Speed Comparison: UIA Fiber Internet to Coaxial Cable

Apples to oranges? Try a whole crate

There truly is no comparison between Gigabit Fiber and DSL. The 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) transfer you get with Fiber is approximately 200 times faster than a 5 megabit per second (Mbps) DSL connection.

What does that mean? Consider downloading a 5 GB HD movie. Over DSL, this may take as long as two hours — yes, that’s about as long as the movie itself! On Gigabit Fiber, you can download 5 GB of data in 40 seconds.

60 Mbps cable Internet is a lot faster than DSL, but there’s still no real comparison with Gigabit Fiber. Fiber is over 16 times faster than the fastest cable. That’s still 11 minutes to download a movie, compared to 40 seconds.

And the difference with uploads is even more dramatic, because cable and DSL upload speeds are only a fraction of their download speeds. With Gigabit Fiber, you get 1 Gbps in both directions.

How does upload speed matter? If you sync your data to the cloud — your photo library, for instance — it matters a lot. You can upload 100 photos over Gigabit Fiber in 3 seconds. On DSL, it’ll take over an hour! On cable, it’s 13 minutes. With Gigabit Fiber, cloud syncing feels like a local network connection. With cable or DSL, it’s nearly unusable.