25 Gbit/s internet as a normal customer
init7.net
init7.net
I hope the whole of Switzerland will do something similar because there are still a lot of places without good internet and fiber is quite future proof.
Home office out of a mountain cabin would be cool...
I believe Init7 leases fibre from Swisscom in other locations. My understanding is that federal law requires Swisscom to give access to its infrastructure to other companies for a fair price.
[0] https://www.swisscom.ch/en/business/wholesale/angebot/anschl...
Oh wait..
The Book Of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal And Free The Net
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
I am also glad the government saw that it was an anti-competitive move and blocked it.
To give an example - OS2 single-mode fiber is the standard fiber for contemporary datacenter deployments and I assume also for last-mile deployments. It's super cheap (less than 20cpf for indoor cable, whereas cat7 copper is closer to 60cpf), has an insane range (a standard $25 fiber PHY can operate with a cable from 0m-10km), and has an insane bandwidth limit (it's currently used for everything from 1gbps to 400gbps).
If you're wiring a home today, I would 100% use OS2 over CatN unless you also need PoE.
Won't you end up with a bunch of media converters everywhere though?
Or if not - how should one think about deploying all this in a new home?
OS2 is not needed for most homes. Use multi-mode fibre (OM4 or OM5), which can do 25-100 Gbps @100m (or more):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mode_optical_fiber
You'd have to have quite a house to need internal runs longer than 100m (300'). For runs up to 100m: 2.5 Gbps can be done with Cat5e, 5G with Cat6, and 10G with Cat6A:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Var...
I never seen it used outside North America.
The biggest reason to use multimode - cheaper equipment, is no longer here. High-end multimode NICs, and transmitters now cost more than SMF.
It would be future-proof but not present proof, as you likely don't have anything else than RJ45 plugs on your devices…
On the other hand, replacing a cable in a conduit by a fiber is a half-hour task (you just stick the fiber to the cable, then pull the fiber with the cable) so it's not really worth it to be future proof in this case. You'll only be saving a hundred bucks in cable by doing so.
Source: I wired my entire home last year.
They're expanding aggressively in those areas, too.
it's been a surprisingly stable and solid product.
It always puzzled me why internet in the US is so expensive. I heard the argument that the sheer size of the US makes the infrastructure expensive, but Kazakhstan is even "bigger" per capita, and not exactly known for being an "advanced economy", yet here we are...
"3. Fair Use Policy The Internet subscriptions for private customers are intended for normal personal use. Init7 reserves the right to temporarily or permanently restrict or discontinue the provision of services for connections whose data volume exceeds 0.5 petabyte (500 terabytes) in a period of 4 weeks, or to take another suitable measure."
(https://www.init7.net/de/kleingedrucktes/072021_contractual-...)
You can build some serious infrastructure on 500T/4weeks on a 25Gbps line, service uptime withstanding. They also provide optional /29 subnets with the private plan so it looks like it's intended for more than just personal browsing.
As a part of de-monopolization they made it lease links to any willing ISP (bit-stream access?), so many ISPs arose, and they have relatively "cheap" and advanced offerings: 1Gb/s, 10Gb/s, 25Gb/s, fixed IPs, IPv6 etc.
This bitstream access is now extended to pretty much anyone who installs FTTH. E.g. one can have it installed by a city or cantonal electrical company or TV provider, but still be able to buy IP access from pretty much anyone through some form of open market - https://litexchange.ch/
Many municipalities still haven't gotten fiber deployments from the local utilities, and in practice you can be stuck on Swisscom's fiber. It's not too bad since several ISPs are also able to use it: for instance Sunrise before (I'm not sure they still allow it), but also Init7 (their Hybrid7 offering). However an ISP like Salt uses only open fiber, at least for now.
Salt and Sunrise had signed an agreement to push for extensive open fiber deployments by 2027. But then the deal blew up when Sunrise got acquired by UPC, since they'd rather use the existing DOCSIS infrastructure in the less dense areas.
