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Broadband Related => Broadband Technology => Topic started by: niemand on March 29, 2020, 08:31:52 PM

Title: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: niemand on March 29, 2020, 08:31:52 PM
I have the following for you:

Speedtest.net hosts that can handle a gigabit in my experience don't exist.
The Think Broadband speedtest doesn't come close to handling a gigabit. Presumably all the other BT customers with a gigabit have overwhelmed it.
Fast.com is about the only thing that comes close.

The main cool thing about having a gigabit is that you basically can't max it out downstream.

It's not transformative. I'm not even touching the sides of the capacity. It's a good to have but really no difference noticed from 300 Mbit apart from running speed tests just now.

BT Wholesale and Openreach have nailed it in Wakefield: hasn't skipped a beat.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: meritez on March 29, 2020, 08:41:36 PM
Interesting, does fast.com or http://speedtest.googlefiber.net/ allow you to hit a gigabit?
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: underzone on March 29, 2020, 09:08:16 PM
I have found that this works well when testing (at work with 1Gb to the desktop):
http://speedtest2.aa.net.uk/
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on March 29, 2020, 10:35:21 PM
Well you only need a 10Gbit link to be a speedtest.net sponsor for 1Gbit testing, so LOL.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: niemand on March 30, 2020, 09:43:21 AM
Interesting, does fast.com or http://speedtest.googlefiber.net/ allow you to hit a gigabit?

Fast.com is actually the one that's capable. Google Fibre sadly no. Too far from the server, too many networks in between, latency too high so bottlenecked by TCP.

I have found that this works well when testing (at work with 1Gb to the desktop):
http://speedtest2.aa.net.uk/

Not bad. However think it's on a gigabit port - maxes just over 800 Mbit. Unsure if a Firebrick is involved somewhere but there are none with ports of more capacity than a gigabit.

Well you only need a 10Gbit link to be a speedtest.net sponsor for 1Gbit testing, so LOL.

That's going to be just fine most of the time.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on March 30, 2020, 06:16:27 PM
That's going to be just fine most of the time.

Maybe if they were dedicated ONLY to Gigabit tests, but presumably they are being used for in general at the same time.

How does speedtest.net even decide which servers to use if it doesn't know your speed prior to allocating a server?  :-\  Is the "finding a server" part some sort of pre-test and if so, I wonder if that can actually fail to allocate properly if the pre-test servers are overloaded?
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: sevenlayermuddle on March 30, 2020, 06:37:15 PM
There must be some other purpose for Gigabit broadband, other than proving/disproving which speed testers work? :D

It's not transformative. I'm not even touching the sides of the capacity. It's a good to have but really no difference noticed from 300 Mbit apart from running speed tests just now.

More seriously, I suspect that once a critical mass of people have access, bloated services will begin to appear that use it, so bloated that they stretch gigabit it to the limits.   That will then create a ‘need’ for everybody else to have it too.   So no doubt, I’ll soon be feeling left behind.

Edit:  said ‘ethernet’, meant ‘broadband’. :blush:
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on March 30, 2020, 07:30:45 PM
I believe speedtest.net looks for the lowest ping to near servers then start testing on that server, that is why if the ISP has a test server it will 99% choose it unless there is a more near server to test on.

Surely it must be cleverer than that?
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Chrysalis on March 30, 2020, 11:12:55 PM


The main cool thing about having a gigabit is that you basically can't max it out downstream.


Ironically this is my primary motivator, I dont really need the bandwidth in terms of my impatience of downloading stuff, for me 80mbit/sec is fast enough.

But I have learnt that managing local downstream congestion is way harder than managing upstream congestion, very basic router side QoS solves upstream, not as easy for downstream, especially heavily threaded like steam which is like ddos'ing your own connection.

So been able to download of steam, without things like twitch falling apart, and without having to implement QoS would be nice.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on March 30, 2020, 11:44:15 PM
I think it being hard to hit the line speed is a very big reason for getting Gigabit IMO, although I more than likely WILL hit it, but not for long periods thanks to the speed.  ::)

I was actually going to say that not having to use QoS, or at least it never needing to kick-in downstream (where its less effective), will be an amazing thing.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: sevenlayermuddle on March 31, 2020, 12:15:04 AM
I liken FTTP to 1950s roads.    It was clear the trunk routes were no good so in the late 50s and 60s we built motorways.   The capacity of the motorways was so generous that our transport problems would be over for good.  Projects such as Westway into London ensured we would see a permanent end to commuter traffic jams.

