High speed internet in St. Barth?

Hello, I'd like to know if there's high speed internet in St. Barth like fibre optic, not public spots but residencial ones.
Thanks!

The Com is in the process of running Fibre Optic cable around the Island, but not many villas have it because it is currently very expensive. I believe the Guanahanni has it but it may be the only hotel. It's probably another year or two away for most villas and private homes. For now, internet speed in most places is just adequate, and certainly not what you're probably used to.

Phil

Seems as if the "typical" speed is between 2 and 5, with someone reporting as high as 10. I usually have around 2, and can stream Netflix with only a few "buffering" episodes.

Little by little it is happening. We have found though, at least in Pte. Milou the speed is adequate. In the late afternoons, when people return to their abodes, things sometimes slow down,.

In my visits for the last few years I have had very poor speeds with occasional outages and I never got better than 1 Mbps at my villa _ I started a thread on this issue about March 15 when I was in SBH. That may have been due to my location high in the hills of Petite Saline which was likely a long run from the CO. Speeds were much better when using wifi at restaurants like Le Gustaf. But I wonder about the capacity of the internet coming onto the island. Sure you can run fibre and give everyone a 1Gbps service but it won't help if there isn't enough capacity on the inter-island cable(s). I don't know if that is supplemented by satellite but satellite isn't great for internet due to the high latency.

A fiber connection lands on the island at Shell Beach. I don't know which carrier, or what the capacity is.

Right now, in Lorient, with most people still at work, I have:

That's pretty much what we had in Lurin during our last stay. Unless you need to upload big files, like video, it's ok. I keep hearing that Fibre is coming, but right now it's only available to businesses in Gustavia, and I believe that the Guanahanni has it.

Phil

Tried to post my speedtest result about 4 pm from La Plage but apparently needs moderator approval for some reason. But had 26 down/32 up. Second try got 27/18. Pretty reasonable really.

Moderator approval? I'm not the tech guy, but I've never heard of such.

tim said:

Moderator approval? I'm not the tech guy, but I've never heard of such.

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Not entirely uncommon to have restricted posting privileges with just a couple posts on a forum so I didn't think much of it.

Here, I'll try again.

KevinS said:

A fiber connection lands on the island at Shell Beach. I don't know which carrier, or what the capacity is.

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It's part of the Global Carribean Network (GCN), a 1200 km, 2.1 Terabit/s system. It runs all the way from Trininad and Tobago to Puerto Rico and St. Croix.
http://www.globalcaribbean.net/
Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands are well connected further (in addition to some of the bigger islands beingconnected directly to some of the systems that cover Central/South America).

Saba and Barbuda aren't covered by any of the cables around but as far as rest of the bigger islands are concerned, there's no need to use satellite. The GCN cable was funded by European Regional Development Fund (75%) and LORET group (25%) that's a family-owned business in the region and runs the network.

How much does it cost?

If you want to buy 1 Gbit/s from St. Barth to St. Martin, it will cost you 9600€/month.

If someone bought 1 Gbit/s IRU on the cable when it was installed, which Dauphine and similar carriers probably did, it cost them 237000€ and 700€/month maintenance cost.
In comparison IRU all the way from St. Barth to Paris was 1.32 million euros and 3850€/month maintenance.

tim said:

Moderator approval? I'm not the tech guy, but I've never heard of such.

Click to expand...

Often on forums you need 5-10 posts to be able to perform certain actions. This is supposed to stop spammers from creating an account and immediately posting lots of crap.