I have had cable internet for many years and with that internet provider, I have had very little to no issues or complaints really. Well almost none. My bill had gone up quite a bit in recent months and my upload speed was less than desirable. At the time I was at around 20mB up. While this upload speed is good and more than enough for most people, it was barely adequate for my needs with what I do. Especially since I host many services locally and need a good upload speed to serve that content externally.
The lack of upload speed was noticeable with my cloud storage but even more so with my media server, while watching movies and video content remotely. While it worked the way it was, the videos needed to be transcoded and caused quality and buffering issues quite frequently. I was also looking to start hosting websites locally more. And 20mB up would cause long loading times compared to a cloud-hosted site. So I was in the market for finding a solution to improve our upload speed.
A colleague of mine, Jeff from Coding Adventures, told me about another internet provider that offered fiber internet in my area. I was intreaged as it offered better connectivity at a much better price than where we were at currently. I got signed up and less than a week later an installation tech was at our house to get us setup.
The installation tech seemed knowledgeable enough and told me he had a background in IT. We got the fiber run to our house but when we went to run it inside the house he tried to convince me that there were too many turns to get the fiber to my network rack and that bluetooth was a much better option. I had a really hard time believing this would work with bluetooth. But was curious how this was possible. He proposed that we put the ONT right on the inside of an exterior wall of my garage and that we could use bluetooth to connect the ONT to my network rack. I tried to reason with him a number of times but he refused to work with me on how I wanted to wire this up in my own home. He claimed wiring this up with bluetooth was much better. And he also claimed the speed that goes into this mysterious bluetooth system, is the same speed I will get when it reaches my network.
Considering this man was the "expert", and I have limited experience with fiber, and never had fiber in my home before, I conceded to his plan. However, I was not impressed and didn't think this would work for me long term. I think I would have pushed back a lot more if he had used better terminology and I had more fully understood his plan and what this bluetooth was. I started asking a lot of questions and learning as much as I could about fiber, ONTs, and this bluetooth system. In hopes that I would change this setup and fix all this after he left. And if that didn't work, I was willing to fall back to my current cable internet provider.
After we got the ONT up and running in my garage and tested the connection, it was time to get it connected to my network. The plan was to use bluetooth to send the internet to my network rack where my router was located. Turns out, it wasn't bluetooth at all but, two Amazon eero Pro's linked together. Ethernet out of the ONT into the first eero and then a wireless wifi network to the second eero, where we'd take ethernet from that eero into my router. So not only was this not bluetooth, it was yet another wifi network, and in doing this created a double nat for my network. To top it off, this capped my speed to less than 250Mb which was a far lower speed than what I was paying for.
After we confirmed I had internet in my network, I thanked him for his time and he left for his next job. Then over the next week, I proceeded to do more research and prove that the technical limitations he claimed to be "too many turns" was wrong. And I did. I talked to a number of IT professionals and sysadmins who are experts in their field, as well as lots of online research. Everyone saying the same thing, and having turns in the fiber is not an issue, just as long as the turns aren't too tight of a turn.
I went to work, redoing almost everything the installation tech did for us, and cleaning up the mess he created with our network. I routed the fiber into my house to the network rack, like I wanted, and connected the ONT directly to my router, eliminating the two eero units, the extra wifi network, the double nat, and the cap of internet speed. I have full internet speed now and full control over my network. Also with everything in my network rack, all my equipment is now again all centrally located and on the UPS backup power supplies.
I'm not sure why he was so adamant about not connecting the fiber to my home the way I wanted, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because of technical limitations, like he claimed, but more so because he didn't want to or feel like it. I'm not all that surprised though since this internet service provider isn't known for good customer service. At the end of the day, I have it connected the way I want, it works better than the tech did it, and I have a good story to tell.