My upgrade to 25 Gbit/s Fiber To The Home
michael.stapelberg.ch
michael.stapelberg.ch
That, along with a surplus server I literally housed in my shoe closet, gave me the firepower I needed to prototype out something that led to two research grants which now employ myself and a new PhD student.
We discount technological investments like this as being “too much” and “unpractical”, but we forget that, even if it only one person in a hundred or a thousand take advantage of them, the impact can be enough to launch careers or start businesses with sizeable positive externalities.
But I really wonder what was your prototype that needed that speed connection and that wouldn't work with something slower. Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work?
We work with gis/satellite data. Nothing groundbreaking technically, but we aggregate it into products that are useful for social science researchers who aren’t comfortable with or don’t have the computing resources to use this data by themselves.
We’ve actually moved everything into a data center with a 1gb connection. The trade of being that we have several orders of magnitude more storage and computing capacity.
I was surprised when my parents had 1Gbit in 2009. I was delighted when I could get 500Mbit in 2013. I'm slightly miffed that I don't even get 1Gbit in 2022. I literally laugh at providers attempting to convince me to get whatever with 10 or 20Mbit uplink speeds, in 2022l Yes, they exist.
Anyhow. What's insane about a 10Gbit uplink? I wired up my apartment for 1Gbit in 2001. I've been frustrated about home network speeds for 21 years. I do not understand why you consider 10Gbit insane.
On the wider internet, few resources are happy to dedicate such bandwidth to you, even if you can consume it. Not even every popular torrent can muster so much incoming bandwidth.
I can see how it may make sense if you run a popular public server from your home; maybe more convenient than colocation, but still is not a typical use case.
Real question: If you are an Internet gamer, I assume that latency per packet is lower for 1Gbit+ connections, so it is useful for many customers.
More: I feel the same about monitor resolutions above 4K. Anything above 4K on a 27inch monitor makes no sense for my body size / sitting height. I cannot use a vertical monitor taller than 27inch, and above 4K is too small for my aging eyesight! Again: I am sure there are many interesting applications for 4K+ and 27inch+. I hereby wish good luck to all the whippersnappers who will prove me wrong with interesting applications of 4K+ and 27inch+!
So? The process of wringing out the bottlenecks is to eliminate the ones you can, and be mad about the ones you can't.
Back in the dialup days, nobody in their right mind would run a torrent, or play online shooters, or watch streaming HD video -- such things were utterly impractical over ultra slow links with very high latency. Once people started getting broadband, these applications started appearing.
Of course we need faster links into people's homes. Of course under-1Gbit links into homes in 2022 are ridiculous.
10gig is insane.
Finally, can your SSD even keep up with speeds like this?
**Oh and I thought I’d note, it is the positive use of “insane” like “mad good”.
COTS nvme SSD can easily do 1GB/s which easily maxes out non-optimized 10Gbit due to overhead alone. Burst that is for write, but you get the idea.
Meanwhile here in Silicon Valley, the fastest connection I can get at home (sonic.net) is 22Mbps/1.7Mbps. In the office I have Comcast Business which is a bit faster (don't recall exactly) but certainly well below 100Mbps.
So yes 1Gbps sounds quite insane. 10Gbps is out of this universe.
Now, 400G uplinks are still pretty reserved, but 100G (and its' breakout, 4 x 25G) is common as dirt now.
This is quite efficient due to the PCIe4 support not hogging many lanes (half of the 8 lanes can be enough depending on usage), but to use the speed one needs a 25G switch. Is the cheapest way just an Ryzen with 5 of these directly attached to the CPU, and running routing on the CPU via DPDK?
[0]: https://geizhals.eu/qnap-lan-adapter-qxg-25g2sf-cx6-a2609459...
Or what if you want a bunch of historical data for some sort of analysis, and you'd like to start that now, not next week when it finishes downloading? If it's historical (i.e. sitting there available to download) then faster is always better right? If your connection is the bottleneck then all else equal why wouldn't you want it?
(I imagine 10Gbps is about the point currently where it's not necessarily going to help going faster on your end, unless you you have multiple (concurrent) sources, or know that even at that you're still still the bottleneck.)
https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/product/imagery/ma...
Being from a soon north korea 2.0 to be (russia,) I can say it was my surprise to see Internet being so bad across the developed countries when I was travelling in the previous decade. Canada - ridiculously expensive traffic, Germany - no comments, UK - sometimes good, sometimes 128kbps DSL, USA - 20mbps DocSis everywhere
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, much of Africa had FTTH as the dominant way of home Internet connection for a while.
Just fyi as I know you aren’t a native speaker, it’s ‘chip in’, if you were native I’d assume a typo, probably is for you too, but it’s a phrase easy to mishear and when I was learning a second language I appreciated these corrections.
We moved back to NL and have 1GBit fiber, and there has been a short outage once in three years. I know that there are a still a lot of addresses without fiber, but when I last checked the stats, about 50% of the addresses has the possibility to get a fiber subscription. Heck, even my parents who live in a small rural town have fiber.
I wonder how the upgrade might look considering that 10Gbps hardware is quite expensive (and house cabling might need upgrading) and 2.5Gbps/5Gbps is quite new and hard to find router or laptop dock/hub supporting it.
At my previous flat 150mbps was the fastest available. So it varies a lot in London on where exactly you are.
We are still creating newbuilds in cities without fiber. In other news, someone fucked up construction and left an entire complex of brand new apartment blocks with 7 mbps internet
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/03/mistake-leaves...
I visited Nepal several years back. They were going straight to wireless. All of the villages in the mountains had a solar panel on their roof that they used to charge their cellphones and there was a cell tower on the ridges.
It was surreal to see villagers use Facebook but have no road access to the main city.
It is easier to upgrade everything in some Blatic states than in some US cities.
In actual fact, our telcos were heavily subsidized during their formative years, granting them a monopoly, rights of way, and helping to pay for their infrastructure. In return for a guaranteed profit margin, we had extreme control over their pricing structure and guarantees of service quality and coverage.
Then we allowed them to be privatized and deregulated, in exchange for which we get fucked. Which is, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, the inevitable outcome of converting public services to private.
Privatisation is good if competition is fostered at the same time. For example by opening existing physical infrastructure to multiple service providers.
Where I live we had (historically) one fixed lined govt provider. When mobile arrived we got 3 private providers. With fibre we got multiple hardware installers (ie multiple companies digging fibre) and then dozens of ISPs running on that.
So far, so good.
That is the official terminology used in school books required by the official curriculum.
I'm from what used to be a third-world country in the strict sense of term, I'd now refer to my country as a country in the global south.
Meaning what, in the southern hemisphere and not Australia or new Zealand?
We have 195 countries in the world and only 33 of those are entirely on the southern hemisphere.
Here is one example of an illustrative map:
Or not necessarily that the inventor of the phrase thinks like that themselves, but rather that they think most people think that way.
The closest geographical designation was the Brandt line drawn in the 80s showing a north and south divide in terms of global wealth distribution [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South#...
I understand if this comes across as pedantry but the global north and south terminology does a better job at leveling the playing field when talking about wealth and progress disparities.
As per your other question, Australia is part of the global north, China is part of the global south in the global north and south groupings.
I mean... but how? It's just the exact same concepts with less intuitively obvious words. Arguably it frames the disparity as a more immutable part of a nation; it doesn't fit normal language patterns to talk about a country moving north/south.
How? South Korea, Japan, and Singapore are richer than France or Spain now. As nations develop the geographic terminology makes less and less sense. Developing nation is much more accurate.
In other words, effectively developed = what we are, developing = trying to be what we are.
It also places unnecessary upper bound on progress (if you call yourself developed, I guess you can stop developing then?).
Ultimately it is forcing a finite game onto the world.
Global south sounds like a better term.
That’s the plan, yes.
> Ultimately it is forcing a finite game onto the world. Global south sounds like a better term.
Except that it’s geographically inaccurate as well as kind of racist. Japan, Singapore, and Korea can get richer than France or Spain, but they still get lumped in with the other non-white people in “the global south.”
Just to clarify, the plan is to stop developing?
> Japan, Singapore, and Korea can get richer than France or Spain, but they still get lumped in with the other non-white people in “the global south.”
Global south/north divide lumps SK, SG and JP into the north. I have a bigger problem with it putting Russia there, but not e.g. Argentina.
