Fiber, is a long strand of glass. When you turn on a light the light travels along the glass and is read by the modem.
Old cable is copper, and it is a signal sent along the copper, think of electricity on a copper line.
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Fiber is faster, because it can go at the speed of light. Cable is slower because it gets held up travelling through the copper.
Fiber to the home means they have put the glass cable right up to your house, which means you are now capable of enormous speeds.
What speeds will you get? That all depends on their server sitting on the other end of the wire. Lets say your cable can now do 10gbit. They would need to install a 10gbit server on the other end, and remove all bottlenecks along the way, and get a really massive conncetion themselves like 100's of gbit, so many people could be downloading at 10gbit at the same time.
So in reality they give you slower speeds, like 100 - 500mb, if youre lucky 1gbit.
It will require a different modem, but its future proof, your connection is capable of way faster than you can go now.
The old copper cable, is pretty much at its maximum capacity now, it will only get modest upgrades.
Some people have fiber to the cabinet, and then copper to the home. This means you dont have the glass cable to your home.
This means you are limited to the speed of the copper line between you and the isp server. The length of the copper cable plays a huge part in this, the longer it is, the slower the singal, the slower your internet.
In an ideal world, you want fiber to the home. |