Call them and ask.

My block has buried lines. A block away, they have overheads. The new local fiber provider is only running lines along overheads for now, with plans to tackle buried lines in another few years. Despite sending me half a tree worth of mailers, they won't run fiber to my house yet and the only way I was able to find that out was to call them up and talk to them.

I don't know anything about this company, but fiber is almost always better than cable. Lower latency, more reliable, and it's usually symmetric (upload speed is the same as download speed).

must be doing some construction on my street because they made survey marks on my property and painted where the gas line and water lines are. Could this be because they are putting in the fiber cables?

It's possible! Those marks means that some sort of digging/excavation is happening nearby. The company that wants to do the work calls a "dial before you dig" service (811 in the USA) and all the utility companies come out and mark their lines.

You may as well call them and ask. Main things you want to find out are what plans/prices they offer and if they have any data caps. And/or if it's still under construction definitely ask to be put on their list of interested customers.

Honestly just about anything fiber is going to be an improvement over Comcast cable internet... if I were you I'd at least inquire if they have a 1 gig download/upload plan and work from there. Good luck!

I don’t know this company but fiber came into my area (central WI) a few years ago and I couldn’t be happier.

Prior to that the infrastructure I was on for cable internet was old and would have frequent problems.

The brand new infrastructure is figuratively worth its weight in gold, imho, even if the company itself is just as crap and your price ends up the same.

Even better, the fiber cables run underground, so other than having them severed when digging, they won’t go out unless there is a major widespread outage. No random branch taking out your service in a wind storm or whatever nonsense.

We've never had a problem with our Xfinity service either. We use both their cable internet and mobile service.

To be fair, I work in IT, we use our own equipment and the service was already hooked up when we bought the house so they just activated it in our name.

We're a low need customer as I take care of most things myself.

According to their "About Us" page, they were a small business that is now financed by Post Road Group and Bain Capital. Creating competition for Comcast is a great thing, but I'd bet over the years those capital partners are going to demand enshittification for profit. I'd still drop Comcast like a rock though.

The excavation in the street sounds like the same thing Google Fiber did in my neighborhood, microtrenching fiber in the street along the curb. Has worked great for me for almost 10 years now

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I also work in tech, and was what you'd call a low need customer.

The Xfinity service in my entire neighborhood would go down almost daily, and sometimes more than twice a day. On top of that, it would sometimes cut out just long enough to disconnect my remote shells, causing me to have to reauthenticate. It was horrible, my new (community) fiber is a huge improvement. I think it's gone down once since having it installed almost two years ago.

It'll save you nearly $50 a month. So even if the customer service is exactly the same, you get to keep another $600 each year.

I switched to my local provider from Xfinity about three months ago, and my internet speeds are twice as fast for the same money.

You probably don't need 2GB. Maybe even not 1GB. I have 1GB Internet and love the speeds, but unless I'm downloading a game from steam, I never really max it out.

That said, for someone who grew up before the Internet and experienced 28K modems (and slower), it's hella rude to sometimes just run ookla speed test for kicks.

I scoured their website and they completely fail to explain what they are actually doing on a technical level. I assume it would probably be a GPON network, just based on the offered speed. Not the best type of fiber connectivity, but probably pretty normal for the USA market.

That said, single mode fiber is absolutely the way forward and if you replace the devices on the end it can scale almost indefinitely. So I would jump on the occasion of having some laid to your house.

They don't have IPv6 and they don't offer static IPs which both kind of sucks, but it might be acceptable: support.surfinternet.com/surf-… No data caps is good at least.

Concerning your question about the markings, they spell out their process on this page, it does include marking existing utilities: surfinternet.com/fiber-optic-i…

Fiber Optic Installation Process - Surf Internet

Learn more about how Surf Internet installs your Fiber Optic Internet service.

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I have Surf.

They ran the fiber in the neighborhood in Oct 2023. Then I assume was near the very first to get it installed in Dec 2023. (I live on the side of town where they started the roll out)

There were definitely growing pains in the first 6 months or so. No long outages. There were a few short ones. More of an annoyance, in March 2024 I noticed NTP wasn’t working. It took a few times contacting support to get to someone that could help. Once they confirmed the issue it was a few weeks to get it resolved.

More recently it has been fine.

Not that many people care, no IPv6. From when I asked about it initially I don’t expect that to be a thing any time soon.

I was also on Comcast. To cancel they made me schedule a call. I just told them it was twice the speed and half the price which was basically true. They didn’t give me too much grief. They ask question, put me on hold for 5 minutes, ask another question, put me on hold for another 5 minutes, ask another question, another 5 mins hold, and cancelled.

Comcast service was good in our area. I think I called support 1 time in 10 years and that was my fault. Good IPv6 support.

Switching saved me ~$35 a month so no regrets. I went with 500Mbps.