Besides, note how the term "developed" sounds like it has an objective, final and fixed definition, but always invites moving goalposts. Now you use some financial metric. Tomorrow someone uses education levels or democracy.
**
The truth is that everybody should keep developing, and development can entail different things to different people. If you say "I'm developed, and that other person is developing", "we are good, but they are not good yet", all you get is resentment when in fact you want global cooperation.
"Developedness" is a vague, subjective measure that indicates duck all except hubris on the part of whoever coined the term (not coincidentally, that was developed countries).
A vague measure warrants a vague term. "Global South" is far from perfect, but it is less bad. It is obviously geographically inaccurate, which on a meta level is quite fitting.
I don't think I could ever use either term without air quotes, but at least with global south they are more or less implied.
Only if you arbitrarily make exceptions for what’s “south”—ignoring the fact that Singapore and Taiwan and Korea are south of China. The phrase itself implies a permanent association between “south” (I.e. non-white, since skin color is a function of latitude) and “under-undeveloped.” That seems far worse to me than acknowledging that developing countries are indeed trying to become like developed countries.
I'm not against replacing "third world", but something with the word "south" is ambiguous and counterintuitive.
'Southern hemisphere' is fine though I think? And I assume that's what was meant.
Your conclusion is my point.
Doesn't make sense. The second world countries wouldn't drop the third world when realigning to first world.
First world: NATO aligned. Second world: Warsawa pact aligned. Third world: Non-aligned.
Sweden and Swtizerland are traditional third world countries.
>>The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact.
Add in a requirement/desire for it being real-time (or equivalently (you'd get further and further behind) continual) and it could be necessary if large (per second) enough.
Secondly - as a person living my whole life in IT - both passion and professionally - I have no idea what would 25Gbit be good for. I’m currently paying about $80 for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and have the option to upgrade to 5Gbit for about $180 but it seems so pointless.
Here is the reasoning behind my grumpy opinion:
1. Living in a home with Cat5 throughout so the best I can do is to route 1Gbit. Running cables in multilevel (American) homes is a major PITA.
2. My Wi-Fi (802.11ax) is heavily affected by homes around me so only one AP can run with 80MHz channel width and the rest is 20-40MHz. Throughput ends up being somewhere between 150Mbit-500Mbit, depending on where you are.
3. I have a few smaller servers running ..stuff. The trouble is not about server performance or bandwidth.. it’s about reliability. Running any business on consumer line (in the USA) is just signing up for trouble. (Eg. “Is your line down because your modem received a fault firmware? No worries, the tech is going to be there within next 4 days to check your cables…”).
4. Things like game downloads on PS5 .. yes, they are amazingly fast (even on 1Gbit. They install faster from internet than from the built-in BD-ROM). But many games need to also “install” (whatever that means on PS5) and that takes 2x the time of download anyway. I can live with that once a month.
5. Big fan of streaming services, however many providers limit bitrate on their side so I am still watching the sometimes blurry 4k …
Back to original question and with genuine curiosity - what is 25Gbit for???
Having your uplink faster than all your individual ports in a network helps prevent any one port from being able to saturate your network.
I work at an ISP that within the last year started selling 10Gbit symmetric, and we all sorta know there's not a huge use for it - yet. It's not really an issue for use to justify though, we don't charge any extra for it, it's all $40/mo and if you're in a new area we're building you get 10Gbit instead of the old 1Gbit at that price.
I think it's way too rural at this point however, given that I am technically in unincorporated area.
I imagine it's easier now than it used to be to find some areas with good beauty and above ground infra (poles) that have space, and make a business plan and point at others that are doing it successfully as justification.
Or maybe we'll be there in a few years. At the rate we want to expand it's not impossible. :)
Still very worthwhile to not have to talk to a Telco, but I had to rent + use AT&Ts garbage router because it did some proprietary negotiation step (With the ONT? There was a blog post where someone reverse engineered what was happening).
Now I'm in a smaller city and Sonic claims they have plans for us some day. For the time being, it's the Comcast nightmare.
Edit: and AT&T fiber was asymmetrical. Disappoint.
Still, like you noted, not having to deal with AT&T is a great selling point to a lot of people, and we're known for good support, so I'd like to think we're providing as good a service as those people can get until we build out our network in their area.
We have aggressive plans for the future, so I hope we're in your area sooner than later. :)
If they kept the same price then the total cost to the end user would be ~$70 for 10G. Which is less than half of the cheapest option available.
EDIT: USA, CA here. sonic.net. $40/mo with 3 free months. They'll pay up to $200 termination charges. Not affiliated with them.
From a switch perspective, it makes more sense to carve out 4x 25G ports vs 4x 10G ports if you have 100G switches. In a single rack unit you can fit ~32 100G ports, which can then be broken out to 128x 25G ports. That’s more port density than a 1U 48 port 25 switch/line card.
What a pointless question. I wish people would stop worrying about this instead of simply making it possible, so we can figure out what to do with it.
Wifi6E is around the corner for >1GbE wifi.
Init7:
1/1 Gbit/sec CHF 64.75
25/25 Gbit/sec CHF 64.75
It's the same price if available.
I have to schedule it all to run at night because it will saturate the network during the day otherwise.
I have 1Gb/40Mb @ $100 internet for reference.
Going above 1 Gbit/s can have (very limited) practical sense because you can hit that with e.g. Steam downloads, changing a 5 minute wait into a 3 minute wait. You can also basically stop caring about QoS on your uplink once you're at 1 Gbit/s with one human user, or anywhere past 1 Gbps with more than one human user.
For running cables, seriously consider fiber. The hardware isn't as expensive as it used to be, and it solves a lot of problems: You can (based on common sense, not sure of your building code) stick fiber in power conduits since its non conductive, you don't have to worry about potential differences etc., it's thinner (easier to hide/more wife-compatible) and once in place, you will be able to use the same fiber for higher speeds just by swapping the SFP's at the ends.
We got 1Gbit in 1999-2000 at work. Upgraded to this crazy IBM standard for wall sockets. Turned out to be unnecessary. We had 10Gbit at work in 2006. When I switched to one of the 'big internet companies' in 2008, every fucking server was supposed to have 10Gbit. In 2013, every fucking server was supposed to have 40Gbit.
We're now in 2022. 8 years later. And people argue about 25Gbit at home.
Ḯ'm a bit ashamed.
25Gbps is for multiple transfers from multiple sites to multiple computers. For example I transfer large files for work (up to 100 GB) from multiple sources and it takes a long time and consumes all the bandwidth in the building. If I download at lower priority (implement some QoS) then it takes even longer. I can see 25 Gbps eliminate the bottleneck and allow everyone in the building to have their regular use (video conferences, movie streaming, gaming, whatever) without me impacting. I would never use more than 1% of that bandwidth on average, but I would peak more than 1 Gbps quite often. Yes, 10 Gbps would be more than enough, but if the cost is the same then 25 Gbps seems more future-proof, at a cost (SFP28 equipment is much more expensive than SFP+).
I used to design 2D graphics accelerators, one thing we learned was that perceived performance is not linear, in reality there was a performance region where people would always crave more, and another where things were fast enough and people were happy but wouldn't open their wallets for massive increases .... at that point 10x seemed more like 1.5x) - I suspect that something similar applies to home net performance too
I just got a notice in the mail that my ISP is "upgrading" their network so now I can pay $200 USD/month to get a whopping 2gbps, which I actually thought was pretty amazing until I read your post. So, thanks.
In all seriousness, congrats! You made a good case for why one would need that much bandwidth. Also, we need to catch up here. :)
Until recently I paid $35 per month for a 300 Mbps line because I couldn’t justify the jump to 1 Gbps.
Then I had to upload some local Hyper-V servers to AWS to convert them to AMIs and figured what the heck I’d upgrade the line.
I would have no interest in upgrading beyond 1 Gbps right now though. There are too many infrastructure components that need to be upgraded to attain that and I don’t have a use case for it.
My local ISP trenched fiber to my house for free and provides gig internet for $80/month.
The funny thing is my previous house was in town and I had to settle for 100Mbit for the same price. ISPs are all sorts of messed up.
In the city it’s often just as easy to let what is working continue “working” - a major rollout takes a lot of money.
