Is fiber a better option for home workers than DSL? Here’s how they compare

With more people working remotely or splitting their time between home and the office, having a reliable internet connection at home has become essential. In fact, 52% of remote-capable employees work on a hybrid model, creating a huge demand for stable internet connections in US households.

However, picking an internet provider isn’t as easy as it looks. The biggest question of all is what speed you should look for, and whether you should pick a DSL or fiber connection.

While DSL uses traditional telephone copper lines to deliver internet to your home, fiber uses high-speed optical cables to do the same, offering better and symmetrical speeds.

However, that doesn't necessarily make fiber an automatically better option for everyone – the exact choice depends on your internet habits and home working environment. Here’s a complete breakdown of what DSL and fiber are, and which option you should choose.

What is DSL and fiber?

Before picking between DSL and fiber, we need to understand what these terms actually mean.

ADSL

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), or DSL, is the oldest internet connection type, which uses traditional copper cables to deliver internet to your premises.

The copper lines run from the provider’s central office to your home through the same cables used by traditional telephone lines. This is an asymmetrical connection, which means the download and upload speeds are different.

ADSL2 Plus may offer a maximum speed of up to 24 Mbps in theory, while upload speeds might range below 1 Mbps. Also, distance matters a lot – the farther you are from the central office, the longer the signal has to travel through copper wires, and the weaker your internet gets.

FTTN

Fiber to the Node (FTTN) is a more modern internet option, which uses a mix of both fiber cables and copper lines. The connection runs on fiber cables from the provider’s office to the neighborhood cabinet, called a node, while copper wires cover the last stretch from the cabinet to your home using VDSL2. This is faster than ADSL because the copper line is much shorter.

However, distance still matters with FTTN, since you’ll need to be relatively close to the nearest node to get the best speeds. Such hybrid fiber and copper lines are also asymmetrical, which means you do not get the same upload and download speeds. Many internet providers advertise FTTN as fiber internet, depending on the jurisdiction they are in, but this is not a true fiber connection.

FTTH

Fiber to the Home (FTTH), or FTTP, is the latest technology in internet connectivity, where fiber cables run all the way inside your home from the internet provider, with no copper anywhere in the path. This is true fiber internet, which is symmetrical, meaning you get the same upload and download speeds, and there is no distance penalty.

Speeds offered by DSL and fiber

To understand what kind of internet speed you need to work from home, you first need to understand the two types of internet speeds that providers offer: download speed and upload speed.

• Download speed measures how fast content reaches you. This comes in handy when you are streaming content, loading files, or playing games.
• Upload speed measures how fast you can send data out from your computer, phone, or other device, which comes in handy while uploading files, making video calls, or syncing to the cloud.

Most internet providers advertise high download speeds without outright mentioning their upload speeds.

However, upload speeds play a key part when you are working remotely, as a lot of the work you’ll be doing requires your internet connection to offer high upload speeds as well.

Here’s what speeds you can expect from the three kinds of connections:

• DSL is the slowest of them all, offering download speeds of around 1 to 7 Mbps, often well below the advertised limits – sometimes as low as 30% to 58%. The upload speed is around 1 Mbps, which is again an advertised figure. The real upload speeds are well below this.
• FTTN does a better job at both upload and download speeds. While upload speeds range around 5 to 20 Mbps, depending on the provider you pick, download speeds stay around 25 to 100 Mbps.
• FTTH, or fiber, offers a symmetrical connection, which means you get the same upload and download speed. The speeds can range anywhere from 500 to 2,000 Mbps, and you can expect to get around 76% of the advertised figure, according to the FCC.

Latency of DSL and fiber

Beyond speed, another important metric to consider is latency. It’s the round-trip time it takes for a small piece of data to travel from your device to the server and back. This is usually measured in milliseconds.

As per the FCC’s real-world data, an idle DSL connection shows a latency of 23 to 34 milliseconds, whereas fiber has an idle latency of 7 to 14 milliseconds. While fiber clearly wins on this aspect, the gap widens dramatically under real-world conditions.

Latency isn’t always fixed. It keeps changing depending on what else your connection is doing at the moment. This is why the FCC tests it under two additional conditions beyond idle latency.

• Downstream load measures latency while a large download is happening at the same time, such as a family member streaming a video or downloading a large file.
• Upstream load measures latency while a large upload is happening, such as backing up to the cloud or syncing a folder.

The upstream and downstream load for fiber stayed in the range of 190 to 350 milliseconds, as per the FCC’s own dataset. However, DSL’s upstream latency spiked to 1,000 milliseconds, nearly three times that of fiber.

This means that most of DSL’s capacity is reserved for downloads, and there is no spare room left for the upload side when something else needs it. So, the moment you start uploading a file using DSL, there’s little bandwidth left for your video calls, and that’s why your calls start to freeze, lag, or even drop.

