Goodbye Xfinity

I was an Xfinity customer for 9 years. At least that’s what it said when I logged into my account. I’m not a customer any longer, though, now that Optimum Fiber is available in my area. Switching was pretty simple, but I did lose some features. Let’s talk about it.

I live in New Jersey, home to many technical inventions like the transistor. However, New Jersey is hilariously behind when it comes to internet service providers (ISPs). I’ll spare you the details, but basically each municipality has agreements with different ISPs that gives an ISP exclusive access to that municipality. If you have the misfortune of living in a municipality with a poor ISP, like I did, there’s not much you can do outside of notifying your elected officials.

I heard on social media that Optimum Fiber was coming to my municipality but I didn’t realize it would be so quick. I was surprised when Skylar knocked on my door and handed me a paper listing a $40/month offer for Optimum Fiber 1000/1000 with a bunch of fineprint beneath. I was already paying $121/month for Xfinity 2000/300 so I figured this would be a great opportunity to both stick it to Xfinity and save myself some money. I ended up signing up for Optimum Fiber 5000/5000 for $75/month.

Comparing Optimum Fiber to Xfinity #

If you’re looking to switch from Xfinity to Optimum Fiber you should take note of the following, especially if you’re technical like me.

• You’re forced to use Optimum’s equipment. It terminates fiber and provides you with a CAT6 RJ45 port for WAN access. However, after the first year Optimum will add $5/month as an equipment rental charge. Think again! You best believe I’ll be calling them up to either cancel or drop that charge when my 1 year comes up. Lame!

• If you want to use your own router behind Optimum’s equipment you’ll have to contact Optimum and ask them to switch the equipment into bridge mode. While you’re there you may also want to ask them to disable the Wi-Fi. Both of these settings are only accessible to Optimum. You cannot control this device outside of the default Wi-Fi SSID and password. Lame!

• Optimum’s equipment has an SFP+ port, but direct attach cables didn’t work for me. I connected my UniFi gateway to the SFP+ port, but I was unable to pull a public IPv4 address. When I switched back to using their SFP+ to RJ45 adapter everything worked. To troubleshoot further I switched the adapters to have their adapter plugged into my SFP+ port and my adapter plugged into their SFP+ port. No dice. They must have logic in their firmware to assert on the adapter. Lame!

• Optimum’s equipment is not rack mountable. Sure, you could likely fit it on a 1U rackmount shelf, but the unit itself does not have any mechanism to rackmount it. This is likely not a concern for most people but it was for me since I already had a rackmount cable modem I was using with Xfinity. The equipment also has a sticker on it saying to keep it upright. Now I have a silly upright box on top of my rack. Lame!

• Optimum Fiber doesn’t support IPv6. I’m sure at some point in the future it will support IPv6, but today it doesn’t. I never thought I’d be saying anything nice about Xfinity, but they supported IPv6 just fine. I’m not going to use some IPv6 transition service like Optimum suggested. My equipment is perfectly capable of IPv6. Optimum’s equipment should be too. Lame!

• Optimum Fiber has really good performance. I’m seeing unloaded and loaded latency under 5ms and 3000/3000 speeds with my 5000/5000 plan. Of course you’ll need a router with at least a 2.5 GbE port to take advantage of speeds over 1000 but you already knew that. My WAN port is linked at 10 GbE so I’m good.

Should You Switch? #

Probably! Brand loyalty does nothing except give the brand itself a reason to be complacent. I recommend switching to send a signal to poor ISPs like Xfinity that their overpriced, underperforming service is not worth it anymore.

In my case I asked Skylar a ton of questions before I committed to anything. I knew that I would lose rackmount access and IPv6, but I would lower my monthly bill and gain an upload speed that I’ve never seen before in my life, which proved to be extremely helpful when uploading large images during Oxide development.

Even so, I’ll be reevaluating my decision in a year from now when Optimum tries to charge me for the equipment they are forcing me to use. Hopefully by then they will have IPv6 but I’m not hopeful. I’m also not hopeful in contacting their customer support based on what I’ve read online and what I’ve already experienced with Xfinity.

For now, though, I’ll enjoy the 5000/5000 service.