(I'm on Comcast's Business service, $250/mo for 1000/35 [long dumb story why]. Most of the time I see under 600 down when checking on speed test sites, and real-world speeds downloading large files rarely exceeds 250. I expect real-world speeds on the non-business service are even worse.)
It's pretty embarrassing that this is the state of things.
Over in Oakland I am paying $40/mo to Sonic for 10Gbps (though I only have equipment to route at 1Gbps at the moment)
There's a benchmark posted there showing that the speed is really as advertised.
gnpUSD = {'USA': 21,650,000,000,000, 'THA': 491,910,000,000} #4th quarter 2021
pop = {'USA': 329,000,000, 'THA': 70,000,000} #as of 2021
gnp['USA'] // pop['USA'] 65805
gnp['THA'] // pop['THA'] 7027
Seems more like a distribution of resources issue... so why not jack up taxes on the wealthiest 1% and use it to pay for things like high-speed fiber in all the rural areas? Doubtless this would lead to economic growth?
Throwing more money at it usually makes that kind of problem WORSE not better.
> "The Rural Electrification Act of 1936, enacted on May 20, 1936, provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve isolated rural areas of the United States. The funding was channeled through cooperative electric power companies, hundreds of which still exist today. (wiki)"
However there are just as many places where the state's government was bought off to ban such networks because the majors are afraid of actual competition.
It’s mostly been ineffective.
---
footnote here: official income record of thai people/businesses does not really reflect reality. Lots of entities are kind of off-system.
I prefer to order grab of around 120-200 baht from a "healthy" place or going for restaurants within Central 200-400 baht per meal.
It's like a typical consumer in the US spending $500+ per month for broadband. Even worse if you consider the rural income factor. Absolutely insane.
For a fraction of that you can get 1gbps from Comcast and you'll never utilize most of it in 99% of consumer situations.
I'm in a small quasi rural 'city' in the US, hours away from any consequential city, and I can get 1.2gbps from Comcast for 15-20% of the income adjusted rate in question referenced for Thailand.
It seems common to forget how astoundingly high US median income, disposable income, and GDP per capita figures are compared to the rest of the world. The latest 2022 estimates are pegging US GDP per capita at nearly double that of France and Japan. To match up on median disposable income figures, you have to use hyper affluent countries like Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway as references. Then people come on HN and proclaim how they're paying only $20 per month for Internet access, in a country with 1/10-1/5 the median disposable income of the US. The US is more expensive than it should be for Internet access (better telecom competition would go a long ways toward fixing that), however the reality is US income figures are also a lot higher than most of the developed world.
Where your number comes into play is for people pricing Netflix subscriptions.
You end up with absurd examples where Botswana is comparable to China; Russia is comparable to Greece; Puerto Rico is comparable to Spain, ahead of Portugal, and just a bit lower than Japan; Kazakhstan is just a bit behind Latvia and Slovakia; Taiwan is far ahead of Finland, France, UK, New Zealand.
Imputed rent for example is one of those things that’s kind of silly on the face of it but makes various comparisons more reasonable. On the other hand it can also imply a great deal of economic activity that isn’t actually happening.
PPP is the same sort of calculation. If rents crash because a great deal of housing was built it can make GDP comparisons kind of meaningless. The country has more tangible wealth, people are better off, yet GDP falls. That’s not what you want the number to represent.
That means you can have two countries with comparable GDP per-capita, where one of them have a more affluent population and able to pay higher prices.
I went with 5G from T-Mobile for $50 a month.
I live in rural BC and I'm was able to get 80Mb for $35 using a no-name internet only provider with no contract.
If I went with one of the big cable companies I would be paying at least double for the same thing
So my internet is provided by Lightspeed on Shaw cable.
As much as Canadian telecom seems to own the CRTC it isn’t nearly as consumer unfriendly as when I lived in the US.
I had an apartment in downtown Seattle which had 2 choices for internet. Many of my friends were quite impressed since most addresses are only served by one ISP.
This price randomness never occured to me in germany, and just booking a fixed low price on a website was so much more convenient.
Moved to Thailand (BKK) in 2016 and was so disappointed by a very new condominium in the center, which didn't even allowed for FTTH lines.
Real Estate Developers usually make contracts within their Condos, to force the whole building to use only one provider.
But it doesn’t matter because it isn’t actually offered in my area / the local telco can’t even notify the right people…
Also amusingly, both Comcast and Verizon have the very old (as in multiple decades) name for the street I live on as my address. It's only somewhat wrong (the name used to have a North on it)--but it is still wrong.
It's orders of magnitude more uncommon than doing so in the USA.
So bring all the hate :)
Where I’m at it’s $80/month for a 5gb/s. If you want that in a major city, >1m people; good luck.
Corruption, regulation and development costs are just too high.
Rather sad to be honest.
Mobile plans are also on the cheap side, to the point of being competitive with many third world countries (for example, I wasn't that impressed with prices in Thailand in 2020 for comparable plans, only a 1-2€ difference with what I had at home).
This is getting to the point that I find myself often suggesting fellows from border countries open a line in France, just so that they can enjoy the "European roaming data envelope" that comes with most plans (i.e. several gigabytes are free to use from anywhere in Europe, and you can make calls and texts to other EU countries when abroad...) after realizing how expensive and suckish mobile plans are in their country (Belgium in this instance).
[0] https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/Best-and...
Which provider would you recommend? I remember taking a look a while back and the most viable option was Free, but 15.99 EUR a month for when I need roaming 3–4 times a year seemed a bit excessive at 180.- per year.
SIM card is free, you can top it up with a prepaid amount or do a one-month plan without renewing it, and I just checked their T&Cs relating to roaming and they are actually quite generous[1][2].
Besides, their website is (for the most part) translated in English due to their target demographic, so no need for full French fluency here!
Some good info in English on the French telco landscape can be found at [3].
[0] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/
[1] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/international-call-rates
[2] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/terms-and-conditions#section...: See section 2.4.2 (in French unfortunately)
[3] https://en.selectra.info/broadband-phone-france/guides/mobil...
Edit: missing word
A cursory search indicates that both Orange and Bouygues (as well as their contract-free offshoots, Sosh and B&YOU respectively) still offer this as a paid option at 5€ and 7€ per month respectively.
This means you could get the plan appropriate for your needs, then suspend it (for at most 6 month per year it seems) and only reactivate it when you need it.
However since this procedure requires getting in touch with customer service, it should be reserved for people well versed in French :-)
Edit: adding links (all in French)
https://www.echosdunet.net/dossiers/suspendre-ligne#suspensi...
https://assistance.sosh.fr/faq/308268
https://www.assistance.bouyguestelecom.fr/s/article/suspensi...
If you know someone in France, you may ask them to make a "solemn declaration" that you live at their address; then you only need provide their own proof of residency (people living with their parents routinely do so).
Tourist and prepaid SIM cards are still exempted and, depending on your case, can prove quite interesting.
For example, we offer $40 service, and if you're in our historical areas that's 1Gbit symmetrical, and if you're in newer areas we've turned up in the last year that's 10Gbit symmetrical.
We're expanding (as I expect most ISPs that can undercut the major players that much are), but it requires actually stringing fiber through neighborhoods on poles, so it takes a while (but that can be scaled...).
If you don't have telephone poles, it's much harder/more expensive to build out an area, so often those are skipped (at least initially) as areas cheaper to deliver to are prioritized. The is unfortunately a lot of new development, as they'll build neighborhood with underground utilities and pre-wire AT&T and Comcast, making it hard for others to deliver to the area without a lot of cost and work (trenching).
Some people a few miles away have a fiber POP at the end of their shared driveway, and are trying to decide if they should pay the extra couple hundred per house to go from 1GBit to 25GBit symmetric to the houses.
At the ISP I work for, I believe we spec out the cabling we need to a neighborhood and then order a special bundle with breakouts at specific locations along the length to serve locations, and then string that along the poles. I'm not sure why we wouldn't serve a house with one of those, but those go back to a central point in a neighborhood, and it's possible the backhaul from the central office to that central point in the neighborhood passes houses that aren't served. Where to build is all about ease of wiring an area and housi g density. It's all about cost per houses passed. The good news is that maybe your area is slated to get fiber since it goes by there, and it's just a matter of the lower hanging fruit being picked first.
