She's Wired gets Google Fiber
Google Fiber trucks in our Atlanta neighborhood.
On a sunny Tuesday morning She’s Wired changed forever with the arrival of two white vans bearing the magical words “Google Fiber”.
Our Google Fiber friend.
Our new friends knocked on the door, and we ushered them in hoping that our dreams of incredibly fast internet would shortly come true. In their hands was a bright blue bag holding our new Google Fiber router.
Before getting started with installation, they took the time to talk with us about what we wanted (and pose for a couple of pictures). We used their new router and our own router so we can keep our Smart-Home devices separate from our work computers, thus keeping our information more secure.
One of our Google Fiber buddies asked us to run a speed test before getting started. With our old provider, the download speed was 51 megabytes per second (Mbps) and upload speed was 11 Mbps.
Our new friend runs a speed test.
Our two new Google friends got right to work, running a cable from the new box on the side of the house across our basement ceiling, and finally through the wall where our new modem would be plugged in. The cable actually has glass in it, so they ended up running two cables because glass in the first one broke.
After less than an hour, in which our internet was never turned off, we had Google Fiber! Another speed test on our desktop which is hardwired to the router showed download speeds of 646 Mbps and upload speeds of 928 Mbps!
On WiFi the speeds were 200-300 Mbps in the living room and basement office.
Since our install, we’ve kept our smart home devices on our original router. The speeds we’re getting are not as fast as the 200-300 Mbps (closer to 60-70 Mbps), but we feel safer having the ability to keep our smart home devices separate from our work computers. We urge Google to consider an option that will allow for the separation of networks for computers and smart devices.
Overall, our experience with the Google Fiber installation was easy, customer service was exceptional, and we’ve been very happy with the consistent high speeds.
The She's Wired team gets a speed boost from Google Fiber.