Summary: The best internet service provider for most people in Coventry, CT is Frontier fiber optic.
I’ve decided to put this article together because one of the most common questions on town Facebook groups is about internet service providers. When I moved to Coventry in 2013 there was only one real choice for high speed internet, Spectrum. Today, you’ve got a number of different choices. As I get more information, I’ll update this page with more details.
| Provider | Plan | Upload Speed | Download Speed | Monthly Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frontier | 500/500 Fiber | 500mbit | 500mbit | $39.99/mo for 3yrs |
| Frontier | Gig Fiber | 940mbit | 940mbit | $69.99/mo for 3yrs |
| Frontier | 2 Gig Fiber | 2000mbit | 2000mbit | $129.99/mo for 3yrs |
| Spectrum | 100 mbit | 100mbit | 12mbit | $74.99/mo |
| T-Mobile | Home LTE | 50mbit | 50mbit | $50.00/mo ($30/mo for some T-Mobile customers) |
| Verizon | Home LTE | 50mbit | 50mbit | $50.00/mo ($25/mo for some Verizon customers) |
| SpaceX | Starlink | 100mbit | 20mbit | $110.00/mo |
This does not, and will never cover traditional satellite systems like HughesNet and Viasat, legacy DSL systems, or dialup (which still exists). These options have such bad performance that you’d have to be really desperate, and with these other choices, you don’t have to be that desperate.
Often times people write asking for suggestions about a new ISP because they think their ISP is “bad”. In most cases, if your ISP is continually “bad” then it is likely the equipment you have in your house. WiFi standards continue to evolve and the average home had 25 internet connected devices as of 2021, which is more than double the 11 devices they had in 2019. If you’re still rocking the same wireless router you bought during the Obama administration, you may want to upgrade to a newer and potentially more powerful system.
From my own analysis over the past year, Spectrum, which had been the best choice for ISP in Coventry, had less than two hours of downtime at my house. That’s not to say there won’t be other problems, but in general, ISPs are very reliable. Please note, this was prior to the rollout of Frontier Fiber in Coventry.
Frontier’s new fiber service is the new kid in town, just becoming available in June 2022 after being announced in July 2021. Frontier is aggressively rolling out fiber to most areas in town and you might’ve seen their trucks on your street. Once your street is avaialble to get fiber, you’ll get a door hangar dropped by your door. From there you can sign up online or by calling them. I signed up online, it was quick and probably easier than calling.
Frontier has three different plans - all of which provide symmetric bandwidth: 500mbit, 1000mbit, or 2000mbit. Pricing is $39.99, $59.99, and $129.99. Every one of these services provides far more bandwidth than most households need. In addition, the hardware within most households cannot support these speeds - even the slowest 500mbit. But, if you do have the hardware to support it, and I do, the speeds are phenomenal. What’s even better is that not only do you get ultra high speeds, but you also have very low latency. This makes video calls and online games a lot more zippy.
Installation is fairly straightforward, although it generally takes longer than Frontier says it will take, so try and schedule a morning slot and hope they arrive by noon. My home installation was much easier than most and it still took about two hours. The first thing the tech will do is fine the pole in your neighborhood to connect to. This may not be the pole nearest to your house - in my case it’s the pole on the far end of my neighbor’s property. From there, the technician will spool out “hard fiber” from the pole to your house. If you ask they can keep this coming in with all the other utilities in your house. Also, it’s obviously much easier if you’ve got above ground utilities.
This “hard fiber” connects to your house in an outside junction box where the hard fiber joins the thinner, more flexible fiber for the short run into your house. Once inside your house, the fiber connects to an optical network terminal (ONT), which you can think of as a little like a cable modem. The ONT has a 10 gigabit ethernet port and MOCA connectors if you need to move the connection via coax somewhere else in your house. You’re best off if you can run ethernet directly to your router. Frontier will really push to have you use either the Eero mesh wifi system or to get high speed router manufactured by Arris. If you’re certain you know what you’re doing and you already have a high end router at home (Unifi UDM-Pro, Amplifi, TP-Link Omada, Eero, Google Mesh, etc), you can probably convince the installation tech to let you plug the ethernet from the ONT directly into your router. Do this and you’ll be much happier.
Contrary to what you may see if you look on Reddit or DSL Reports, the ethernet
coming out of the ONT is plain old ethernet. There’s no need for crazy
wpa_supplicant dance routines, VLAN tagging, or strange 802.1x options.
Coventry has their newest buildout and it’s dead simple to use.
Thus far, I’ve been very impressed with the speed of Frontier, but they do have a poor reputation and have gone through multiple bankruptcies. Fortunately, Frontier has been hiring a handful of high level execs from Verizon to compliment their shift to entirely US based workforce. I consider this to be a very positive sign for the company and makes me hopeful.
