Kitz Forum
Chat => Chit Chat => Topic started by: Weaver on January 12, 2020, 11:51:32 AM
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If you are lucky enough to have used a say 100M / 300M / 500M / 900M / 10G / 40G / 100G / [?] bps downstream internet connection, what exactly was the user experience like when browsing the web and visiting well known websites ? Was it noticeably incredibly fast? How fast? Or was there a bottleneck that was significant in limiting your experience to below the level expected ? Such as the internet connection / wider internet / pipe going into the server or the web server s/w itself’s responsiveness? We’re some websites fast but not others?
I’ve never been lucky enough to have used a 10M / 100M / 1G / 10G etc internet connection at all so am left wondering what the web browsing real user experience would be like. The fastest internet connection I have ever used was a 6Mbps pipe at work or maybe an 8Mbps pipe at smo.uhi.ac.uk when I was a student 21 years ago. But now my home internet connection beats that with a 10M / 1.5M (measured TCP SDU speeds ). Except that since mine is a 4-pipes bonded DSL internet connection, it may well be that some applications don’t respond well to that in terms of achieving optimal speeds.
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My work has a 1GBit symmetrical internet connection. It's certainly quick, but in all honesty, regular web browsing doesn't feel all that much faster than my home VDSL connection. Everything feels pretty instantaneous, but web browsing still has the odd pause whilst the browser performs layout/rendering. Likewise, there's still a brief pause before online video begins playback.
Downloading multi-gig ISOs is certainly quick, as are pushes/pulls of large chunks of data. We have a frequent need to push ~1TB into the cloud. Being able to shift 1TB in a couple of hours (well, a bit more because of QoS to prevent total saturation) is quite fun!
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It feels faster to me balancing across Plusnet and Zen, but its hard to say if its just placebo effect as latencies reported on both ISPs have dropped over time anyway.
Theoretically though it SHOULD be faster, especially if you don't adblock and the rest of the page is waiting on the adverts to load. But it can depend a lot on your PC as all that javascript loading can end up CPU bound.
For me the big reason to upgrade was I download a lot. I was sick of game updates taking forever and once the new consoles come out with more limited storage space, I feel its going to be even more important as I'm someone who tends to swap games a lot rather than just focus on one, so having as many installed as possible has been important. Assuming their infrastructure can support it, being able to download at 1Gbit would be a god send, no longer needing to think about which games I can delete based on how long they would take to re-download.
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As displaced says, if you’re on a decent VDSL you will find limited benefits from higher speeds (apart from downloads or if you have multiple large demands on the line), as things like your setup, resolving DNS all act as a bottleneck as does peering/the web server on the other end
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Can a very very fast PC help with ordinary (ie not pure cathedrals of JavaScript) websites, the likes of amazon eBay, Facebook, bbc, YouTube then? And can multiple cores help?
If an extremely fast internet connection can end up bottlenecked by the CPU in the browser because of rendering and JavaScript execution I’m wondering if the bottlenecks then lie in RTT and in dns lookups (but they could be in the dns cache). You could change to use a faster dns service maybe, one with a better cache or faster servers, also closer so less rtt and a fast pipe to/form it.
Has anyone ever used more than 1Gps link to the internet?
Of course there will always be bottlenecks but today with fast processors, if browsers are designed to be multi-threading friendly thus supporting multi-core CPUs then where does the next bottleneck lie? Back to the internet but to RTT ?
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RTT, DNS and website coding are the big ones for most sites.
There are so many places that can bottleneck. If the site is poorly coded you'll be getting loads of serialisation rather than resources in parallel. If having to make many requests to many servers RTT and DNS.
Once you get past a certain level of bandwidth browsing isn't perceptibly faster.
I have 350 Mb at home. I have used 700 Mb, 1 Gb and 2 Gb. The fastest browsing experience I've had was none of those - it was a 100 Mb connection because of where that connection was - in RTT a millisecond from LINX ;)
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So RTT really does matter, because of the silly number of objects in most web pages ?
I thought CarlT might have a chance to win the fattest pipe competition :) no offence meant, because of your work, but then I don’t know about other people
The reason I asked about the extremely high speed browsing experience was a bizarre thing that happened in 2004. I upgraded my sister from dialup to 0.5 Mbps DSL (Demon before and after in fact). She was using her web browser and after a while I asked her how it was now, and she said it was not any different, even though she had got a true 50kbps downstream before (or ~200kbps with serious Demon MPPC compression of text such as html) so this was a 10x upgrade on incompressible data such as images. I was amazed that she could not see a 10x speed upgrade. She had an extremely fast PC for those days, the hottest money could buy back then, a c 2001 Pentium 4 1.7GHz with weird fast RAM in it (RAMBUS iirc) but it could be that RTT and DNS were limiting things.
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People quickly adjust, I'd be willing to bet if at the time you had tried them back on dialup after a few day on that faster connection they would have been "wtf did you do, it was NEVER this slow before".
The same happens with gaming, I constantly switch between 60fps and 120fps gaming and when going upwards I sometimes have to check its doing 120fps. However if I actually switch back down to 60fps its immediately obvious and hugely annoying.
Or if I don't game for weeks then go on something like Spiderman which is only 30fps, I will completely forget. It doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a generally better experience at a higher frame rate.
Although with the Internet I'd notice much sooner when browsing high resolution photos on Flickr, its the difference between seeing the photo load or it just appearing instantly.
