Broader bandwidth comes to Turlock

One-gigabit Internet connections have come to Turlock, a major upgrade for AT&T customers being offered for $119 a month after an introductory discount.

The super-fast fiber connections mean customers can download 25 songs in 1 second or a 90-minute blockbuster movie in under 34 seconds notes the company, which already offers the service in Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto and a number of Sacramento suburbs. The service is still being installed in some neighborhoods, but should be available soon across Turlock, a company spokesperson said Wednesday.

The new speed is 20 times faster than the average cable customer receives, according to AT&T. But go to the Charter-Spectrum website, Turlock’s cable provider, and Internet standard service is listed as 20 times faster than phone service providers.

To sort out the Internet math, it helps to know one gigabit per second equals 1,000 megabits per second, or 1,000 mbps.

AT&T service without the 1-gig fiber connection ranges from around 5 mbps for the most basic service to around 300 mbps, according to an AT&T chart. Spectrum’s website lists 60 mbps as its basic Internet plan, with speeds of up to 300 mbps available.

But the head of technology at Turlock’s university campus said a better way for consumers to visualize Internet speed is to compare two-lane roads with multi-lane freeways.

“A gig will give them faster connections, but more importantly it’s going to give them a whole lot of lanes to connect,” said Stan Trevena, chief information officer for California State University, Stanislaus.

Speed matters when streaming a movie from an online service like Netflix, Trevena said. Those moments when the video freezes or pixelates are when the bandwidth cannot keep up with the feed and it needs time to catch up.

“But realistically,” he added, “It’s almost always the servers on the other side that determine your connection speed, not your speed.”

Netflix has high speed streaming, but everyday business websites typically only upload so fast – no matter what a watcher has available, the picture will only load at the speed the business sends it. To put it another way, if the two-lane road moves at 25 miles per hour, having a Lamborghini will not get its occupants there faster.

But glitchy movies may also happen if a home has multiple laptops and tablets running, a tech connector like an Echo Dot, or a host of other so-called smart devices that stay silently connected to the Internet, Trevena said. A family can easily have a dozen or more connections running at once, causing a virtual traffic jam on their home’s Internet highway.

Schools have similar issues as they gear up for hundreds of students popping open laptops after the bell rings. The state addresses that capacity problem with a high-speed connection available for schools through county offices of education. Stan State recently upgraded from a 1 gig connection to a dual 10 gig connection through the CSU system, though the university does not use that full capacity yet, Trevena said.

This story was originally published March 29, 2017 at 3:55 PM with the headline "Broader bandwidth comes to Turlock."