Choosing DSL and fiber based on speed

Reading these speeds in isolation might not give you a complete picture, especially if you’re about to choose a provider for your home working setup. Here are the different types of activities working from home usually entails and the minimum speeds you require.

Browsing the internet and reading emails

These are download-heavy activities, and you need an internet connection with good download speeds to be able to browse the internet without any lags, usually requiring around 1 to 5 Mbps.

So, you could get away with using DSL for this purpose. However, fiber or FTTN would ensure a seamless browsing experience, especially on content-heavy sites that might take considerable time to load with DSL.

Video calls

Remote workers are required to participate in and host video calls almost every day. Zoom’s own published bandwidth recommendation says that you will require at least 3.8 Mbps of upload speed and 3 Mbps of download speed for one-on-one and group video calls in 1080p HD.

However, gallery view requires higher bandwidth: 2 Mbps for 25 views and 4 Mbps for 49 views. Microsoft Teams also requires a speed of around 1.2 to 1.5 Mbps for high-quality video calls.

Considering this, DSL would not be the right fit, as it can only offer up to 1 Mbps of upload speed, and that too in optimal conditions. For video calls, FTTN would do a better job, offering 5 to 20 Mbps of upload speed. Fiber, on the other hand, is a no-brainer choice for lag-free, seamless, and interruption-free video conferencing.

Cloud uploads

Lastly, there’s file uploading, which requires the highest upload speed among all remote working activities. Cloud-based apps such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace need an upload speed of 10 to 50 Mbps.

However, larger files might even require around 10 to 100 Mbps of upload speed. Such speeds can only be offered by a true fiber or FTTH connection, which offers the same upload and download speeds.

So, even if you get a basic fiber offering with 400 Mbps of download speed, you do get the same upload speed, which is ideal for uploading even the largest files. As per a university IT support guide, a 1 GB file takes only two minutes to upload at 100 Mbps. Speeds higher than that can cut down on this time to less than a minute.

Choosing DSL and fiber based on your household

Whether you need a DSL or fiber connection will also depend on your home setup. A typical household usually has more than two or three devices, which can eat up a lot of the available bandwidth.

The speeds mentioned above only pertain to a single device. Having multiple devices means you’d require more bandwidth when choosing the right internet plan for your home.

The FCC has published guidelines on minimum internet speeds based on usage patterns.

• A single device or user might require a 3 to 8 Mbps connection for light and moderate use, whereas 12 to 25 Mbps might be required for high use. While DSL might be good enough for light use by a single device, it does not fit the bill if you run more than one high-demand application at the same time.
• Three users or devices at a time require a minimum of 12 to 25 Mbps of speed, which again cannot be met by a simple DSL connection. In case of high usage, you’ll compulsorily need more than 25 Mbps of speed for three devices or more.

To put it in a nutshell, if you use two or more devices, a DSL connection might not be able to fulfil your requirements.

You might experience lags in your video calls, or the quality might fluctuate consistently. Your uploads will be pretty slow, and it might take a couple of hours for a simple 1 GB file to upload.

As a result, multi-device households should lean towards an FTTN connection for moderate use and fiber connections for high internet use.

Cost and availability

You’d imagine that, considering the vast speed gap, fiber internet would be more expensive than DSL.

However, that is hardly the truth. You can get DSL internet at around $40 to $55 per month, depending on the provider you choose, whereas fiber prices also oscillate in a similar range, between $30 to $55 per month.

For instance, T-Mobile’s fiber plans start at just $45 per month for 300 Mbps of symmetrical speed. Similarly, AT&T offers a $55 plan for a similar speed range. BrightSpeed’s plans range from $29.99 to $39.99 for its 200 to 500 Mbps plans.

So, cost isn’t a factor when choosing between DSL and fiber.

Verdict: DSL vs fiber

All in all, fiber internet seems to be way ahead of DSL on all counts. Not only does it offer higher download speeds, but it also offers symmetrical upload speeds, which are essential for every remote worker.

With DSL, you can get download speeds of 1 to 7 Mbps and upload speeds of around 1 Mbps. Fiber, on the other hand, offers high speeds ranging from 300 to 2,000 Mbps, depending on your plan.

Plus, if there are multiple devices in your household, the available bandwidth gets divided between them depending on their device activity. With DSL, this leaves you with nothing more than 2 to 3 Mbps of download speed and less than 0.5 Mbps of upload speed. Fiber, on the other hand, continues to offer high speeds even with multiple devices in a household.

The key advantage is the high upload speed. For instance, even with a 300 Mbps connection and four devices, you get around 80 to 90 Mbps of speed at any given moment, ensuring you can upload even the largest file in less than a minute.

And the fact that both DSL and fiber almost come at identical prices makes it a no-brainer choice. Why would you pick an internet connection with slower speeds while paying the same when you can get fiber internet at almost the same price?