This street got sold off to a bankrupt telco (from what I can tell, their business model is to buy up unprofitable lines, then periodically file for bankruptcy).
There are a few local fiber providers. Maybe I could call and see what it would take to convince them to build out. (There is definitely demand here.)
Alternatively AT&T (who is not our local telco) keeps spamming us to get a business fiber to the home connection. They make it clear they'll ban customers that appear to be using it for residential traffic, but I think that sort of traffic discrimination falls afoul of California's network neutrality laws. Has anyone tried calling their bluff on that?
Be careful approaching incumbent major ISPs or letting them know if you got the signatures though. You might find they went out and offered sweetheart deals to the same people on two year contracts, but at existing service levels...
Regarding business fiber, I think they're more trying to keep people from reselling it as a micro ISP. If you're willing to pay business costs for personal use, I don't think they'll care. If you split the cost between 10 neighbors, they might. There may be other concerns they are dealing with that I'm not thinking of though.
For example I have 3 Internet connections at home that I pay ~ $30 in total, from 150 Mbps to 1 Gbps. I think the 1 Gbps is ~ $12/month, it is so cheap because there are so many options and I can afford to keep all 3 for redundancy (1 is a 4G mobile data capped at 200GB/month, it works even when there is a power failure in the entire neighborhood).
But if there is no variety of options and no competition, then price is high. From what I read, most ISP in USA are squeezing as much as they can from their clients, sometimes to ridiculous levels.
Here in Australia: $90/month nets you “100/40mb”, which is really more like “~85mb down, 25 up but only a quiet night, if you’re next to the router, and it hasn’t rained within the last week”.
If you live in an area that can get HFC, FTTP, FTTN etc. it’s possible these days to get a pretty consistent 1000/50 for $150/month. Those fibre services are pretty stable in my experience, definitely a million times better than the old broadband which as you put got destroyed by bad weather and distance from the exchange.
Apparently you can pay money to have fibre routed to your house from the nearest node/etc, but I rent, so I’m not going to do that.
They recently called me to upgrade my fiber connection from 1 Gbps to 10Gbps for free (every customer with a compatible connection gets it, AFAIK).
I have to admit that, although the network is indeed faster (on the speed tests and file transfers), I really don't see the point quite yet.
Considering that:
- Most of the devices I use are anyways connected to WiFi 6
- Reaching a 10Gbps peak is highly unlikely
- Most of my ethernet ports are anyways at most 1Gbps
- Most of the servers won't serve you more than 1Gbps anyways
I do not really consider this a must-have upgrade for a residential customer, especially if you live alone / less than 4 people.
On top of that, as demonstrated by these tests, servers aren't quite there yet, and the 10Gbps / 25Gbps you are getting are not fully dedicated to your connection.
Don't get me wrong, I love to be able to use the fastest internet I can - but realistically speaking this is just useful in a few specific cases.
If you are hosting your own server at home, a 10 / 25 Gbps upload is definitely interesting though.
It a nice thing to have already, and I'm really thankful to live in a country where I have the privilege of having such a luxury, but as of today a >1Gbps connection is overkill (heck, for most of the stuff even a >100Mbps is overkill sometimes).
I don't know about you, but the only time I would reach such a peak would be in case I download something huge while watching Netflix at 4k (which I don't have) and while at the same time downloading an update for my phone and a game for the PS5 (which I don't own).
I would argue that the likelihood of all the above things happening at the same time is quite low, at least for me :)
Sure, being 10Gbps-ready is already awesome, but it feels like buying a 16k TV today. For some niche use cases it might make sense, but until this technology is mainstream and makes sense it would take a while
But even such high peaks should be covered by “only” 1G.
Joke aside. I get your point, but how many people do you have to have on a single 1 Gbit line to saturdate it? Some things will get faster for sure (like downloading large files, if the other side is fast enough), but I feel like most of the time it's driving a Ferrari within a city.
Given that this article is about Zurich... that's a very apt analogy.
If you want you can get a IB4 and forget about the replacement module (it should have the module directly soldered onto the board AFAIK).
Anyways, both routers are fanless from what I know (and can hear).
https://www.swisscom.ch/content/dam/assets/b2c/products/inte...
True because the customer router has just one 2.5G and four 1G ports....thank you swisscom...but hey like you said the upgrade from 1G to "shared" ~10G was free.
I think beyond 1gbit, the benefit become super marginal and the hardware expensive.
Probably the best argument would be that many/most? people don't watch the whole video.
The main argument I see is "if you build it they will come" i.e. we won't see higher bitrates until connections like these are more common, but for now gigabit has even fairly extreme use cases for video streaming pretty well covered.
Past even 500 Mbit I'm way more interested in latency considerations than raw bandwidth, and practical matters like how to use that bandwidth from my laptop (good luck doing 500 mbit wireless reliably, never mind 25 Gbit!)
I'd still rather have gigabit fibre.
The fastest I ever saw on 4G was 300 megabit down but the latency could be 40-80ms.
Most routers and wifi adapters are crap. Buyers do rarely go beyond "wifi 5" or "wifi 6", and do not realize that there's much more.
The older Apple Macbook Pros (pre-2019) came with 3x3 MIMO ac adapters. If you had capable AP on the other side, you could reliably do gigabit with them. The newer ones have only 2x2 MIMO, just like the rest of the laptop market, so you will get only 600-700 Mbps (out of theoretical 866 Mbps).
If you are getting 500 Mbps and there's not a concrete wall between your client and the AP, something is quite wrong. Misconfigured AP, your client cannot do multiple streams (yes, there were adapters like that sold on the market), or just older/pre-ac AP or client.
Would you mind elaborating on this? I would like to learn more to revamp my home setup, which is currently on wifi 5.
1) how effectively you can pack data into a channel, determined by the modulation scheme.
In your wifi properties, you can see the modulation scheme used as 'MCS index'. You will see an integer between 1 and 11, the higher, the better. This is negotiated between client and AP, depending on the signal strength (antennas, number of walls/wall material between them, etc). With wifi 5, it is realistic to have MCS 8 or 9, if your client and AP are in the same room.
2) how wide is your channel - the "basic" is 20 MHz wide, newer standards can combine multiples, into 40, 80, 160 MHz wide one. Wifi 7 will bring 320 MHz wide channels.
2,4 GHz band has only 3 non-overlapping 20 MHz wide channels available. If you use more than one, your neighbors will hate you. The situation is better with 5 GHz band, unless you run into the DFS (radar detection), then you can have intermittent outages. This is improved by Wifi 6e which brings more channels in the 6 GHz band, but the client and AP support is not there yet. Currently, running an 80 MHz wide channel bellow DFS frequencies is probably the best.
3) how many many simultaneous streams you are able to transmit/receive - MIMO (one client using multiple streams), MU-MIMO (multiple users using multiple streams, so they do not stomp on each other and sidestep next point).
Most clients are capable of 2x2 MIMO, older Apple MBPs (pre-2019, -ac based) are capable of 3x3. Most APs are also 2x2. The nicer APs can do 4x4 MIMO, some gamer APs by companies like ASUS can do 8x8.
4) how effectively can multiple clients share the same channel.
Here the problem is, that once an older client connects, it is downgrade for all clients, they must be compatible. If you can, keep your 2,4 GHz network -n and higher, and 5 GHz -ac or higher.
Once you will be able to have a band -ax only, you could theoretically be able to use OFDMA, which does improve the performance for multiple clients.
You can have a look at mcsindex.com: pick the modulation scheme (row), number of MIMO streams (group of rows), how wide is your channel (column) and OFDM/OFDMA (group of columns) and there you can see the theoretical bandwidth. Note, that it is a shared bandwidth, for all clients.
There are some minor points:
5) if you have IPTV or another application that uses multicast, do not run it over wifi! Multicast by definition does not have ACK, so what can AP do to ensure every subscribed client gets the data? Slow everything down, for everyone. So do not let it do it.
6) multiple SSID - possible, but do not overdo it; they also have performance impact (the SSID advertising takes time, at the slowest/most compatible rate allowed; the more of them, the more time it takes). Ubiqiti limits them to 4 per radio.
7) at higher frequencies, you won't have a such range than at lower ones. This is both good and bad thing. The bad, obviously, that your range is lower. The good is, that the range of your neighbors is also lower, so you could use the same channel without disturbing each other.