Swisscom was going to push its own deployment as well (even though G.fast is not bad) and Salt was now interested in chipping in, but soon after the Comco has stopped Swisscom from using P2MP which is a big setback in its strategy to cover sub-urban areas. I understand the decision to enforce P2P deployments and give smaller ISPs a fair chance but it's definitely going to hinder the speed of new deployments. I believe we're rich enough, and we should mandate (and fund) open deployments in all these sub-urban municipalities that won't do it on their own.
Yup, I'm using some 3rd party ISP. I have from them 1Gb/s (ODC - optical direct link), and the first hop is their IP.
And also 10Gb/s via Swisscom's XGS-PON. Here the first 2-3 hops are located within Swisscom's net (except the immediate gateway). I guess init7 complained about it - i.e. paying more for using Swisscom's L3 net, instead of leasing fiber?
Why would P2P slow down deployment?
You have the same exact amount of cables in a P2P and a P2MP topology, the only difference is the amount of fiber in the cables. There is a (small) cost savings, but that's about it.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but I believe P2P topologies would be inefficient (i.e. too expensive) for sparsely connected areas. Conversely, the kind of hardware needed to operate XGS-PON is prohibitively expensive to small ISPs, and they're all deploying P2P topologies, and only that.
XGS-PON isn't that expensive. You can buy disaggregated XGS-PON modules in a SPF+ form factor for $1500. CPEs are $120 each.
I don't really get why Swisscom wouldn't be able to deploy P2P in low or medium density areas if they wanted to.
I guess the key is that they _are_ actually more expensive than the competition here, and they provide less ”value”.
But less is very much more in this case, since you don’t have to use a locked-down provider-specific router. I guess they save money that way too.
I might be incredibly unlucky but I had two major multi day downtimes with Init7 (neither their fault).
If you depend on your internet as part of your business, make sure you have a plan for when it might fall out.
On that note, I'm hosting my own personal fileserver over that connection and the public IPv4 address has not changed once in the two years I've been using them so far ^^
And by Linux ISOs I mean porn.
People tend to grossly overestimate how much bandwidth they need, especially non-technical people. Even a 100 Mbit connection is more than capable of letting a family of five all stream Netflix at the same time, but that won't stop Xfinity from up-selling them to a 300 Mbit plan.
Even at this extreme there's still ample headroom, and our rate is ISP limited; so the line can do much more.
Saying that, I am no Steam power-user. Most games will be <10GB with updates <1GB
At this point, I have no services or use cases for anything faster.
Both my wife and I work from home and are on video conferencing a good portion of the day. I also build locally and push artifacts to the cloud and those clock in at 10+ gigs from some classes of devices and I obviously have to wait for them to build and upload before I can test (yes we have a full CI pipeline but during crunch time it gets smashed and I can be waiting in line for hours, or build it myself in 10 minutes). All things individually don't require such a large pipe, but they add up, quick.
25 is probably overkill, but I would take 10 in a second.
It would take a huge leap in a service requirements to change that, and would mean that I have to change my server and probably switch
Still only on 1 Gb/s fiber though, because I havent found any router that is 10 or 25 Gbps that I’d really like to have at home. Are there any good consumer-grade 10 or 25 gbps routers?
Also, what is up with all computers _still_ having 1 gbps ethernet ports? It’s been the standard forever, feels like. Why arent there more computers with 10 GbE as standard?
If you're already running a device like that Protectli then maybe you'd be comfortable building a small-form-factor PC with a 2 port 2.5Gb/s ethernet card (around $40) and running it to a 4-port 2.5Gb/s switch (around $125 for this TRENDnet one I see on Amazon). You could even install PFSense on the PC and keep your setup mostly unchanged.
Have we learned nothing...
Not much is really out there for routing to the internet at those speeds; there's lots of stuff for 10GBe in-house, and some machines are starting to come with it (it's power hungry). The Mac mini can come with it, for example. I have a decent setup at home with some 10GBe cards in some old servers through a 4 port SPF 10GBe switch.
See last week’s discussion on “A disquisition into the sadly slovenly takeup of 10GBASE-T” and note that the article was written TEN years ago.
