatever’s left of them), etc.)

Man-of-Leisure

I’m surprised they even still have 25Mb as an option.

Most of them have 100Mb as the slowest dedicated fiber option, and the price difference between 100Mb and 1Gb is usually pretty small at this point.

Even 1Gb vs. 10Gb isn’t that huge any more.

Comcast was giving residential customers 10Gb MetroE for $300/month, though they apparently no longer sell that to new customers.

cr0ntab

Nice I followed your thread on the old forums about this. Glad to see you’re still around!

The price decrease is nice!

Are you month to month at this point or still on a contract? When I inquired last they wanted me to do a 3yr contract term.

xmd

Yes, this price does reset me back onto a 3 year term (but they gave me a few months free service to sweeten the deal, so it’s not bad).

I suppose if I wake up tomorrow and find that Ting Fiber or ATT has come to my address, I might regret the 3 year commitment? At the moment I’m just happy to get 4x speeds for under $75 more.

Smith6612

I’ve always found Spectrum to be a bit more on the high side when it comes to their Fiber pricing. Paying $375/m for 25Mbps isn’t surprising to me. I’ve heard of quotes for much more, and then they start cramming bundles for DDoS protection down your throat to bring the price down. There was a case I saw on Reddit a few months ago where someone was being quoted something in the ballpark of $900/m for a 100Mbps circuit, but Spectrum would drop it down to $650/m if they included DDoS protection. This was on a circuit that already existed, and the person was simply trying to order more bandwidth.

Meanwhile I have 2Gbps circuits with companies like Crown Castle that are v4/v6 dual stack and cost around $1,000/m. In an area where Spectrum has Fiber already at the doorstep.

For Spectrum to be dropping their Enterprise Fiber pricing either tells me that Fiber competition in the Enterprise space has been heating up, or they have decided that the Fiber line to your house has been paid for and they can start to cut you some slack on that Dedicated circuit.

rebus9

For DIA delivered over enterprise fiber, in our particular market Charter is around 20-25% higher than Frontier on Gigabit service. I know because we use both carriers at $DAYJOB.

Astyanax

xmd Also, I’m guessing on your $80 plan you don’t have a SLA, you don’t get more than one IP address, etc.? Or is that $80 for a business-level plan?

I was going to say if you’re paying that much I assume you can fold your arms and blink and a Spectrum tech will appear at your door at 3 am on a Sunday if you want! 😄

xmd

I ended up going for 100Mbps DIA Spectrum fiber for $450/month, and they gave me a few free months to sweeten the deal.

Guess what? Now I’m hungry for even more bits per second. Apparently this stuff is addictive?

Latest Spectrum quote was 200Mbps for $525 /month on a Five year term, or $600/month to month.

For other providers:

Although Ting fiber keeps emailing me, seems like they’ve stalled out and are not coming any time soon.
ATT Fiber, which showed up about ½ mile from me in a new development, seems to have stalled and is not heading my direction either.

The jump from 25mbps to 100 was very noticeable and definitely worth it. I’m less sure the jump from 100 to 200 would be life changing.

MacLeech

xmd Guess what? Now I’m hungry for even more bits per second. Apparently this stuff is addictive?

Always has been. The bandwidth addiction has kept me employed and busy for over 2 decades now through half a dozen different companies. Spent a few days, a few weeks ago installing a couple dozen 400gb and even more 100gb links for new equipment I racked. 25+ years ago I started with 10mb ethernet links and DS3 backhaul.