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Ask HN: What questions to ask a new/relatively unknown telco now offering fiber

3 points by garciasn ↗ HN
Local telco is running fiber to my lake home. They are doing so with a state grant and are relatively unknown and located in a town with a population less than 1,400.

I work from here all summer and want to make certain I’m covering all my bases before I drop the 25/2 DSL we get via TDS telecom.

Thanks!

2 comments

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nobody9999
What questions would I ask? Here are a few:

What bandwidth tiers do you offer? Are those numbers "best effort" or do you provide a minimum bandwidth guarantee?

Do you provide an SLA[0] and if so, What are the repair/service response time commitments for the telco?

The bandwidth offered is symmetric, yes?

What equipment, if any, do I need to provide for connection? That is, where is the demarcation point between the telco's equipment/responsibility and mine, and what sort of handoff (ethernet, presumably) will I get from the telco equipment?

Do you have IPv6 support? If so, may I have a /64 block?

Assuming the answers to those questions meet with your approval, I'd add these two as well:

How fast can you complete the install?

How can I assist in speeding up that process?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-level_agreement

h2odragon
If you can justify the expense, keep the DSL and get fiber too. Have your own multihomed redundant connection. Become invulnerable to either services' foibles.

Your connection will stay up until some guy with a backhoe digs up the only fiber into town. You could add an LTE modem and a satellite (not starlink) dish, tho, and get a little more grip.