8) It does not help to crank the tx power to the max. The clients may receive, but when they answer, the answer could never arrive. Clients do not have antennas or tx power like APs do. Use the tx power reasonably; if you have multiple APs in your house, adjust it so clients will let go the weaker signal and connect to the stronger one (which AP connect to is fully managed by clients, unfortunately, and they often prefer to stick to the one they are already connected, even if different one with stronger signal is available. At most, some APs can kick the client once the signal is below threshold you specify).
9) some cheap dual-band APs have only single radio, capable of transmitting at both frequencies. Not at the same time, obviously, they time share. Make sure your APs have separate radios for each band they support.
10) some APs do support roaming (802.11-k/r/v); for home (or WPAx-Personal) that's not that important. It is enough if your SSIDs are named the same and have the same password. Roaming support helps with WPAx-Enterprise, which is much more heavy-weight.
If I was revamping my home setup today, I would pick something from Ubiquiti that can do 4x4 MIMO, probably U6 Pro; if the top speed was not really an issue or there would not be two users trying do download the internets, then probably U6 Lite (I'm running nanoHD today, and even that can utilize the 1 Gbit ethernet uplink to its full capacity). Mikrotik is supposedly also working on Wifi 6, but they have nothing available right now. If you have a better budget, then there are brands like Ruckus. The choice is affected by about how big is your home, what is the disposition, what materials are used, where do you want to place your APs and how you need, are your neighbors noisy (in wifi), what you expect from the wifi and what is your budget.
So I hope that this helps you for a start.
Is it expensive though? We spend how much of our lives online. How much do you think this all-spanning life upgrade costs? What is the price of never ever dealing with buffer-bloat? Take a guess.
I calculate it as a one time $356 cost plus labor. You might have paid more for your wifi system. 128 port 25gbe switches are around $20k ($156/port). Transcievers are under $100 and you need one on both ends. For a lot of already deployed fiber, this is a drop in replacement. This is absurdly cheap. Given how cheap this is it's an obvious & enthusiastic heck yes. Who wouldnt throw down $356 right now to get 25Gbe for life?
Cost gets a bit more complicated when it comes to the POPs & their uplink. Subscribers are going to be way oversubscribed even with some fairly expensive 100Gb uplinks. As you get further from an exchange the difficulty grows geometrically (because pops become.further hops away from the ix). Peering needs to be bigger too, as does transit (but ask whether the net volume of traffic grows elastically or not), which has costs. But I think we need to frame this question a bit better, of whether it's "worth" upgrading. Honestly costs are so low it doesnt make sense not to; the rest of the world is just milking us, bilking us, charging what the market will bear, protecting it's profit centers, and this company init7 is doing what makes financial sense for the consumer. Donwe need all that? Maybe maybe not. Should we settle for less? There's almost no financial case when the hardware is so so so very cheap. This tech sounds magical but 25Gbe is not exotic, not extreme technology; "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet".
To actually realize your faster speeds, you need to spend thousands of dollars yourself on new switches and NICs. And then, as mentioned, the benefits are marginal. You would have to be streaming 10+ 4K movies at once to even "need" gigabit, let alone 25Gbps.
I semi agree that I dont think we know what this is for. Never ever having buffer bloat is a tempting first ask. Connectivity is more than the sum of throughputs, as your figures imply- there's questions of availability too.
Being able to access each other's systems at near local speeds sounds quite compelling, could help jumpstart post-Big Social computing. You talk about netflix streams, but those are heavily compressed with the best offline encoding on the planet: if i just want to open Steam Remote Play Together & share realtime 4K with a friend, I'd need a lot more throughput since I have much much much less efficiemt encoding. If i wanted Remote Play Together with 3 friends, well, that figures goes up. If my family member also wants to do the same, now we're using a lot or maybe all the throughput & we're starting to have some contested bandwidth, some rising latencies.
The truth is somewhere between. Rationalizing ourselves down to what sounds sensible today, to me, is a cruel trick, is not just path dependency but an ideology that believes only in what we have & can see now, & refuses exploration & trying. To me the world & tech is spiritually fueled by why not thinking, by deciding to opt for the extra thats within reach.
Forgoing a cheap (still less than the price of a nice tv, by far), available one-time purchase option that vaults us into near-local connevtivity caliber with the world is still a lock in my book.
There's benefits to 25G (certainly when transporting 4K video around which needs more than a 10G nic), whether that's worthwhile for a typical home is likely "no", so unless you've got hundereds of employees in an office it doesn't feel very useful.
Don't get me wrong. I'm very much in favor of this upgrade. I just don't think it's going to be an everyday quality-of-life improvement for most people. It's more about providing a service for people with special needs, and future-proofing the infrastructure.
Indeed. And I'm speaking as someone who downloads most visual media before I watch it, so bandwidth matters to me. But not that much. With 100-200 Mbit/s I am good.
Cookie prompts, newsletter pop-ups, scrolljacking and ads constitutes the majority of wasted time for me, by a long shot. Latency to sites in other parts of the world can cause problems sometimes, since number of round trips can be quite high with TLS neg + progressively loaded content.
Unfortunately for most (consumer) FTTH deployments, that's not the case. Most of them are GPON, where the initial deployment was more effective, as up to 64 of your customers share single fiber, but then that means all of them have to upgrade all 64 of them at the same time, you cannot do them one at the time (see also the speed of XG-PON upgrades).
Additionally, many providers forced use of their CPEs. If you can send out SFP module and the customers can put it into whatever they want, it is much simpler, as replacing CPEs for all the customers on that fiber.
As TFA mentions, same was the case with 1 gbit. I can confirm, I'm on the same ISP and was "early" to have 1gbit/s. Lots of servers still only had 100mbit/s links. These days I have zero issues saturating my 1gbit link.
Give it time, now that it starts rolling out, costs will come down and server links will be upgraded. The usual early adopter stuff.
Some time ago PC has revolutionized the world by giving access to computer power to general population. This has unleashed a tidal wave of creativity and business.
Giving the ability to host own servers to everyone can open up endless opportunities as well.
I host some of my own servers and benefit from it greatly.
It’s my biggest hope for internet re-decentralization.
Software and driver updates exceed 1Gbps all the time, as do game updates/downloads through Steam.
Piracy also works really well. Downloading copyrighted media is perfectly legal in Switzerland and I was able to get ~7Gbps real-world speeds from Usenet without too much hassle.
It's also really handy for things like backups. As of writing, bandwidth to a Hetzner cloud server is ~5Gbps up/down with iPerf3.
I do agree that 25Gbps is more overkill/bragging rights than it is real utility but I think 10Gbps is an easy sell.
Keep in mind that there is no change at all to the monthly price of your internet by choosing these higher speeds. 10Gbps has the same monthly and setup costs as 1Gbps, you only have to pay a bit extra for hardware capable of dealing with 10Gbps, which is pretty affordable.
Please note too, piracy is not legal in Switzerland. What is illegal is the spying and tracking which would be necessary to build a case and prosecute pirates. Technically you could still self-incriminate if you documented all of your piracy, with proof, and published it online.
The mentioned legal basis is [1].
Note that this applies strictly to downloading though. Participating in a torrent swarm (where uploading is also happening) is not permitted. That's where the technicality you mention comes in: until recently, it was illegal to monitor internet users for copyright enforcement purposes, which meant it was illegal to monitor a torrent swarm, which meant you could somewhat safely seed torrents, despite it being illegal.
That loophole was recently removed however.
[0]: https://www.ige.ch/en/intellectual-property/counterfeiting-a...
[1]: https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1993/1798_1798_1798/en#ar...
De jure it's not really legal anymore since they updated the law... De facto nobody cares as long as you're not making a business out of it.
Same goes for the place I live since 2016: Thailand.
Though: Not pirating for professional stuff, only for private stuff. I still support software/media by buying the things I want to support.
My claim was founded on authoritative sources, including the law itself. If you want to contradict that claim, you'll need to back it up.
The realistic limits are per connection. But with 25Gbps you can just have multiple connections open without any of them ever affecting any other.
Realistically, this is pretty close to true with 2gbps symmetric, too. My provider seems to give me 2.2gbps in practice.
