Kitz Forum

Broadband Related => ISPs => Topic started by: Weaver on February 02, 2020, 03:47:59 AM

Title: AA and G.Fast
Post by: Weaver on February 02, 2020, 03:47:59 AM
Does AA do G.Fast ?
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: jelv on February 02, 2020, 09:33:31 AM
Quote from: https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/home1/
We offer both the slower ADSL services and the faster VDSL (fibre to the cabinet) services, FTTP and G.FAST services where available.
...
** Please contact our sales team to order G.Fast as it is not on our order form yet.
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: niemand on February 02, 2020, 03:24:57 PM
AA offer G.fast at 160 Mb. They'll sell you the 330 if you want the higher upload speed but you'll be paying more and will only get 160 down.

They can't offer 330 as they're still using gigabit-only Firebricks internally.
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: re0 on February 02, 2020, 04:16:18 PM
They can't offer 330 as they're still using gigabit-only Firebricks internally.
I didn't realise that was the reason. The more you know!
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on February 02, 2020, 07:06:31 PM
I guess it makes sense, they are an ISP aiming at quality over quantity, considering their bandwidth prices.

How do they handle the FTTP though, same limitation?
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: Weaver on February 02, 2020, 07:15:34 PM
They really need to fix the 330 thing asap
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: niemand on February 03, 2020, 11:26:33 AM
Same limitation, Alex.
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: adslmax on February 03, 2020, 11:47:37 AM
They really need to fix the 330 thing asap

AAISP told me few weeks ago they have no plan for 330/50. They only offer 160/30 and 160/50 (£10 extra a month)
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: j0hn on February 03, 2020, 12:35:38 PM
Quote from: RevK
But of late we have some CISCO switches in the A&A network. I sort of swore I would never use anything but FireBrick, but we have not got 10Gb/s FireBrick switches yet, so we had to get them. I wish we had FireBrick 10Gb/s switches to be honest :-)

They are actually pretty good. I will say one thing for CISCO, they can make some impressive hardware. Some fast switches and fast ASICs in their routers. We are not a patch on that. Our hardware is fast but is designed to do software routing very fast. So we are there at a few Gb/s, and CISCO are there with boxes that do way way more. We're getting there - the 10Gb/s+ box is on the drawing board, obviously. But we will never manage anything like CISCO's top end, well, probably not. We can hope.

That was RevK in August 2017.
So don't hold your breath for faster download speeds on AA if the Firebrick's are still the bottleneck.
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: niemand on February 03, 2020, 02:54:11 PM
While they continue terminating subscribers on https://www.firebrick.co.uk/fb6000/fb6202-lns/ they're in for bottlenecks.

Weaver's lines will be terminating on an FB6202 LNS and the mobile on a 6602 GGSN.

I presume 10G is on the way soon, though imagine it's being delayed by perfectionism and some OCD as you can deliver a 10G LNS using commodity hardware that fits into a 1 RU package and serves 10,000 subscribers happily, let alone using the 'bespoke' hardware in the FireBrick.

I do not think A&A have any interest in that segment of the market still. A VM running on a modern CPU with a decent NIC can route 10G with a single core taking most of the load. With loads of PPPoE tunnels to terminate that load can be more easily parallelised across multiple cores. Most of the extra load with PPPoE is encapsulation and of course the RAM requirements. RAM is cheap and modules are small.

A Lanner box the size of a cigar box, commodity hardware, can push a gigabit - http://www.lannerinc.com/products/x86-network-appliances/desktop/

Switches? https://mikrotik.com/product/crs309_1g_8s_in - 160 Gbps non-blocking throughput via 8 SFP+ ports and will fit on your desk.

A&A do their own thing. Always have, always will.
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: dee.jay on February 03, 2020, 05:51:14 PM
You do get what you pay for. Cisco equipment is expensive, but, it's bloody good. CarlT may have different opinions as he works in a different space in networking to me.
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: adslmax on February 03, 2020, 05:53:09 PM
I never liked AAISP. Because they are very expensive and 300GB isn't enough (don't understand they will never do unlimited)
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: Weaver on February 03, 2020, 06:06:02 PM
If they already have CISCO kit, why not use that for the 330Mbps customers to terminate their links? Or have I missed some point?
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: j0hn on February 03, 2020, 06:56:35 PM
I never liked AAISP. Because they are very expensive and 300GB isn't enough (don't understand they will never do unlimited)

They do 2TB packages.

You use nowhere near 2TB a month so no idea why you need unlimited data.

Perhaps the same reason as you used nowhere near 80Mb/s but upgraded to more than double that anyway.
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: Chrysalis on February 03, 2020, 07:27:55 PM
I never liked AAISP. Because they are very expensive and 300GB isn't enough (don't understand they will never do unlimited)

The limit is to protect themselves (and other customers) from serial abusers of bandwidth.

They set the limit high enough so that normal people wont even have to worry about hitting.
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: Weaver on February 03, 2020, 07:31:19 PM
Indeed. I wouldn’t be very happy if truly unlimited users were allowed a free lunch on the same network as me.
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: dee.jay on February 03, 2020, 07:33:27 PM
I never liked AAISP. Because they are very expensive and 300GB isn't enough (don't understand they will never do unlimited)

AA exists for very different reasons when compared to other providers.
Title: Re: AA and G.Fast
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on February 04, 2020, 12:08:13 AM
AA exists for very different reasons when compared to other providers.

Which I think is fair enough personally.  They have a very different model to Zen who are more bandwidth, multi-vendors, lets throw as much kit at the problem as possible.

It stands to reason that AAISP sticking steadfastedly to a single vendor, makes their job of maintaining a high quality connection much much easier.  Also allowing their customers much closer access to their monitoring, etc.

Almost all ISPs are quantity over quality,  AAISP are invaluable to people like Weaver who needs to keep things working at all costs.