Comment by dweekly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dweekly | Hacker News Reader

I think things like this are great because they will finally start to create pressure to commodify >1gbps networking in the home. The industry has some work to do here.

I've been on Sonic 10G for almost a year now and LOVE it, but it's definitely been a sore spot to get things set up to expect those kinds of speeds - prosumer 10G switches are vastly more expensive per-port, wired consumer devices don't typically support 10GbaseT/SFP+, 2.5G/5G switches aren't broadly available and commodified (e.g. UniFi has limited offerings here) and WiFi6E is still mid-rollout (almost no client devices currently in market yet) meaning that clients can't reasonably expect >1gbps of goodput, even with a good link from a modern device to a modern AP. Then there's flakiness: when things get hot in my garage, my 10G switch just stops working. My Thunderbolt-to-10GbaseT adapter for my MacBook runs very hot. Lots of sharp edges here.

The more consumers are buying 10G equipment for their 10G home links, the faster prices will come down and reliability will come up - not just for 10G but also for 2.5G/5G equipment. Hats off to EPB for paving the way for 25G and keeping vendors diligent in mapping out the next generation of their equipment.

10GBaseT is the wrong solution, period. As you've found out it runs hot (somehow I doubt all the fanless consumer trinkets are going to last very long). Not that Ubiquiti is a good example – even with their 1G kit they had issues with thermal management. Both the ER-X and ER-L ran hot enough to cook themselves (especially the early ones with the tiny SD cards). True to form my ER-Xs get flakey when it gets slightly warm. Fiber is the way forward and hopefully getting multi-gig connections to the home will start to bring the pricing on some of that kit down to reasonable levels.

FWIW I've also got Sonic's 10G offering and yeah it works well enough. Something is causing intermittent problems that I've not had with their ADSL or 1G fiber offerings – I'm starting to suspect the 1G TP-Link switch they tossed in. For now I just live with the periodic interruptions.

Edit: Certainly I'm not planning to upgrade any of my gear to 10G as I simply don't need the bandwidth and Sonic's offerings are really geared towards web browsing more than anything.

> Sonic's offerings are really geared towards web browsing more than anything.

What do you mean by that? I fully saturate my 1G link for work all the time.

No static IP on fiber connections (like they promised initially), no native IPv6 (although maybe there is on the DSL products), outbound SMTP blocked. For a while there was a tool you could use to adjust your DSL profile to skew it towards upstream bandwidth, but that's since been dropped. No more m-bone access. Stuff like that.

Sonic's shifted from offering a full featured internet connection to a slightly neutered dumb web browsing pipe.

> Both the ER-X and ER-L ran hot enough to cook themselves

I must have a different revision of the ER-X. Mine only runs slightly warm to the touch, running off of PoE and powering an AP.

So the last time I looked I only found one person complaining that their ER-X runs hot to the touch (plenty of "it seems kind of flakey" comments tho). Mine become unstable once the ambient temp gets much past 75 °F. The ER-L is well known to run hot to the touch at idle.

When I opened up one of my ER-Xs to get a the serial header I noticed that it had a much sloppier application of thermal compound than the one pictured in the instructions I looked at. I'd totally believe some units will be more reliable than others.

In my extremely limited home 10G experience so far, SFP+ DAC modules have seemed relatively inexpensive with low(er) thermals than 10GbaseT (subjective SWAGs here, not detailed thermal measurements!) and are a great, cheap way to connect a desktop to a 10G switch. Kinda makes me fantasize about a laptop with an SFP+ slot, TBH...

I was admittedly just too chicken to wire my home with fiber (nervous about kinking it) so used plenum CAT-6A for my mid-length runs (~50ft). Perhaps there are classes of "tough fiber" for this use case?

I gotta say, I LOVE Sonic. $40/mo and I actually get 6gbps+ up, 6gbps+ down real measured throughput, and unmetered/unfiltered. Great support and a great CEO, Dane. Just wish I could pay a bit more for a static IP, like I did with AT&T Fiber.