PS5 downloads/updates are 500-600mbps in practice. Steam is 1.5gbps or so. Most other things-- streaming, video calling, etc, are under 40mbps. So, you know-- if I kick off a PS5 download, and a steam update, and my kids are streaming and video calling... And my machines are backing up to the cloud at 1.5gbps (other direction)... and I decide to do a big apt-get update on a machine, maybe my steam update completes a couple seconds later.
Of course, I want even faster... but I'm hard pressed to say what would be better.
SATA drives max at 6 Gb/s, and probably a bit worse than that in practice.
M.2 NVMe SSDs can reach 25+ Gb/s on sequential writes. Maybe I could overclock these to squeeze a bit more out too. Although, an 8TB M.2 drive will cost over $1k for now.
I suppose there's also RAID. Although, I'm not sure what other limits/gotchas I'd run into there.
Quite frankly, I'd expected a 100Gbit uplink by now.
The only use case I can think of would be bit torrent where lots of peers housed in server farms could lead to full saturation. I’ve seen download speeds at 150MB/s. That’s still a measly 1.2Gbit. But even when you’re talking about downloading remuxed 2160p files (~50-75GB) or the occasional collection (~100-200GB), I don’t see the need since it takes time to connect to the swarm and saturate those connections. Unless of course you want to seed it to the whole world.
Cool to have such big pipes, and I’m glad Switzerland is doing some good for science and proving to other ISPs that there’s profit to be had in avoiding rate limiting, but this is so wildly unnecessary.
Their point still stands though: the download servers bandwidth usually throttles below gigabit, so it's gonna be hard to saturate that line today
That is not true at all? Spider man was like 70gb , miles morales was like 40gb
Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War Cross gen bundle / Ultimate edition - 283.5 GB minimum
Spider-Man Miles Morales Ultimate Edition - 170.5 GB minimum
Hitman 3 - 105.1 GB minimum
Destiny 2 - 101.1 GB minimum
The Last of Us 2 - 93.37 GB minimumhttps://gamerant.com/ps5-biggest-game-file-sizes-gb/
Here's the offical site also saying 105 gb:
https://direct.playstation.com/en-us/games/game/marvels-spid...
Also it's two games, Miles Morales and the remake of the PS4 version of Spider-Man.
Assuming Sony uses similar technology are the PS5 downloads strangled by weak residential connections? Maybe specifically in your area?
AT&T fiber recently rolled out 5 gigs in San Francisco and as far as I can tell, Steam is the only service that can saturate it. That’s after buying a 10 gig $100 network card and a $200 router which only has 2 10 gig ports.
It’s going to be a few years before >1 gig internet is commonly supported.
Why should he have to wait several minutes?
Secondly, I'd like to point out that I wired up my house for 1Gbit about 20 years ago. And I've been frustrated about the lack of home equipment for 10Gbit for about 15 years.
I mean, I reached download speeds of 150MB/s about ~15 years ago. What The Actual Fuck.
No, I don't live in the US, nor the Neterlands, nor Switzerland.
WiFi goes up to 1Gb/s, if you're lucky. Sure, some WiFi-6 APs have a 2.5Gb/s connector, but that's not what you want or need, unless you're a high-density enterprise. WiFi-6E will possibly improve that a bit, but it will take WiFi-8 to get anywhere close to saturation.
Wired, you can do 10Gb/s for server systems, which are, amongst other things very loud and not very suitable for placement anywhere near humans. 2.5Gb/s support is spotty, and 1Gb/s still the only thing that works reliably.
So, exactly which residential application requires 25Gb/s is not very clear. Yes, it's cool, but not very useful, and faulting manufacturers (especially in times of crippling supply-chain limitations) for not fully supporting it is questionable.
2.5Gb/s can easily be done with a lot of laptops and workstations these days; 10 Gb/s isn't quite there yet (and 25, 40 and 100Gb/s are definitely in the server-only fiber-or-DAC-only realm)
It's also easy to open and replace the fan with something less noisy. Just remove a few screws, it's a standard size with a normal connector on it.
There's also big external heatsink so you could rig up a big, slow, fan to help it out a bit.
If you want to be green by the way, use fiber/DAC. The 10G copper SFP+ modules are power hungry, and Mikrotik recommends not placing them next to each other. Also the extra power draw is likely to result in fan use if you have a lot of them.
The Mikrotik ones (S+RJ10) are based on Marvel chip and they are the more power hungry / run over 30m only variety. On the other hand, they can negotiate 2.5G or 5G if necessary and support a proprietary protocol to tell the switch about it, so you will that in SFP+ properties.
As I have written in the sibling comment, I have good experience with BCM84891-based transceivers. CRS305 can handle two (still not next to each other, obviously).
Mikrotik CRS305 (4xSFP+) and CRS309 (8xSFP+) are both passively cooled. They are pretty much silent :) though the blue led takes some tape to be less shiny.
> 10 Gb/s isn't quite there yet
If you really, really need RJ45, look into BCM84891-based transceivers. They still get hot, but not as much as others (according to datasheet, takes 1.6W at 30m and 2W at 80m). I also managed to get stable 10g over 20m Cat5e with them.
There are a few quiet 10 GbE switches, the passive Mikrotik ones others are mentioning, but this one is a quiet actively cooled one if you want RJ45: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/qsw-1208-8c (Lots of combo RJ45/SFP+ ports)
Consumers around the globe have had increasingly common access to 1 Gbit/s for a decade and there still aren't any other great, common use cases for it beyond very high quality video streaming.
It didn't take very long for computer use to need more than 640K by comparison. In the computer realm those edges were being constantly pushed at that time. Such is not the case with bleeding edge consumer broadband speeds today.
10 Gbps is still below the 7 GB/s that a single NVMe on PCIe 4 (which is readily available) can achieve.
25 Gbps is still below that.
I'd say 100 Gbps is where the current practical maximum is more or less. You'd have a hard time writing or uploading data that fast on anything resembling consumer hardware.
"Everybody believes quotes on Internet" - Abrahamo Lincolni
The bigger issue with 25G is that it’s well into the range where any OS’s default TCP settings won’t provide anywhere near line speed, and once you solve that it can expose other non-network bottlenecks. I have dual-SFP28 cards in both my workstation and NAS, both connected to the network via a10G Mikrotik switch and directly to each other via a 25G point-to-point link. Now after all that tuning I have a fast network but run into the SAS bus bottleneck for any file transfers exceeding the size of my app take write cache :p
SR is ~$40 and LR is ~$60, so more expensive than SFP+ modules but not out of the reach of someone who even has a capable SFP28 port.
The last time I thought I have not enough BW on my 50Mbps connection I learned what it's just my T440 is not enough to decode h265 extremely compressed stream over an SFTP streaming over WiFi, which gave around 20 Mbps at best. After toying|fighting around with wireless settings I found the main culprit was my Intel 7260 (or whatever) WNIC, not the CPU, Internet connection BW or the server throughput (10Gbit, despite being an IIS instance).
YMMV
My 10gbaset switch is all of 23 dB when the fan kicks on and I have other switches with sfp+ that don't even have a fan.
Granted, it's beyond the definition of overkill (but I wouldn't mind it!)
My guaranteed speed is just 50Mbit/s, and despite being a software engineer and streaming movies, I did not notice a difference. My son has to wait longer for his steam downloads sometimes.
25GBit/s is impressive, though, and if I could get it here without strings attached I'd probably go for it, too.
BTW. My first experience was a dial-up model with 9600 baud, so maybe my expectations are just lower :)
The first one being ADSL/xDSL. ADSL is still very much alive in rural America. My sister pays about $50/mo for 6 Mbps ADSL.
Having worked as a telephone tech, I can tell you that many people would be pretty surprised by the speeds that DSL is capable of. With a a new/good condition cable, and a VDSL2, or the like modem, even without bonding, you can exceed 100 Mbps. With a shorter line, and bonding, you can go well beyond that.
The mention of PPPoE is interesting, because I recall having to use proprietary dialer software back in the day, before Windows and Linux baked in PPPoE, and home routers really weren't a thing. One would think PPPoE has gone by the wayside, but the aforementioned sister is forced to use it with Frontier. Trying to disable all the routing functions on the ISP-provided router, and get creds to setup PPPoE on a customer provided router, is somewhat of a pain.
