Hacker News Reader

Comment by ultrahax | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially, I've faced some interesting challenges getting a multi-gigabit Wireguard VPN operating through my 2Gb Frontier connection.

My UDM Pro seems to top out around ~800mbit per UDP stream - pegged at 100% CPU on a single core. Likely it can't keep up with the interrupt rate, given it's ksoftirqd pegging it. Replaced UDM Pro with a pfsense machine.

Then I started getting 100% packet loss on the edge of Frontier's network after a couple of minutes of sustained UDP near-line-rate throughput. In the end, after trying and failing to explain this to Frontier's tech support, I reached out to their engineering management on LinkedIn, and got put in touch with the local NOC director. Turns out to be some intermediate hop is rebooting after a few mins, and they're "in contact with the manufacturer". Haven't heard back in a few months.

tldr as >1Gb connections become more ubiquitous, other bottlenecks will become apparent!

View on HN

> I reached out to their engineering management on LinkedIn, and got put in touch with the local NOC director.

I hate that this is a thing. I'm dealing with a similar potential issue on Charter Spectrum right now. Specifically it's an issue that's called out here https://blog.cloudflare.com/ip-fragmentation-is-broken/ (failing the IPv4 fragmentation test http://icmpcheck.popcount.org/ ).

How on earth is one supposed to get past the front-line tech support in 2023?

You're not supposed to.

You could look for a better ISP. The larger problem is that in the US it's completely normal for there to be no actual choice, or for your "choice" to be between two equally huge uninterested corporations who know they don't need to be better than each other to keep the same revenue.

Separating the last mile infrastructure from the ISP can make it possible to have natural monopoly for everybody's last miles, but widespread competition for ISPs. That might be really hard to pull off in the US but I think it'd be worth striving for.

It'd require sensible regulation, so the Republicans simply won't stand for it, and it's not one of the Democrats' main issues, so they couldn't be bothered.

The problem is how satisfied people are when they get to just blame the other side and not bother with any further thought. As long as people like you reward that mentality then it will never be fixed.

Yes, it must be me to blame, not the bad faith actors in office. Would you like to collect the two cent payment I offer for exposure to my wrongthink now or later?

> Separating the last mile infrastructure from the ISP can make it possible to have natural monopoly for everybody's last miles, but widespread competition for ISPs. That might be really hard to pull off in the US but I think it'd be worth striving for.

Or even better, the model we have in France. The last mile is a monopoly for a limited time only (2-3 years). So if you build a connection to some place that didn't have one, you can profit off exclusivity for some time, and are incentivised to be good to the consumers because they can switch, but will probably ony do so if you're shit/too expensive.

Through LinkedIn evidently

Smells like Sandvine traffic shaper falling over or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com