The above is things you should do when you have 1gbps in order to actually get those speeds. I know people will argue citing 640k being enough for everyone and have some edge case that needs this but.... 25gbps is overkill.
It has a steep learning curve though, albeit it's extremely rewarding and powerful once you gwr over that curve. It should handle routing 1 gig with zero issues, and is under $200. You can do bonding, vlans, esoteric ip rules, and tons of "misc" functionality.
Do not go with ubiquiti, their hardware is very poor and their UI is very buggy and simply poorly designed, it's focused on people who know a bit above an average person about networking, which I suspect is not the case for most people here.
Once you start doing much esoteric the speed slows down, if you get off the fast path it can be pretty intense (thought they do sell bigger ones that can route more packets).
The main thing is that the CPU in it is 1.5ghz quad core. Before that I had a Linksys with a 800mhz a single core that literally couldn't route traffic fast enough.
Running opnsense on it, and it’s doing fine and saturates the line when I’m maxing out downloads. For comparison, the isp (Verizon) router was consistently around 100Mb/s less than this one.
Router has had no problem pushing 1Gb and the switch is rated for something like 44 Gb. Has enough of a firewall and other built in services, plus POE for home devices and SFP+ ports so in the event you need a faster link. Average current draw is < 5 W and it's quiet.
Although nearly any modern mini-PC running Opnsense or VyOS or whatever linux/bsd can trivially do gigabit routing as well. 25 Gb would be a bit harder of an ask :)
For 25Gbps? Or are you meaning for the 1gbps you have? If the former, of course, but otherwise Cat5e can handle 10GbE if you have good connections and the loop length isn’t too long.
Most hard drives will keep up with a full gigabit pipe, too, on a sequential write. I think the poster is exaggerating a bit.
Yes, for sure. 99% of the time, based on personal experience, the person either doesn’t realize the difference or is just incorrectly using the term Cat5 to mean Cat5e. It’s pretty rare you’ll find the former even in older homes (again, my experience based on living in the US). This is why I intentionally used the term Cat5e in my reply. Cat5 was deprecated by Cat5e back 20+ years ago, long before the average US home began getting wired with Ethernet. Further, many (majority?) of Cat5 cables older than 10 years old actually meet the 5e requirements, just weren’t certified specifically.
> Cat5 struggles with 1gbps.
Like with my original point, that depends on the length and the quality of the connections. Inaccurate blanket statements mislead or worse, so I encourage you to avoid it.
1000baseT requires plain old category 5 for distances of up to 100m.
Most plain category 5 out there will have no problem with 2.5gbase-T at 30m and less.
(And, of course, most "cat 5" is actually "cat 5e".
P.S. - a lot of your recent comments are showing as dead, might want to email HN mods and see what’s up.
There is actually a semi-reasonable case for there being a limit on useful bandwidth for most purposes. Exact numbers are hard to come by for many reasons both obvious and subtle but around 25gpbs you're getting to the point that with reasonable compression you can saturate a human's entire sensorium with retina-quality video, full audio, touch, proprioception, etc.
While there are use cases that exceed that, like running a search across the entire locally-stored output of the Large Hadron Collider, you're certainly getting to the point where the applications are getting more and more specialist relative to the average person sitting in their home, no matter how exotic the the requirements. I mean we're literally talking about having enough data bandwidth to stream your next-next-next-next-gen VR system a holodeck-like experience for you.
I could see netbooting your desktop to avoid having to buy a hard drive.
Also instead of downloading large game assets they could just stream on demand. (Even though downloads would go really fast anyway.)
4K and 8K video streams are already done reasonably at 100 mbps. Some sort of 3D point cloud streaming?
25 Gb/s, in this light, is small.
10GB/s needs a 10+W router and you'll need atleast 50W of compute behind that.
On lead-acid if you want long battery life and a good uptime you'll need atleast 4x 50Ah batteries.
25GB/s does not scale without waste unless you are ok with having 10x lead-acid batteries in the room where you live/sleep because that energy is heating.
Dunno about the hydrogen problem. Lithium only fixes the space problem in exchange of fire hazards, a hefty price increase and short battery life.