You'd think we moved passed it all with fiber, but I can personally say that AT&T does not work this way. They actually use 802.1x authentication on their network, where their gateway they force you to use has the certificates built in. It really then comes down to being only able to set up a 1:1 NAT with a public IP, but then your traffic is still routed through their gateway, not a true network bridge.
Having AT&T even set generic PTR records for the /64 they assign you is unheard of, let alone getting them to delegate to you. It's a fact of life in the US, where few ISPs can actually operate in the broadband market, short of the megacorps.
I'm currently on 1000/50 cable internet, which is already quite nice. Telekom is laying fibre but it's not clear yet whether or not they will stop short of this house. Also i suspect it will be a while before they offer better than 1000/500 service.
Eg, your tech and cable can support 40 Mbps. If you split that 20/20, your users will have trouble watching 4K video that wants 25 Mbps. Change that to 35/5, and for most people it'll actually work better.
This issue goes away eventually as you either get a fiber for each direction, or you can just push terabits through fiber anyway, so there's plenty capacity to be symmetric without any compromises.
You have one cable, a given frequency may go in one direction or in another. Both sides have to agree on what it's being used for. You'd need a communication channel between the ISP side and the client side to constantly negotiate, and that negotiation would take some time, so such a mechanism would have some latency to it, with possibly weird effects on things like online games. You could get weird behaviors where some particular pattern of traffic would result in the connection readjusting itself just wrong on a regular basis and result in hordes of angry gamers.
I think it's reasonable to guess that ISPs targeting consumers have no interest in monitoring and troubleshooting such a thing when they can just set a fixed split and be done with it (and ask the customer to upgrade to a bigger plan if it's not good enough), and ISPs targeting enterprises have no need for it.
Edit: And there's the issue of how you sell such a thing. It's a system that readjusts itself automatically based on some arcane magic and may work differently from one day to another. How do you make any reliable promises about it?
But I'm spoiled, growing up the only ISP in town spoonfed everyone higher and higher speeds even though no one asked for it. They're laying fiber to villages seemingly just 'cause. People are choosing 4G over fiber because it's cheaper (even though data is limited), go figure.
Well, actually there was a bit of government initiative (with no funding or enforcement) to boost the IT sector. The US would benefit much more heh.
Perhaps it's a conspiracy to have less tech-savvy work-from-homer's keep bumping up their speed plan because their upload speed isn't up to snuff for video meetings. Either that or cable companies feel they need to compete on advertised download speeds with fiber, which is a losing battle.
It's most likely an operational mistake - have you called and asked for them to nuke the line and then set it up again?
Or are you saying that you are getting your advertised speeds, and those just didn't go up when you "got fiber"?
Don't know which one is more worrying if true, to be honest.
That’s so cool. Very cool he got to participate in the upgrade process.
I had 1G up/down through FIOS (Verizon FTTH) but eventually downgraded to 500M because I was saving perhaps 10s a day for 50 bucks a month.
There has to be a server at the other end willing to give you data that fast.
What I do enjoy is that rsync.net is using the same ISP so I can max out my upload to them.
How US gets so little for so much spent is really beyond me.
So excited that at least somewhere sanity and quality prevail!!!
My current provider (Sail Internet) provides a symmetric connection so I have experimented with cloud backup. The difference between my internal network (10G and some 100G) and the external (< 1G) is pretty sad.
ADD: I'm so sick of hearing ("why do you need that" or "what's the point"). There are plenty of applications TODAY, but even if you don't have any, new ones will manifest themselves once the technology is available - it's the way technology works (who would have imagined that daily video conference would be a part of life?).
I've had phone calls with them and the support/sales reps have no idea. They provide their own router+AP box that takes the fiber and spits out WiFi and Ethernet, but how would I go about replacing that? Their hardware is obsolete, insecure, outdated and just all-around poor! I know I could set it to bridge and place my own router in between, but I'd love to just replace their box instead.
As far as I could figure out on my own, the best bet would be getting a EdgeRouter X SFP and then plugging in a compatible SFP module. Is that right? How would one figure out which SFP module to buy?
On top of all that: do ISPs run proprietary handshake stuff on top of it, where even if the physical connection is correct, the ISP refuses working with your box? or is it just like the old ADSL days when all you needed was just a PPPoE stack?
There are ONT SFPs that contain everything you need to connect back to the OLT. Maybe you can ask your ISP if that is supported?
https://www.nanog.org/news-stories/nanog-tv/top-talks/tutori...
You can check pricing on any of the many online stores, such as Fiberstore.
r/fiberoptics for questions and discussions
Our servers are 1Gbps and the bandwidth is rarely the biggest bottleneck.
I have 200/20 in my own office and the biggest problem is that it works unreliably with Microsoft Teams and Google very often.
PS5 seems to have a 1Gbps interface.
I wonder if 25Gbit has any impact and what is the real stability of it in the Switzerland and the connection to major DCs and services. Entire Internet just doesn't feel stable enough to use that bandwidth but maybe this is a problem here in Poland.
Do you encounter problems with Teams or Meets in your countries?
The reason I haven't, isn't that more isn't better, it is that equipment costs and hassle to deliver 10 Gbps around the residence is a giant PITA as the article kind of demonstrates. If 2.5 Gbps ethernet equipment becomes more common and cost-effective, I'd definitely consider the 10 Gbps offering but until then, it isn't worth $1K or more to get prepared.
I don't knwo anything about SSD so maybe 25Gbit/s is easily achievable, just talking from my experience of copying from a USB Drive to my local disk.
Average SSD write speeds are usually around 1GB/sec these days, but most folks could build a RAID of several SSDs and be able to keep up with such a connection, as well.
I would also assume that most folks who would bother to install 25Gbps, or anything close, probably have a lot of devices in their homes to take advantage of it at once.
Personally, I find it very hard to saturate the 1Gbps link I have. Most servers won't push more than around 200Mbps out to you, and I'm basically never doing 5 tasks at once that are that bandwidth-intensive. But it's nice to have some overhead, just for fun.
https://www.servethehome.com/exploring-best-zfs-zil-slog-ssd... is several years old but still a good read.
To fully utilize the connection you can use storage backed by memory. For example ESXi allows you to back a vm by a "virtual pmem" disk that uses a chunk of your host system dram
After having had to pay Vodafone 50 euros a month for 10Gb of data through LTE for years, due to the impossibility of getting any connection faster than 3Mbps (even as a business), we are also, through the miracles of governmental financial incentives and magnificent planning (only 2 years late), getting the joys of high speed internet in our area. 100 Mbps. Hoooray!
Telecommunication in Germany is a cancerous, price-gouging cartel that needs to be eradicated at all costs, packaged on the first-available Falcon Heavy flight, and propelled at escape velocity out of our solar system.
It has gotten better over the years, but even the best available consumer connection is 1000 Mbits down and 200Mbits up.
Majority of the tech Germans I meet are embarassed about the internet and telecom infra, being an advanced economy.
Hopefully the new government fixes things.
I do agree about the general state of German internet connectivity though. However, seems to be catching up quickly, especially in rural areas.
Also config on Mac is awkward.
There’s also some weirdness when you upgrade to that speed into a backbone with sub 10ms latency where, for example, Teamspeak’s servers kept booting us because a security mechanism thought we were doing something naughty. We had to use a VPN to connect to add back latency.
- 3 NICs with SPF+ at ~ $45 a piece
- 1 switch with 4 SFP+ and 1 RJ45@1Gbps: $140
- 1 switch with 2 SFP+ and 8 x RJ45@1Gbps: $100
- ~ $100 for all the DACs and AOCs
So I have the backbone and 3 computers @ 10 Gbps and a number of other devices left at 1 Gbps, all for $500. This is just because I have many devices connected and some longer optic cables instead of DACs, otherwise it would be just half of that. But yes, going to 25 Gbps is a different game, probably 5x the price or more.
Probably less than 20W under load (assuming DAC or SFP+ SR Multimode). My setup has a CRS309 (8 SFP+) and CSS610, and it's 12W with almost all ports active (though not much load).
Now if they can lower the cost of the network equipment that would be ideal.
This is great for sporadic (very high peak to average consumption), residential type of use. Sharing such a high speed link across many subscribers is great. But in no way is this capable of running high bandwidth streaming servers, datacenter-like, from your home, as some are suggesting. Just 4 customers like that would consume the entire bandwidth. No sane ISP would allow even 1 customer to use all their 25G, continuously, that they might argue they paid for.
