Switching ISP Fiber Provider

This entry is mainly for people who live in my home county of Grant County, Washington and are connected to the Grant County Zipp Fiber Optics network...but others may find it of some value. I wanted to share the fact that I may have discovered a better provider of Internet services (so far, so good anyway) that is providing me blinding speed connections at a fair price. It is iFiber, located in Ephrata in the old VIB offices. Now, VIB was bought out some time ago by a company called HomeNet. Recently, HomeNet was purchased by iFiber. They apparently have made a major effort to provide the kind of high speed services that fiber optics can offer.

And, just to set the record straight, iFiber is not paying me or offering any kind of benefits for me talking about them in this blog. In fact, they don't even know I write a blog. These are just the facts as I have found them so far.

Now, many of you know, that I was with BentonREA and it's subsidiary PowerTelNet, one of the earliest providers of fiber optic Internet services in Grant County. We ran probably the fastest connections at that time...so I know what fiber optics is capable of for its users. For the last couple of years, I have been with a local provider who shall remain nameless, both for my home and studio. In the last few months, I noticed my Internet upload and download speed was very slow. I began running speed tests using both SpeedTest.net Web site and a built-in testing software that came with my network software. The results have been far less than spectacular. Most of the time I ran the tests during peak Internet usage hours, because that is when I use it the most. The download speed numbers ran anywhere from 450 kb/s to 1450 kb/s (kilobytes per second). Now, this is not good and is equivalent to a low-end DSL connection. Occasionally I would see 4,000 to 5,000 speed tests, but mostly they were 2,500 or below.

Fiber can be so much faster than DSL, or anything else for that matter. So, I did some research on current providers in our area and found iFiber's Web site. They offer two levels of service for the home user...a 6 and a 12 mb/s service, the latter being $5 more per month. I also found out that their business service, which is required for my studio, offers an even higher connection speed (at a higher price, of course). They said I would see download speeds at my studio of 15,000 to 20,000 kb/s. Now, that is at least 10 times higher than what I was getting. So, I made the switch at the studio and hoped it would be true.

It's true! Yesterday's speed test came in a 22,000+ kb/s during peak usage time. I am impressed, to say the least. I have run several tests at different times of the day and they all come back at this high rate. You can bet I will be switching my home connection to them at the end of this month. I don't expect to get quite the same download speed at home, but I will let you know.

I discovered another bonus when I went to Steve Gibson's Security Web site to run security tests on my new provider (I mentioned Gibson's site a couple of blogs ago). I went the his "Shield's Up" test site that can analyze the level of your protection right over the Net. Using the "Common Ports" part of his test, I discovered that iFiber's gateway does not use Reverse DNS, which is very good.

Without getting too techy, the "Common Ports" test has three possible outcomes for your computer...Open Ports, Closed Ports, and Stealth Ports. Open, is of course very bad, meaning your computer is wide open to anybody who wants in. Closed Ports is better and means hackers normally can't get in the easy way, but it still shows you exist. Stealth Ports is the best results because hackers cannot even see that you are there. The test on my previous provider showed Closed Ports, meaning my router was blocking intruders, but I could still be seen. With iFiber's service, all my ports are reported as Stealth, meaning my ports and, for that matter, my computer(s) can't even be seen. Now, that is good. I'm invisible!!

Now, I have only been with them for a couple of days so, time will tell if they really are a good provider, but so far, so good and it is nice to get the best bang for my buck, especially on super high speed fiber optic system. But, if I were you, regardless of who your provider is, I would run some speed tests and use the "Shield's Up" test just to see how secure you are.