Owen Reynolds Personal blog

In January of 2023, I was coming to the end of a multi-year promo with Videotron (Quebec) via my legacy cable modem. My normal speeds were pretty good, but definitely some room for improvement with my upload channel ; as I primarily WFH, I’m constantly using my upload channel for video calls as well as OneDrive uploads, etc. Modern collaborative apps (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, etc) will dynamically compress your audio/video channels if your bandwidth ain’t cutting it, and 56 / Mbit certainly isn’t enough if i’m doing other uploads at the same time ; OneDrive, ISO uploads over VPN to clients, etc

As my promo was ending, I called Videotron up to see what promos they had, they were able to knock $10 off my next bill for 2 years, but the speed would remain the same. Next, I looked up big-bad-Bell to get the scoop. I had quit Bell in 2015 when they hit me with a HUGE overage bill when my promo ended. However, I don’t hold grudges against the big Canadian ISPs ; I’ve got zero loyalty to ’em, and will happy to switch for better price/services on phone/internet. Bell provides FTH (fiber to the home) service in my area of Montreal, I signed up for their 1.5 GB package, which was actually $10 cheaper per month against Videotron, but touted 4x times the DL speed / 20x UL speed. WOW

note: Pic below shows some janky pricing which you can probably get around if you come in as a new customer, or use whatever tricks the hound dogs over at the redflagdeals.com forums recommend for better pricing

On install day, I was VERY happy with the speed based on connecting to the new Bell FTM hub (modem) from my desktop via my 1GBe home network switch

Fast forward to February, I was chatting with a co-worker in my new job, and he mentioned connecting to his 3Gbit Bell FTH via a 2.5 Gbit LAN cards he’s got in his laptop/desktop. To be honest, I had ignored the ports on the back of my own Bell modem!

It was only on talking to him that I checked, and found that the 10Base-T port shown above supports (10 Gbe, 2.5 Gbe, 1Gbe speeds). However, my own home 10Gbe switch is SFP+ based, so, I bought a 10Base-T to SFP+ converter on Amazon for $63 CDN and connected it today

I disabled the 1Gb LAN port on my desktop, enabled the 10Gb port and re-ran a test using speedtest.net. Again, here is the before:

And the after:

Which is an 18% speed increase

All for about 5 mins work / 63$. Now, what should I do with the extra bits and bytes I can upload and download?

have a good weekend, ya’ll!

Owen