r/googlefiber

I had a door to door salesmen sell me on AT&T Fiber today. I am currently using GFiber and have reliable 3gb service for $100 a month. The plan I will be getting with AT&T will be 5GB for $100 a month grandfathered rate never to go up. My work pays me $100 for my internet so this price makes sense. A few other things I noted:

- 5 meshboxes from AT&T vs 1 from GFiber.

- $200 gift card for signing up

- Waived installation/signup fees.

- Some other jargon about how the wifi works better in general but that could just be salesman talk.

Some other notes: I work from home and use a wired connected for both gaming and work PC. All other devices are on wifi. I am in the Kansas City area.

Is this too good to be true or is this actually a good deal?

I’ve had Google Fiber for almost five years and have never been truly satisfied with the speeds. For the longest time, I had 1st gen equipment with frequent downtimes. Even with the new equipment replaced for free a year or two ago, I see inexplicable slow speeds at different times of the day, in different rooms and different devices with no rhyme or reason.

Sometimes unplugging and replugging power fixes it, other times it doesn’t. Sometimes the problem shows up on diagnostics, other times it doesn’t. Even wired connections like tv or Apple TV buffer for 1-4 seconds. Many times the speed tests are fine but actual speeds are not good (I know about WiFi being slower than wired).

If you call support, they will do the basic troubleshooting, tell you everything is fine, or schedule a tech to come out. Granted that techs are smart people with good skills, it goes back to the same frustrating speeds again a day or week later. No one has time to keep calling them and going thru troubleshooting.

I’m genuinely thinking about going back to Spectrum - I’m sure they will be happy to offer gigabit service for less. Is anyone else experiencing this?

The house I'm moving into has fiber but no jack. Gfiber won't send me a jack, they won't send me a technician to give me a jack until after I move.

I can't create a second account to tie to the new address because the address is stuck in my main account with the move request when I cancelled it.

Support doesn't work. They've escalated it twice, "please wait 24 hours", "please wait 48 hours". I've waited and got told the escalations themselves were cancelled.

For the love of everything, do not move your service. Create another account and start fresh. Avoid support, they'll tell you they're working on it but they're not. It doesn't seem like they can review prior conversations, no notes, just a blank "agent" that needs to be filled in with all the information every single time you sign in.

My connection to the local Gfiber service is perfect rock solid 0% packet loss.

They host a local speedtest.net node which makes it easy enough to check.

2ms latency, no reported packet loss, 900ish MBPS up/down

If that were my ISP's only job we would be golden...

Sadly, anything PAST that has 15% - 50% packet loss. and\or low transfer rates

This includes Speedtest nodes hosted by ISPS in San Antonio (ATT,. Spectrum etc etc) and anything further afield.

The packet loss is not randomly/evenly distributed, it comes in chunks, with the predictable impact of extremely spiky latency.

The interconnect to ATT specifically seems to be particularly terrible, with transfer rates stuck firmly in the single digits.

Contacting support obviously only results in the typical script reader trying to troubleshoot the perfectly good connection between me and the Gfiber servers, but I pay for connection to the internet not to Gfibers San Antonio servers.

So, I am no network engineer, that's the limit of my internet sleuthing capacity.

How should I go about collecting useful/actionable data to demonstrate the issue, and how can I report it to someone who can do more than ask if i've tried turning it off and on again?

To those on the 2gb/1gb plan, I just called and scheduled my upgrade to the 3gb/3gb plan. Same cost of $100 per month!!

I think this new plan will be the replacement for the 2gb plan, but not sure it will be automatic. The rep said the system is forcing a tech to come out to do the upgrade, even though I should have the equipment needed already. They are also replacing the wifi 6e router with a wifi 7 one.

Just thought anyone in Irvine might want to know!

I updated my other posts, but I figured it dedicated post was the way to go as well. The team that monitors this subreddit are above and beyond. It's a stark contrast compared to the normal help desk line we call.

I can't recommend enough this team for complicated service issues. The rep that called me with 30 minutes of making my post here, remembered our conversation from the initial install way back when. Obviously it was in his Reddit DM history, but those are the kind of details that matter.

Again, thank you to Luke, Lee, Gregory, and any names I messed up or have left out. You guys are rock stars.

🤗🙏🙇👍

We had google fiber installed a couple months ago and still have the temporary line laying across the front yard. We have called several times to have the temp line removed… a ticket is “created“ each time and then nothing is done. Canceling…. good luck to everyone!

This might be a coincidence, but immediately after switching to Google Fiber, by phone has been constantly cycling on/off the wifi. I have many wifi devices but, as far as I know, only my phone exhibits this behavior.

The LAN from the GFiber box is plugged into a 3rd party router, which is subsequently plugged into a switch, and to the switch is connected a wireless AP. I have numerous devices on the wired and wireless network.

Any tips to troubleshoot?

