I’ve been giving most of the details over on Facebook, but I thought I should nail down this big step in getting our gigabit fiber Internet service. The crew from USI came and brought the fiber from the junction box on the side of the house through to the ethernet switch they installed on the wiring panel.
So far as I know, actual Internet through this is still scheduled for sometime in the first two weeks of June.
Also, note the support for a serial “console port”!
Just before Minicon we learned that USI Internet is bringing their fiber trunk up our street. And of course immediately signed up for 1Gb (symmetric!) service.
 
Today, they came and put the conduit from the boulevard over to where the junction box on the outside of the house is. Progress! (Meanwhile I’m working on upgrading the internal network to be able to deal with this kind of external bandwidth.)
Just checked whois for the domain eol.com. Not surprised that it’s owned, glad it appears to be by a real owner rather than a squatter.
But look at that ip address!
People sometimes notice, and complain, that they can’t get the bandwidth they’re contracted for consistently. We certainly do.
However, in all fairness to the providers, most residential connections aren’t used very heavily at all. To offer competitive prices, the upstream connections need to be oversubscribed (at least with DSL, we really can get our full contracted bandwidth as far as the first router at Qwest, because that last mile of copper is not shared).
Our household has four adults who use the internet fairly heavily, including for Netflix streaming and such. One of us works from home across the internet.
And here’s what our last week of usage looks like:
This is based on sampling of counters in the router via SNMP every five minutes; our actual peaks certainly go higher than that (the connection has an inbound rated speed of 7 megabits). Also note that the chart is in bytes; that top line represents 3.52 megabits per second, a full half of the rated speed.
(And to those few of you who may be thinking this looks rather a lot like an MRTG chart, yes, it does, doesn’t it?)
You may be seeing “+1” boxes appearing places. Like on individual blog articles, and photo gallery pages, and individual photo pages. And soon, booknotes. This is part of my Google+ integration; no idea if it’s going to turn out to be useful to either me or you.  But that’s what it is.