Telus, our local telco this past year chose Creston as one of the small towns to revamp with fibre optic to the building. This is a major upgrade for their customers who have previously had access to 3 or 6 Mbps ADSL, Shaw's services or Point-to-point wireless offered by one of two loal providers. Telus is offering up to 100 Mbps Internet speeds and their Optik TV service, moving may folks from the rebranded Bell Satellite service to a product fully under their umbrella.
Our installation occurred in late September, and was very smooth, at least for us. Our street was constructed about 30 years ago with underground services, and some of the conduits have become crushed or blocked in some way. Fortunately, ours was not, else we'd have had to wait while they dug up my neighbour's concrete driveway, not a happy thought! The team from Telus was able to pull the new fibre behind an unused cable originally installed when the house was built - leaving the active copper cable in place.
A few days letter, the Telus team completed the installation of the ONT and ethernet connections to my computer and TVs in the manner I wanted, set things up and confirmed proper operation of it all and were on their way. We're now enjoying our higher speed Internet, and Optik TV. Here are some of the changes we've noticed:
- Most, but not all webpages load faster.
- Software updates are speedy. For instance, updates of iTunes store apps which often took greeter than half an hour now complete in minutes.
- Video no longer stalls, so YouTube, Netflix and Apple TV are a joy to use.There is less interference between users. We have as many as 14 devices connected to our network, 8 to 9 of which may be connected to the internet at any given time. At times in the past, one user on the network might impact others using it, slowing their download immensely. This no longer occurs.