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We have 1Gbit internet access at work and, it, if you know how, can make it lightning fast. We have 10Gbit internet pipes in our Data Centres, but none of them have GUI's that I can browse the internet on (Linux)
I.e. not use a machine that uses the corporate internet software that tunnels everything for security.
A raw 1gbit connection is just, lovely. I've seen downloads at 700-800Mbit to my laptop.
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So RTT really does matter, because of the silly number of objects in most web pages ?
I thought CarlT might have a chance to win the fattest pipe competition :) no offence meant, because of your work, but then I don’t no about other people
Actually an awful lot of my work is with relatively modest bandwidths.
RTT is a big thing, yes.
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I think that provided sharing doesn’t ruin it all, the community of B4RN users must have a very nice time. The 1Gbps upstream they enjoy is a beautiful thing, given that upstream with eg BTW FTTP is relatively rubbish, still not symmetrical.
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Don't think it makes any difference to most applications.
Being held at pitchfork point by Chris Conder to ensure you don't undermine her absurd point about premises passed and premises served by daring to not take the service may be a downside. :lol:
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There are some things that just don’t work at all at these speeds. Uploads are horrendous at 1.5Mbps (measured, presumably TCP payload speedtest2.aa.net.uk) - doing a backup of one iPad can take 40 mins and it just wipes every other kind of traffic out while it’s doing it, effectively putting a hold on any other activities, and has a bad effect on downloads too. Mind you a lot of the fault is down to operating systems and my router - bufferbloat and insufficient queue-, QoS and fancy traffic management features.
The other thing is iMessage which sometimes doesn’t work properly at all, with incredibly distorted picture with bizarre vertical bars on it. It’s ok on 4G though, which I view as very significant. When I’m trying to iMessage Janet in the house I think each of us is only getting 1/2 of the DSL upload bandwidth per pipe per user.
And even though I now have 10.5 Mbps downstream which is joyous compared to 49kbps/33kbps (49-200k/33-130kbps max with highly compressible data) in 2003, 0.5 Mbps downstream in 2004 and then 1.5 / 0.4 Mbps in 2006, two of us doing things at the same time is sometimes not good at all. So I avoid activities that might disrupt my wife while she is trying to work - software downloads for updates especially common case. Downloading movies is left till the middle of the night so they won’t wipe Janet out or cost a fortune (AA ‘units’ deal means downloads are 400x cheaper in small hours)
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So iMessage is server based like Skype is now?
On the old peer to peer version of Sykpe you could video chat to someone else on the LAN and it would never leave the LAN at all, so absolutely pixel perfect.
Its practically unusable now even with him on Virgin and me on Zen, it never wants to hit a stable 1080p feed because of the server bottleneck even though we both have plenty of bandwidth.
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I would gladly contribute to a 'Get Weaver Better Broadband' crowd funder.
The lengths you've gone to to improve your connectivity rather than just complaining about it or holding your hand out and waiting for the taxpayer to help are unreal.
Where, approximately, in the country are you? I know people who know people.
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Hi Carl I am in the village of Heasta, Skye. In fact there’s an old thread about my 7300m phone lines. I’m not sure how much it would cost to run fibre into here from NSBFD. Perhaps I should have done it some years ago.
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The thread in question is "Ultra-long line beyond 63.5 dB attn (https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,16585.0.html)" which runs to eight pages!
It was at this point (https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,16585.msg306715.html#msg306715) in the above thread where I discovered the location of the "Weaving Shed" (in "Weaver-land").
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The thing you find on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w7cwi7vXGw
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That's a good find. :)
I've virtually-travelled that road on a number of occasions (via Google Maps Street View) looking at the places where the telecommunication cables were lying beside the road.
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That’s a very good YouTube posting. I’m assuming it was filmed by a local not a visitor because of the speed that she/he is driving at, confident. When you see the "Heasta" village sign at the Heasta cattle grid I am high above on the right. My house can be seen on the right of the road as you come down towards the village. It’s white with some large trees right by it.
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I’m assuming it was filmed by a local not a visitor . . .
Have you watched part two? S/he continues the journey, almost to the shore, before turning into the driveway of a newer looking house to the right of the road.
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It looks a lovely place to live, but I can't even begin to imagine living somewhere so far from a hospital.
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I have watched part two.
@Alex there’s a hospital in Broadford, half a mile from the end of the road. So I’d say it’s four miles or 15m mins to the hospital, time depending on how much you’re making allowances for the fragile patient and very bumpy road. That’s why I’m very fortunate. The hospital is marked in google maps in the centre of Broadford, on the north side of the road, set back a little way. The GPs’ medical centre is next to the hospital.
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Where I live, about an hour and a half’s drive from London, we are equidistant between two NHS hospitals. Each is about 10-15 miles, or 20-30 mins drive.
But you wouldn’t drive to them as neither has credible car parking facilities, NHS guidance being to cycle, or to use public transport. Yet being a small hamlet, there are no local taxis, and the community buses run just three times a week.
If healthcare were paramount I could easily be tempted by a move to the Hebrides. :)
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There is a small amount of parking at the Broadford Hospital. It’s free and in the incredibly rare event that the car parking out at the front is full up, then you can always park at the doctors’, at the medical centre, just next door, down the road. The hospital has an emergency dest, and x-ray and ultrasound. They used to do major operations there but now for some reason they have stopped that, although I have had several lots of minor surgery there. They have a dozen or so patients resident - I’m not sure exactly how many. I have had a stay several times. I have also been to hospital in Fort William and Inverness both of which are hospitals where they do serious stuff, very major surgery.