The other downside is that their network does not appear to support IPv6, whereas Spectrum makes this easy. I’m still looking into an easy solution for that. For most people IPv6 does not matter. There were a few edge things I was doing with it that I’d like to have working again. For most people, you’ll never notice this is an issue, but for techies this might matter.
This service is best for:
Spectrum, which is the brand name for internet and television services from Charter Communications, had been the best option for Internet in Coventry. Their standard plan provides 100mbit downstream and 12mbit upstream for $74.99/mo. There is no fee for a modem but there is also no discount for providing your own. New customers often get discounts to their service plan that time out over 12-24 months.
In reality, 100mbit with 12mbit upstream is enough for most families. You should be able to stream four 4k video streams at once. You’ll have plenty for video conferencing too. I’m a heavy user of internet services as I work in technology and I work from home, and this has been fine. The biggest downsides are the price and upload speeds.
Since Frontier moved into town, people have reported being able to negotiate their Spectrum bills down to $50/mo for 300mbit speeds. I have not personally tried this, so I cannot confirm.
This service is best for:
Starlink sounds relly attractive, but it comes with a number of caveats. First, there’s a long wait list and the equipment costs $599 on top of the $110/mo you’ll pay for service. Second, you need a clear view of the sky - not just in one direction, but in many different directions. Third, the equipment is power hungry, particularly in winter expect it take about 100W of power on average - which means you an expect to pay $175/year just for electricity at current Eversource rates.
As far as the service goes, Starlink uses thousands of small satellites in low earth orbit. These are launched on SpaceX rockets and cover wide swaths of the earth with internet. However, that doesn’t mean that you can just sign up and get it next day. The satellites have bandwidth limitations that cannot be easily upgraded because they’re floating around in space. But, when compared to older satellite technologies like HughesNet that use a few geostationary satellites, you get a much better experience. Speeds are on par with the most common Spectrum plan, but at higher latencies. The latencies are still low enough that you can do video conferencing, although it might start to make an impact for many online games.
Unless you’ve got no other choice, or you can’t get a fixed broadband solution and need more downstream than what T-Mobile LTE or Verizon LTE provide, you’re better off with other solutions for broadband in Coventry, CT. However, there is one case where it might make sense. If you’ve already got a setup that makes your home highly resilient to storms - which usually means a whole house generator or Powerwalls that allow to operate off grid, then this could be useful as a backup. When Tropical Storm Isaias hit Coventry in August 2020, the damage was so severe that, not only were the ISPs knocked out, but so was almost all mobile phone service. Verizon actually rolled as SPOT satellite uplink to Coventry for a few days (here’s a picture of these devices. So, if you’re a prepper, it might make sense to have Starlink as a secondary ISP.
Of note, Starlink recently created their RV plan, which lets you activate the service one month at a time for a higher price of $135/mo. If you can afford the equipment, this option could let you have the equipment as a non-powered backup and only activate it during a disaster. Of course, you’d need to get someplace to activate it, but even during a major disaster in Connecticut, you never have to go more than a few towns away to get wireless service.
This service is best for:
T-Mobile has been aggressive in providing fixed wireless internet and it is avaialble in Coventry, although speeds and performance aren’t amazing. In general, they lump all their options under the banner of T-Mobile 5G Home Internet. This service works best in areas where you already have great T-Mobile coverage. Specifically, if you have a view of the tower over by town hall and can place the T-Mobile router by a window with a view of the tower, then you’ll get the best coverage.
As with any wireless service, it’s a bit easier to experience congestion on these services, which will result in slow downs. In general you should expect to get about 50mbps down and 50mbps up with this service.
This may prove to be a more reliable option after storms than some other options, particularly if you live in an area where lines get knocked down all the time. However, after 2020’s Tropical Storm Isaias, all wireless coverage in the town was knocked out too.
Finally, this is very different than tethering your devices to your phone. This solution is designed to be a primary home internet solution that is on all the time. You do not have bandwidth limits when using this service and you don’t have to manually turn tethering on to make it work.
This service is best for:
There’s lot of other options out there, but I’m not evaluating them. Here’s why for each one:
Mobile Phone Hotspot: It may be tempting to use a mobile phone hotspot as your primary connection. Tethering is usually metered, which limits you to 10-20GB of data a month. A single 4k movie streaming from Apple TV can be 20GB. Not to mention, you’d always have to turn on your hotspot, which becomes challenging as more and more devices have internet connections.
Dedicated Mobile Hotspot: Most of these don’t have unlimited data, although you might able to find a few grandfathered plans. These devices, sometimes called JetPacks, are often not designed to handle as many devices as the average household has.
Frontier DSL: Although some locations can get 125mbit DSL from Frontier, most places in Coventry can only get 18mbit. Frontier is trying to shut down their copper network and this option will prove to be slow and frustrating.
Dial-Up: Ughh. No.