Trevor Larson

Writing at Fiber Picks

About

I'm a 39-year-old IT systems consultant in suburban Kansas City. In 2018 I moved from Chicago, which meant shopping for internet in a new market with no existing opinions. Good position for collecting real data. The next five years covered two addresses and six providers: fiber from the local utility, two cable providers at different addresses, a brief overlap during a move, three months on DSL during a service gap, and satellite for one stretch when nothing else reached the second address quickly enough.

Upload speed and jitter matter in my work. Zoom, Teams, and VPN are on every day. I started keeping a speed log when I noticed the gap between 7 AM readings and 6 PM readings. The install tech for the fiber upgrade was named Marcus. He left the modem blinking amber. The manual said amber was normal; it wasn't. Three weeks of support calls and a unit replacement later, I started logging install-day notes too.

No network engineering credentials, no certifications. Just someone who has paid for internet at six different addresses and kept a log of what happened each time.

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Disclosure

Some links here are affiliate links. If you sign up for a plan after clicking through, the ISP pays me a small referral fee. You pay nothing extra, and the comparison list does not change because of it. I only cover providers I have personally signed up for or that someone close to me currently runs on.