Who locally in rural Woodstock, Vermont, or the surrounding areas uses 7M Consolidated Communications (Fairpoint) Internet and how can I boost the speed?
How’s it going for you? Do you have any suggestions for boosting internet speed? The internet at our new house is pokey and makes working from home difficult. We’d love suggestions! And yes, Consolidated Communications is currently our only option until EC Fiber is brought to Woodstock, which won’t be happening until 2022.
Answers ( 2 )
Ryan, I just checked out Consolidated’s website. Looks like they offer 7M, 25M, and “blazing” 100M service. You’re likely running into problems with the connection speed of 7mbps just being way too slow for today’s business applications. A single big download could easily fill your pipe. A YouTube video streaming could also fill it up as they will go from 300 kbps to 3 Mbps if available.
Also, I’d start with testing your internet speeds by going to http://speedtest.net. How close to 7Mbps are you getting on download speed? Also, with a 7Mbps download speed, your upload speed is also probably being throttled. Theoretical maximums for cable uploads are around 35-40Mbps, but you likely are being limited to 1-2 Mbps by Consolidated.
The first thing I’d do is upgrade to 25 or 100Mbps if it’s available to you. If not, see how close to 7Mbps you get when you’re right next to the wifi box. If you walk to the edges of the house and your download speed drops demonstrably, you’ll probably benefit from a wifi mesh solution like Google Wifi or Orbi.
But neither solution can help much if your baseline download speed sucks. They both will help tremendously if you’re just having a signal strength problem within your house.
Foolproof is to run a wired connection from your router.
You can improve wireless experience by making sure your wireless router has updated firmware (the rest of the tips are also great). Wireless data is transmitted through radio frequencies, you can also try tuning the antenna by rotating the router and moving it higher. I've seen serious speed differences after pointing a router at a device.