The original post: /r/homenetworking by /u/yskas on 2025-03-26 07:25:13.
Our peaceful community of about 100 homes has become Ground Zero for what can only be described as The Great Fiber Debate of 2025.
It all started innocently enough. Frogfoot, our open access fiber provider, experienced a weeklong outage earlier this year when their core routers decided they'd had enough of our collective Netflix binges. This sparked what can only be called "The Great Questioning" - suddenly everyone became a network engineer overnight.
Fast forward a few months, and Octotel (another open access provider) sensed opportunity in our digital discontent. They secured approval to lay new fiber lines, and that's when our neighborhood transformed from a harmonious community into two opposing factions that would make any online gaming clan war look tame.
The Two Camps
In one corner: The "It's Not The Fiber" Club These neighbors insist their internet works perfectly fine. According to them, the problem must be with everyone else's ISPs (the companies that actually provide internet service over the fiber). They view the trenching operations as nothing short of neighborhood vandalism and look at the opposing camp with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for people who put pineapple on pizza.
In the other corner: The "Packet Loss Posse" (where I reluctantly find myself) We experience consistent latency spikes and packet loss to our first hop. Sure, websites eventually load and videos play, but the internet experience feels like driving a sports car with square wheels - technically moving, but far from optimal.
The Investigation So Far
I've run my own tests and consistently find packet loss issues that explain our frustrating experience. The internet is remarkably good at covering its flaws - TCP/IP will retry failed packets until the cows come home - but that doesn't mean things are working as they should.
My attempts to explain that "working" internet isn't necessarily "good" internet have fallen on deaf ears. The other camp simply doesn't experience (or notice) the issues we're facing, creating a bizarre neighborhood-wide Schrödinger's Internet scenario.
Help Solve The Mystery
Reddit sleuths, I'm turning to your collective wisdom. How can we definitively determine the source of our problems and bring peace back to our fiber-divided community? What tests or evidence would convince both sides that there's either a real problem or we're all just imagining things?
Is there a way to objectively measure network quality across different homes that would settle this debate once and for all? Or are we doomed to passive-aggressive neighborhood WhatsApp messages until the end of time?
(thanks ChatGPT for dramatization)