Lithium has ~half the longevity compared to lead-acid unless you heat/cool them like Tesla to keep them at a stable temperature (too high/low and the longevity drops like a stone because of tiny impurities between the metal sheets).
NiMH is actually my preferred battery tech now, but it's WAY too expensive for the Ah you need for anything beyond say a maglite solitare LED (awesome torch btw).
Lithium and high power vehicles are completely meaningless for the wider human population in the long run because electricity is NOT an energy source.
This goes back to the idea that POTS usually had its own power service, so when the power goes out the phones would often still be working. When things changed over to fiber and VoIP, similar availability requirements were being applied. As mentioned I'm not sure if this is still the case, I haven't bundled phone service with internet in well over a decade.
Ultimately though of course I would put at least core network things on a UPS (ONT, router, PoE switch for APs) as if the power goes out I'd want to be able to see WTF is going on. If its a big enough event to knock the power out for a little while there's a decent chance it could also lead to lots of people stressing cell networks, so you might not want to rely on that. For those core things I have on a UPS, a small-ish gel cell battery would operate them for a bit under 4 hours. I live in an area prone to both tornadoes and remnants of hurricanes though, so I'm in semi-disaster-prone area.
Init7, the subject of this thread, supplies 25Gb/s, not 25GB/s.
And why are batteries being brought into the discussion? This is a fibre service, it only operates in fixed installations, where grid electricity is available.
I misstype GB and Gb all the time because I talk about disc sizes and network all the time, but you see humans can adapt to my misstake and correct without having to tell me I'm wrong again after the edit timeout has expired... Xo
But to further expand on the battery solution: humanity needs to move away from centralization ASAP, and the most efficient way to do this is to host servers at home. If you only use the fiber you have for consumption you are a slave but if you produce (and potentially sell) something of value from home you are a king.
Unless of course the companies and governements take your external IPv4 away, then you're a slave again, so it's important that EVERYONE that has fiber with an external IP to use it as hosting now, so it's harder for them to undo!
Note, it's not a PON, but real symmetric, point-to-point connection.
I once had 250mbps over 1000BaseLX, and it was way more expensive than 500mbps GePON coming after it.
I'm already using Mikrotik CCR-2004 with 10Gb/s + 1Gb/s links, it has 2x28Gbps ports, so it should be fine when init7 comes here.
Though, with CCR-2004 I'm seeing about 50% CPU usage with 8Gbps up or down, which means I won't be able to use full 25Gb/s with it, most likely 20Gb/s max. And no, there's no specific reason for me to have it - it's just the price is sort-a the same as local 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s offerings.
CHF 64.75 = ~$70USD. But why does 1 / 10 / 25Gbps all cost the same?
I am wondering if there are any cheap Swiss Cloud Storage that one could make use of the upload and download speed. You really could have an external HDD in a DataCenter.
The one-time fee is for covering the expense of the faster optic.
The only expensive thing is the fiber optic line to your house. As long as that’s paid for, bandwidth usage is small potatoes.
The biggest issue I see with doing this (for residential users) is the fiber handoff. For 25Gbit, the very minimum is going to be a SFP28 module with an LC connector. The linked Init7 article is a bit light on details, but consumer grade hardware is not even close to that that in 2022. (SFP Ports OR the packet processing power to move that much traffic!)
Maybe the OTO Init7 installs on the house breaks it out into multiple 1Gbit or 10Gbit links to be more compatible? Even then, in the USA, basic SFP+ 10Gbit fiber, (inside the house) is rare in a residential setting. (Most fiber-based ISPs in the USA provide a 1Gbit copper uplink inside the house.)
Does anyone have thoughts on appropriate hardware/software? At the moment I'm just running a Linux machine as my router, using standard nftables for NAT and firewall, but I'm curious what others think.
Also, congrats!
As someone with symmetric 1Gb, it is really nice in that the effective distance from your house to anywhere and anywhere to your house becomes a lot smaller. With Gb+ backing it, cloud storage with a local cache becomes an attractive alternative to ever buying disks again.