I wonder how much of a push this will really be?

For the vast majority of people even vanilla gigabit is of limited benefit... that's on the edge of what a consumer SSD is writing at.

Right - the popular sentiment on my smallish town Facebook group is people dropping their 300mbps cable since Spectrum is an awful company to deal with in favor of cell-based (T-mobile or Verizon) home service. 90%+ of people in most areas don't need internet any faster than Netflix requires, and nobody is running ethernet so WiFi speeds are going to be the limiting factor in internet speed for most everyone else.

I went from ~250Mbit to Gigabit recently. I don't notice it on my wireless clients at all, but it is really nice on my main PC, which is tied directly into the router via a good 'ole cable. I've seen actual downloads speeds flirting with 100MB/sec, which is really nice when downloading some of these massive 50GB+ games.

You may be off a bit. A gigabit is only around 125 megabytes a second. A low end consumer SSD is closer to a 550 megabytes second, or ~4 gigabits. A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or 4 gigabytes a second. 30 to 40x a gigabit!

> A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or 4 gigabytes a second

That is PCIe 3.0. For example the Samsung PCIe 4.0 990 PRO just released: sequential read 7.45GB/s and write 6.9GB/s — https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/samsung-announces-99...

Under ideal circumstances, yes. When say, torrenting, or anything else with non-ideal file access patterns real world speeds are not going to be nearly that high, especially on a consumer-grade drive.

Nothing is ever ideal. The point is available SSD disk I/O bandwidth will exceed network bandwidth well above a gigabit.

And my point is that for 99% of people even 1Gb is overkill, so I'm not seeing why they expect Joe Smith to suddenly start buying $500 routers.

Yeah, I completely agree with you there! The average person doesn't need gigabit speeds. The only reason I even upgraded from 100 megabits to 300 is because it was literally 5 bucks more a month.

Stress tests on consumer SSD's consistently show 300-500megabytes/s. The whole point of an SSD is that it has ridiculously high available iops, so what you are saying literally does not make sense.

a consumer SSD will have about 50k iops at that 300-500megabyte/s . The access pattern will not practically matter at all until you saturate that or get close. The drive is effectively constant time until you hit the limits of the interface, or at least get somewhere near it. A consumer will never get near it.

So they can expect, and consistent testing shows, they will get 300-500 megabytes/s in real world conditions, and even harsh conditions.

I actually have no idea why you don't just say "yeah, i was wrong" and move on. It's clear you are wrong about this - there is no data to support what you are saying. It's also totally and completely orthogonal to a more rasonable argument - they don't care about the speed anyway.

IE arguing they don't have equipment that can saturate 1gbps is silly - they clearly do. arguing they wouldn't care either way because the speed difference doesn't matter to them is more reasonable.

Grandma running pirated Word 2007 on an ancient dust-clogged Dell laptop that her grandson upgraded with a cheap 256GB Lite-On mSATA SSD stolen from a throwaway work computer is probably only getting 125MByte/sec and certainly lower than that due to the plethora of IE addons constantly writing to it.

1. Stop confronting me

2. Can confirm these writing speeds

I'm now imagining this ancient grandma writing 125 MB/s into her pirated text editor, just cranking out volume after volume of cheap detective and romance novels. Later, after her death, it is discovered that this lady was the ghostwriter behind all of the top 50 bestsellers of the last 30 years. She would write faster too, if it weren't for that crappy SSD her grandchildren set her up with.

Even as a regular consumer I see the benefit. I buy a new game, and its typically something like 100GB. Gigabit internet is the difference between waiting 15 minutes and 1 hour to play my new game. This is not an uncommon use case and the difference is quite large.

I'm a deep computer nerd, I play lots of games, with a family watching streaming on 2 to 4 devices regularly, I buy a decent amount of games, download terabytes per year...

I'm just fine with my 300 mbps connection. Even when it drops to 20 mbps occasionally it's not the worst experience.