This is mainly for the GFiber guys watching this thread. And of course for anyone else in the same situation.
GFiber originally laid the main line in the private road. Here’s the rub - we are going to mill and repave the road early next year. That’ll peel up all of the neighborhoods fiber. ATT has conduit that’s available but GF has to move the line.
I absolutely cannot find anyone at GFiber that seems to know a thing about what to do and when to do it. I’m hoping one of the guys here can help get the right person in touch.
Cases are old and closed since the onsite tech could do nothing about this. Sorry guys.

I've been a GF customer for about 10 years now - never any issues. I was working in a flower bed one winter's day and accidentally cut the GF cable. After an hour or so getting through the gatekeeper, my issue was passed on to the local office. Not even an hour goes by and I got a knock on my door. Wow - that was quick. In the interest of getting me up and running ASAP, he pulled a - I don't know - a 250 foot roll of cable from his truck and, since it was pre-terminated on both ends hooked it up to the street and dropped the rest of the roll below the house box and hooked it up. GF up and running. He said someone else would come out and reterminate and bury the cable. It took a while (months?), and after I came back from an extended vacation I noticed they cut a slit in my grass and stuffed the cable in there. I looked at the house box and noticed they zip-tied the GF to the outside of the conduit instead of running it up through it. Today I was back in the flower bed to finish up and found the roll of GF that they buried at the foot of the box.

This bothers me. A lot. I want to rerun the GF through the conduit but i'm afraid it is too fragile. Plus, I don't want to just bury that for someone else to discover on down the road, but what choice do I have?

https://preview.redd.it/h0von5t2nrzg1.png?width=1285&format=png&auto=webp&s=717bfe50c898ece1022333c88e1855464a8b2cf5

https://preview.redd.it/rmf018t2nrzg1.png?width=907&format=png&auto=webp&s=2f4f3aedbcd62a77e73ed72098eabd8479f47ed6

Well I've been a customer for almost a year now I think, and I'm experiencing my first outage. Yesterday I woke up and I noticed a new fiber going from the box in my yard between my house and my neighbor, all the way to the backyard and then across the back of my neighbor's yard. Not sure where it goes after that.

Thought to myself "Hmmm, I guess my neighbor signed up.". I went about my day and then about 4:30 p.m my fiber goes dark. I wait a little while, finally call them as the evening is getting to the point where I want to watch TV and they tell me they see the outage and they expect to be fixed by 8:00 p.m. Okay cool, so I wait, come 8:00 p.m. still no service.

Okay I've been down this road before with previous providers, so I check the Google outage tool. I put in my address, and it says there's a power outage and once the power comes back on I'll have internet. But there's no power outage in my neighborhood. So I call them, and they explain to me that "oh it's a widespread outage affecting not just me and that they expect to have it resolved by 11:00 p.m.". At this point I said the heck with it and I was in bed by 11:00 p.m.

I get up in the morning still no service. I called them again, and this time they tell me they've escalated the ticket and that it's going to take 24 to 48 hours to fix and that they've got a crew assigned. What utter bollocks! Nothing is wrong with the fiber from that box in my yard to my house, it's got to be at the junction. How long does it freaking take to get me back online?

So coming home from work I call them again, and this time they tell me the installation is in progress and it should be done by tomorrow or the next day. I asked them "What installation I'm in an outage?". Then the customer service agent says oh yeah I see it's a repair.

So now I'm thinking to myself is that fiber line between my house and my neighbor, some kind of a repair uplink to the junction? If so, why did I lose servicer hours after it was run? I will tell you why, so maybe it was working in the junction box or the pedestal up the street and screwed up my fiber and now I'm a low priority for him apparently. Why hasn't there been a truck out here working the issue every freaking day?

The transparency of the issue and the accuracy of the customer support agents is horrible.

I'm immediately shopping for a new provider, never in all my years of working in IT have I had a residential provider take this long to get me back online. So much for working from home eh? I'll take Comcast back at this rate.

/End rant

A yellow vest wearing person emblazoned with GFiber showed up at our door today. He ignored our clearly posted No Solicitors sign. Why? We don't have Google Fiber. No work is going in around here related to Google Fiber. It seems like a cheap sales tactic making it seem like a "technician" has something important to say only to quickly turn it into a sales pitch.

This is not a good look for a multi-trillion dollar company.

Anyone else having issues signing in to the their google fiber account?

Getting a "We can't find a GFiber account for this email" or "We don't recognize this email" when signing in via web or phone app.

Anyone else having issues?

I live in Raleigh NC and have had gfiber for 2-3 years and overall have been happy with the service. But over the last couple of months, outages have been frequent and long, with the latest beginning Friday evening.

Other than talking to support twice a day, being told a resolution is coming and unplugging/plugging in equipment, what can I do? Is there a way to escalate the problem?

Five days without service seems inconceivable.

My family is currently with Cox for our ISP, but Google Fiber has been made available to us. For $60 we have 1GB, while with Google Fiber it is $70 for the same data.

Does the use of Fiber make that much of a difference?

My family is big into streaming and has multiple devices connected to the WiFi.