TLDR: It's awesome. See if it's available for your home or business here.

Metronet Fiber (FTTH: Fiber to the home)

Fiber Internet is "the ultimate" internet. It is state of the art, technology. It provides absolutely ridiculous latency and speed. You also often get a killer-deal as we have with Metronet.

Fiber refers to a different type of wire than we are used to. Just about every wire you have ever handled conducts electricity. They are made of some metal, typically copper or gold-plated - to increase the efficiency of these wires. Fiber is different. It doesn't use electrical currents. Instead it uses the fastest thing known to exist in the universe: light. A fiber-optic wire is essentially a glass mirror tube in which a laser transmits data by pulses of light on one end. The other side receives these pulses and converts them at some point back into electrical signals which are utilized by various equipment.

Light does indeed travel faster than electrical current. If more bandwidth should be necessary, another interesting ability is that you can transmit multiple streams of information simultaneously using different light frequencies (colors).

Another benefit of Fiber is that it carries the information much further than traditional forms of communication using electrical signals. A made-up example would be your link back to the cable company's main office. A fiber-optic signal may be able to travel 20 miles before needing an amplifier, where your traditional coax wire will need an amplifier every mile or two.

The last primary benefit of fiber is it's immunity to electrical interfearance. Phone and cable wiring being electro-magnetic has to contend with everything around that may interfear with the signal. This "noise" can come from your cell phone, an electrical tower, a light-bulb on your desk or even the sun and stars. Fiber, being an optical signal (light-based) is not sceptable to any of these interfearing factors. This has many positive effects including reliability and speed.

Where ethernet typically tops out at 1 Gigabit per second, Fiber can reach over 100 Gigabit per second and more.

With so much bandwidth potential, the cost for providing these high-speeds plumets.

With Metronet, we are on a packaged special delivering 1 Gigabit Symmetrical Internet (meaning 1Gb/s down, AND 1Gb/s upload) for around $60/Month. That's 1000Mb/s upload and download for $60 per month. You'll typically get between 50-200Mb/s on cable for that price. With ATT Uverse you will likely be paying more, and getting less due to the nature of phone-wiring. (This is of course unless you have ATT Fiber Uverse)

Our actual speedtest results are displayed in the image on the left. This is while streaming several videos. The 2 m/s ping time is amazing - and would play a significant role in online-gaming. The bandwidth being over 900 up and down means you would be able to transmit and receive things almost instantly. It took less than 10 seconds to download the entire windows 10 ISO. Uploading large videos is also almost instant. Most computers have network cards that max out at 1Gb/s. Simply amazing!

One potential downside to Metronet is their use of "CGNAT". Carrier Grade Network Address Translation, while being a mouthful, is not too difficult to understand, as this already exists on a smaller level in your home. Almost all of us have routers. One of the primary functions of a router is to share a single IP address among all the devices in your home. You typically will get only one IP address from your internet provider; yet you need to connect 15 different devices to the internet. Your router obtains and uses the "public" ip address from your ISP on one-side of it's network. Then you have a "private network", in which each device connected to the router has an IP address that really doesn't exist on the internet. When your computer, with a private IP address makes a request go load PcComputerGuy.com, your router receives that request, then relays it to the internet provider. The router then receives the PcComputerGuy website and then relays that information to the initial computer.

With Metronet, the same thing happens on an ISP level. The result of this is your equipment doesn't have it's own unique IP address. For the average user this may not be an issue; but if you host any kind of servers, possibly security systems or other things you "dial into", you may not be able to make that connection. The only way to have the ability to "dial in" is to request a static IP from Metronet. For Metronet this costs an additional $10/month (first year free).

There were a couple surprise fee's on our invoice such as a "technology fee" and a billing fee. This adds $15 onto our monthly bill. The end result is we currently pay $75/month for 1000Mb/s upload and 1000Mb/s download. This is of course WAY more than I would recommend for any home user, we simply couldn't resist at that price. The average home would do well with 50Mb/s internet. Metronet offers 100, 200, 500 and 1000Mb/s packages. For the typical home user any of these packages will be far more than enough.

Overbuilds such as Metronet often struggle financially and sometimes end up failing and shutting down. This is something to be aware of when switching to one of the "smaller guys" compared to Comcast, Spectrum or ATT. That being said, if that were to happen with Metronet, I would imagine someone else would buy the company in order to gain access to all that fiber ran directly to people's homes. If that were to happen, subscribers typically have several months to adjust as needed.

Metronet also offers TV and Phone service, none of which we use - so we can't comment on this. We did compare prices and it seemed better than ATT's offerings.

As always, we recommend NOT using the internet providers email system. It's better to get a free outlook.com account for a number of reasons. Outlook.com is a much better email platform, it's one of the largest platforms so everyone else must work with it, it will have vastly better spam filters and most importantly, you won't be married to your internet service provider.

Metronet is available in northern Indianapolis, Carmel, Fishers and other surrounding areas.

For internet use, we give Metronet Fiber internet a 8/10 rating and definitely encourage any of our clients that have it available - to make the switch.

You can check if metronet is available and view packages with this link. If you choose to subscribe using this link, we receive a referral discount; however that in no way influences our recommendation to subscribe to metronet. If you do sign up with our link, Thank you! Your support helps us continue to provide free tech tips and education to everyone on the net.

We've spoken with several other subscribers and all have loved having a 100% fiber network available.