The peering/transit that the ISP has is also a hugely important factor to how "good" this 25G connection really is.
I'm not knocking it -- I wish I could get even 100M. But at the end of the day, a 1G connection that many USA city dwellers can get will be just as useful as the provisioning of such will be vastly different than the provisioning of this 25G service.
I have not actually upgraded my router at all so I not profiting as much from it as I could.
Still, love init7 and their service.
When we got 2Mbit I was AMAZED. The entire internet now actually semi-worked.
Now in 2022 I have gigabit (down, 50Mbit up) internet, with WiFi6 on my devices it's amazing (I'm hardwired for my desktop).
Aussie Broadband here in Australia is my current ISP, and they are amazing. FTTP was a major upgrade.
But the thing which hurts where I am (Perth, AU) is the latency to everything, not the download speeds :).
Curious thing, the ISPs don't oversell even though they easily could. I get exactly what I pay for, speed is never below ~940Mbps (down or up), and uptime has been stellar.
But, of course, I'd still love 25 gbps fiber to the home just because.
Back when covid19 started, we all went home, the office closed, and then we had a server failure. And I spent multiple days downloading stuff to back it up before reinstalling the machine, because there was not enough spare storage inside the office.
If you work with VM disk images even 1 Gbps starts feeling a tad sluggish.
I work with VMs. Disk images stay in the datacenter, and occasionally get sent between datacenters. They don't live at my house.
I can't even think of it all probably. Maybe VR streaming and other things.
Maybe we can finally have higher resolution gifs?
With 1Gbps or 100MB/s you could download 6GB in a min, roughly the size of an OS update or with 10Gbps internet which isn't as far fetch as others have said in comments, it takes less than 10s to download the update. It then takes 15min if not more for the CPU to work those 6GB files before the update finishes.
PCI-E 6.0 gets 8GB/s for 1x or 16GB/s for PCI-7.0. Ignoring the power / heat issue. We now have I/Os that are way quicker than how the CPU could response. The whole Software and Computer ecosystem may need a rethink to gain more performance.
65 CHF = US $67.89
If you live outside the city you may not be so lucky and spend 100+ on maybe 500mbit internet.
Init7 is also currently in a legal fight with swisscom because swisscom wants (has already started) to pull some alternative fiber that doesn't directly connect the customer to the pop therefore preventing competitors offering faster service than swisscom. The small cost savings that swisscom has is a huge problem for future upgrades and requires power in underground shafts. Not very green when you could pull the fibers directly.
Absolute madness. But this kind of bandwidth isn’t meant for a single machine.
Having fiber without pon is great, means no new infrastructure for decades. But anything above 10gbits will be too much to use realistically, even for smaller companies.
Individually no one person/port can use more than a gigabit and can't saturate the switch in this case, but combined they could utilize far more.
My speeds are advertised as 1Gbits down and 100Mbits up. On speed tests, I get much higher downloads (~1.5Gbits per second). This might be because it's not capped properly, and I live in a place that they're still building houses in (I imagine that our "box" is not yet saturated).
However, I rarely max that speed out in any download. Video games on Steam max out at maybe 65 megabytes per second. wget commands go from between 10 megabytes per second to maybe 40 max.
The thing is, I know that the speed tests are legit, because I can do several of these things at once and none of them lose any speed.
Copper or radio connections just don’t seem like as worthwhile an investment to me. I’m not saying it makes sense to have an 800gbit connection to a residential property but from a longevity, cost per mile, use of less rare materials, reduced rf interference or whatever, fibre just seems a better proposition to me.
Is that a normal over provisioning rate for an internet connection? It seems like each pop can only support four people at maximum speed before bandwidth would drop.
For comparison: init7 POPs used to be connected with 10 Gbit/s “only”, so even 10 people maxing out their Gigabit line would saturate the uplink. This turned out to never be a problem over the years, I would always get maximum speed. The average usage is very low, in part also because transfers complete so quickly.
My 2 fiber connections are 500mb/s and each cost $350 to activate, $150/mo each not counting the costs for static IP's. Trenching it in was $3k. I'm more than happy with 500mb but the price could be lower. For my specific use cases it is less about bandwidth and more about latency/peering arrangements. I would personally be happy splitting as low as 100mb/s across many devices with fq_codel or cake and cdg on my little firewalls. I can't really complain though. The alternatives here are 4G LTE or Starlink.
Moved into a new apartment which (unbeknownst to me at first) also has the capability of 25 Gbps with init7, unfortunately that was before getting a locked-in into a 1 (or is it 2?) year contract with my current provider (1000/100 Mbps, so I can’t really complain). Looking forward to having that contract expire and upgrading though, but then the issue is going to be how to distribute all that bandwidth properly over the house (most devices I use are still 1 Gbps OOTB) :).
For perspective, an 8k video stream requires ~40-50Mbps[1]. Theoretically, 25Gbps is sufficient to stream ~500 * 8k streams concurrently.
[1] https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Short-Cuts...
I'm impressed the Ookla speedtest server can deliver 25Gbit.
The 25gbit network card he mentions costs $400-$500, that's cheaper than I would have guessed.
However, I only have a gigabit router, so most of that isn’t utilized, assuming that’s true for all my neighbors as well (Sonic’s only offering here is 10gbit)
Usually got around 500-600Mbps over WiFi on a fast device.
It's not surprising since is testing against his ISP's test server.
Don't get me wrong, I'm super jealous and of course I'd love to have a 25Gbit connection at home.
But I think we need to step back from the Kool Aid for a moment and ask ourselves:
- What's the likelihood of the remote servers you are connecting to having a 25Gbit connection ?
- Even if the servers do have >=25Gb connection, what are the chances of the server sysadmin allowing one user to hog a large chunk of capacity ?
- Even *IF* the answer to the above two questions is positive, what are the chances of your magical 25Gbit ISP having sufficient backbone + peering + transit capacity to fulfill the 25Gbit to its users at all times ?
I also suspect the small-print of the ISP could make for interesting reading.
EDIT TO ADD:
Found the relevant clause in their conditions:
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.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to how long it takes to transfer 500TB on 25Gbit ;-)
But AT&T tells me not to worry, it has fiber rolling into my neighborhood. I know it must be true because they've been telling me that for the past 5+ years!
Well it's easy to get more latency ;)
Now there is 2 Gbps up and down available which is slightly less than $40.
Brah. USA/Canada/Australia is so far behind its not even funny anymore. Let's not even get started on things like banking.
Lo and behold, I can get a 10G line, and in a little while, probably 20G.
Then I realized that I don’t even come close to saturating the 2G I currently have. Cables are limited to 1Gbit, and the wifi doesn’t go higher than 500Mbit.
You have 100Mbit internet? Cool, your 54Mbit only WLAN devices are now the bottleneck.
But now it's your 10GB ethernet that's the limit.
I just upgraded to 10GB networking in my house and the old desktop I have hanging around mostly for guest use tops out at around 6 Gbps. The CPU just can't handle more than that. Granted, it's a 10 year old, cheap CPU with integrated video, so it was never much good. But still, it works just fine for web browsing.
And of course hard disks get 200MB/s on the very rare occasion, and often a good amount less than that. Even SSDs are limited by SATA's maximum of 6 Gbps, so make a plan for upgrading everything to NVMEs.
If we had this, it would allow us to literally grow at double or triple the speed.
For broadcast, namely the scale above (for instance a public TV channel), if I recall properly, IPv6 has many broadcast IPs... just need the IAPs of a "telecommunication zone" (state, country, etc) to manage to work together at that level. I think IPv6 multicast is "too much" for IAPs to handle though (the whole "subscription"/"unsubscription" propagation for domestic users, not limited to CDNs only).
I have Starlink and 4G because our internet infrastructure here is abysmal.
Given the generally dire security of home routers (and understandably low security of most home networks/users) it feels a little like giving people far more power than most can safely wield.
Though for regular users, they can get 10Gb/s for half the price of init7 with other isps (but probably worse peering as mentioned in the post).
i saw a dude living miles off-grid in Sweeden with a fiber connection routed to his tiny house in the woods ...
as for saturability, I had no issues to pull 25Gbit/s between .ch and .hu using bbr.