Trevor Larson

Writing at Fiber Picks

About

I'm a 39-year-old IT systems consultant working from a finished basement in Lenexa, Kansas. VPN, Zoom, and Teams are on most of the day. Upload speed and jitter matter to me the same way server uptime matters to an operations team: when they degrade, work stops.

The habit of keeping a formal speed log started with a fiber install that went wrong. The tech, Marcus, left the modem blinking amber. The manual listed amber as a normal status. It wasn't. Three weeks of support calls and a unit swap later, I added an install-day column to the log: time of arrival, equipment state when the tech left, and any follow-up support contacts during the first month. Every provider since has gotten the same treatment from the first minute the door closes behind the installer.

Six providers across two addresses, eight years of logged readings sorted on the whiteboard by provider and time of day. The whiteboard covers one wall of the basement office, columns running across it in provider order. The gap between a 7 AM reading and a 6 PM reading on the same connection is usually the most interesting number on the board.

My neighbor Caitlin Fairweather prints ISP contracts and highlights every clause before signing. She knocked on my door in 2022 after her cable bill increased without explanation, which opened a long conversation about reset clauses and the paragraph in the fine print nobody reads until month 13. Royce Chesney, a former colleague who relocated to Overland Park, sends speed-test screenshots at 11 PM with no message attached. Lindiwe Odden, a remote colleague in Olathe, saves her upload-jitter data from every morning standup. These are the people I test my conclusions against before publishing.

Eight years of paid bills, address-by-address logs, and consistent attention to what the bill says in month four compared to what the sales call mentioned in month zero. The expertise is residential and practical, not credentialed.

Recent posts by Trevor Larson

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.