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I'm currently on profile 17a, I pay for 100 Mbit (downstream), and get like 90 Mbit actual IP protocol bandwidth (wget tops out at 10.7 MB/s). But I think the ATM signalling that's still used on the underlying VDSL physical layer is eating a significant portion of the bandwidth (due to the high frame header overhead).

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Sounds like you have a nearly perfect line and very close to the Cabinet?

In the UK lines can typically be 500M while worst case may be 1KM or more from the Cabinet. We do have alot of aluminium or cca based lines as well due to copper conservation in world war 2.

All in your perfect 17a vdsl line is still slower than Jeff is complaining about over starlink (100mb)

Yes, I can see the cabinet from my window, so maybe less than 100 meters cable. Inside big cities that seems to be the state-of-the-art. They must have placed a lot of cabinets in recent years. I'm surprised those cabinets don't give up a noticeable amount of heat, they don't even have noticeable active cooling. That's a huge amount of DSP operations that they are running, like a hundred DSL modems crammed together. But maybe modern ASICs can run a single 17a VDSL line at a just few watts.

Right now the modem reports a (link layer) data rate of 98338000 bit/s. Wget tops out at 10.7 MB/s.

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