I'm not sure what it is that is different about me than my peers.

I'm right there with you, as long as that 300 mbps connection is symmetrical, and the ISP is carrier neutral. I didn't know how big a deal neutrality was until I switched from Suddenlink to a small company called Vexus. Gigabytes of nightly backups went from hours to 5 minutes, and downloads from certain companies improved drastically.

This was my experience when I had a gigabit connection. I could download games from steam as fast as my ssd would write it.

Which was pretty awesome, but I'm not often pushing that sort of bandwidth.

The counter argument being that without it being a commodity, we don't know what might be invented if it were. We could miss out on, or delay lots of really amazing innovations.

That’s not my experience at all. I had 10Gbps internet in Tokyo. In normal browsing there wasn’t much difference between using wifi which I normally did and connecting by 10Gbps Ethernet. But downloading on steam was one case where the difference was amazing, I could download a AAA game in 1-2 minutes instead of 10-20.

In my experience you hit those speeds if you happen to be few short hops from the server/CDN.

I find that Steam decompression pegs one core of my CPU and downloads get stuck at 550-600 mbps. It would take a lot less time if it didn't compress anything.

Yup, about the same for me (maybe slightly faster).

Sometimes games have assets that compress really well, and then I end up downloading at 400mbps and maxing out my SSD writing.

Haha, yeah I bet most people who play games these days have a faster CPU than I do. My machine is eight years old.

Your SSD comment aside: not everyone lives alone; during the lockdown we had four people using the network simultaneously during the day, plus of course some of my other machines using the network. We have friends with three or four kids, which would have magnified that demand.

Gigabit can support ~25 simulatenous Blu-Ray streams (and that's at the full 40Mbit).

It wasn't all that long ago (~10 years) when the company I worked for had only 200Mbit to the internet, and that supported ~300 people pretty comfortably.

Remember when cd players had 60 second anti-skip buffers?

you are off by an a factor of 3-5 :).

The random consumer ssd reads/writes as 300-600megabytes/second, easily. That's 3-5gbps, not 1gbps.

A reasonable 7200rpm spinning disk can easily saturate 1gbps.

Most home grade nas RAID arrays can saturate 10gbps. (obviously not 2 spinning disk mirror ones :P)

An SSD nowdays has something like 3500 megabytes/second, a 1gbit connection can (roughly) provide at most 100 megabytes/second, so we are not even close to use SSD write speed at full capacity.

That being said, downloading from Steam is incredibly different with a gigabit bandwidth.

Since every consumer fiber plan is best effort, I'll get better speed by using faster plan even though rated speed isn't needed. I get about 700-200Mbps on my gigabit fiber for download. I'm fine with 1Gbps but 200Mbps is sometimes slower. Hopefully 2Gbps is constantly available on 10gigabit fiber.

There's more to Internet than downloading data straight to disk.

Families can have multiple kids taking online classes while both parents are also working remotely. Many families have multiple devices per person that can be streaming, downloading, OR UPLOADING (commonly the aspect shortchanged in residential Internet) which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection.

We always need to advance because others are too, and services demand greater speeds in returb. It's a bit of a race, but no need to claim it's useless. We can do things now that were unthinkable before due to such advances.

>Families can have multiple kids taking online classes while both parents are also working remotely. Many families have multiple devices per person that can be streaming, downloading, OR UPLOADING (commonly the aspect shortchanged in residential Internet) which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection.

My 37mbps can do that for 2 people constantly working from home and most of the time on meetings.

My family of 6 would stream Netflix, game and I'd be pretty heavy handed myself all on my router tethered to my 4G connection while we were switching providers. We didn't notice anything surprisingly. Three was the provider at the time.

20 kids x 25mbps streams each is still only half a gig. You are way off here. The only way you saturate a gig is if you download big games from Steam, etc. If each of your kid is doing that you would probably run into fair use limits and have to set up a central PC for catching downloads and stuff but that's still a niche use case.

My guess is that most people will just use whatever router is supplied by the ISP, and those are going the be the cheapest China has to offer. Even if it is Wifi6, that will max out at around 1Gbps. Some might run Ethernet to their office or consoles, but I'd guess that most will just use wifi. There's also the issue of the networking gear. Home users will just buy 1Gbps equipment, or slower, if that's what fits their price point.

For future use, and businesses it is nice to see speeds above 1Gbps being rolled out. For now though, promising 25Gbps to residential is easy marketing. The ISPs knows that it will barely be used.

1Gb connection is 120MB/sec, there is no way to saturate that for a regular family.

> which, at times, can easily saturate a 1Gb connection.

The only thing that can saturate 1 Gb in practice in my experience are large downloads.

Video conferencing, streaming etc. uses well below 100 Mbps (even 4k Netflix seems to be 25 Mbit/s). You'd need dozens of such applications running at the same time to come even close to saturating Gbit.

This may change over time, but right now, there is very little need for going beyond 1 Gbps for households. And honestly, I think the change will take a long while, because 4k is still not ubiquitous, anything higher than that isn't much of a thing, and even the next step after 4k (assuming it needs 4x the bandwidth) will still be easily handled by a Gbit line even for large households.

A 100 GB game download taking 14 minutes with a saturated line is not going to be a reason for most people to pay for faster hardware all along the path (router, cabling, NICs, ...).

> even 4k Netflix seems to be 25 Mbit/s

Netflix's help page says 4K uses "up to" 7GB/hour, or a little less than 16Mbps:

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87

Replying to my own comment. My examples weren't the greatest as I was traveling while composing it.. I agree that my examples would not push a symmetric 1Gb connection to its limits.

I was trying more to make the point that folks were giving arbitrary examples like SSD speeds when there are other kinds of usage that have other limits or could potentially change with time.

If residential speeds only target the "average" case, that'll artificially slow advancement. Many places outside the US have much faster speeds than are available here and we should not invent reasons to slow the shift to faster access. At least it shifts the needle a little and puts additional pressure on the lazy ISPs that still offer 90s-era ADSL speeds.

10Gbps wont ever be consumer grade. There is nothing on the roadmap which suggest we could bring down the cost of 10Gbps Ethernet to say within 2x of 1Gbps Ethernet. 2.5/5Gbps have a much better chance, and it will require some market narrative to push for that. Such as WiFi 7 ( 802.11be ) getting 10Gbps wireless speed but stuck with only 1Gbps Port. It doesn't matter whether that is true in real world, but with enough Social Media push and marketing, we could push vendor to incorporate 2.5 and 5Gbps. Then we may have some chances of seeing 2.5/5Gbps replacing 1Gbps Ethernet.

> prosumer 10G switches are vastly more expensive per-port

They are, but they aren't out of reach - i recently bought 2 Zyxel managed switches with 3x 2.5/5/10G and one SFP+ ports alongside 8x 1G ports for 200€ each. That's not cheap, but it's not super expensive either, and most consumers can get away with unmanaged switches. The unmanaged version has 2x2.5 and 2xSFP+ and comes for 120€.

So we're getting there in terms of availability.

The kicker I've found when looking at proper enterprise networking gear (NOT anything from the Ubiquiti trash lineup) is most of the cost on top of an already high hardware cost is in software licensing for the router / switch itself. Did you different routers etc?

Fortunately, fiber cable runs are really cheap. Fortunately with sources like FS.com optics and transceivers also aren't too expensive.

>The industry has some work to do here.

I think that wired ISP bandwidth missed out on marketing/branding (which may also be intentional). The thing is that the average consumer is woefully misinformed. You don't even need to look that far. A comment downstream mistook gigabit with gigabyte. With cellular networks, everyone and their dog is clamoring for 5G. Wifi too now has numbers like wifi 6 and wifi 7. So my conclusion is that we need numbers but not units. Units confuse people.

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