And originally, the motorways were exempt from speed limits.  These roads would be so good, so fast and so safe, that speed limits were just not needed.   

Striking a chord?   ::)

Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on March 31, 2020, 02:16:41 AM
Fortunately PONs are easier to upgrade than widening the motorways.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: sevenlayermuddle on March 31, 2020, 09:13:18 AM
Fortunately PONs are easier to upgrade than widening the motorways.

Yes it has that advantage.

And that is fortunate as I still predict, pretty soon after 1Gbps becomes widely available, service providers will find a way to occupy the bandwidth and people will start looking for 10Gbps.  :)
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: niemand on March 31, 2020, 12:31:52 PM
Given they are yet to find a way to occupy 160 Mbit it might well be a while yet.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on March 31, 2020, 07:39:19 PM
I'd love to see streaming services adopting Bluray bitrates including lossless audio, but considering the claims the backhaul networks can't even handle their usual bitrates right now.....
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: aesmith on April 02, 2020, 01:07:14 PM
More seriously, I suspect that once a critical mass of people have access, bloated services will begin to appear that use it, so bloated that they stretch gigabit it to the limits.   That will then create a ‘need’ for everybody else to have it too.   So no doubt, I’ll soon be feeling left behind.
It's notable that whenever media like Radio 4 have a piece on broadband speeds, whether it's about UK being behind other countries, or about new initiatives, they never ever cite applications that require these speeds. Personally I hope that mainstream applications never bloat to that extent, just think how many would be disadvantaged if you needed a 300 meg connection to say access the library or online banking or do your tax return, or for your kids to submit their homework.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: sevenlayermuddle on April 02, 2020, 01:53:16 PM
If the bloat does not happen, it’ll be a first.

We’ve seen the same in CPU speeds, memory and disk capacity, all of which have gone up by many orders of magnitude in two or three decades.   Yet we still face the need to regularly upgrade, the more the manufacturers have provided, the more consumers have consumed.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on April 02, 2020, 05:52:21 PM
IMO there's a huge difference between bloat (using more resources for no good reason) and what actually happened.

We use more CPU, RAM and HDD space because applications do more complicated things.  If you use a PC in the same way you did 20 years ago, the requirements wouldn't be as dramatically higher.  In fact, over the last 10 years things haven't increased that much, which has allowed mobile devices to creep closer in power and memory to a PC.

I know people using Atom/Celeron based devices to this day, with 4GB RAM and 32GB eMMC, because all they need to do is open a browser to do an online shop.  Sure its sluggish and some of that probably could be improved with better web design, but a lot of the changes that eat resources are quality of life improvements.

Granted on other websites, adverts are a huge resource hog, but then those websites wouldn't exist without them as they need to be paid for somehow.

So I don't think its honestly fair to call it bloat and I don't think bandwidth requirements going up is the same thing.  If it wasn't for YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc, then would there be much need for increased bandwidth outside of gaming?
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: sevenlayermuddle on April 02, 2020, 07:46:52 PM
It’s bloat, and it’s laziness by modern developers.

I wrote a 3d graphics engine for iOS less than a decade ago.   Getting it to present fluid motion at full refresh rate was a challenge, solved by a number of optimisation of which I felt quite proud.   When I revisit that same engine for new Apps, there is no need for clever optimisations.   The fast hardware removes all motivation to do so.

I began my career in mainframes.   A half Megabyte of memory was not untypical, and discs that resembled top loading washing machines ranged from around 80 to 200 MB.   These machines were plenty capable, supporting many users.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Weaver on April 02, 2020, 08:57:55 PM
I began my career writing assembler for 8-bit microprocessors. Some had only 2k RAM. The Sinclair Spectrum had 48k i spent a year writing code for that. I used a DEC VAX every day; it had a dozen users and 1 MB RAM which was later upgraded to 8MB. I then wrote code for my company’s own new hardware and novel operating systems.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Bowdon on April 02, 2020, 11:11:39 PM
As some have mentioned a lot is lazy developers.

I remember one fear when cd's became a valid gaming format was that it would be filled with flashy graphics and the games would stay at the same level and length, and sure enough that's happened.

I am interested though on how programmes could fill out a gigabit line. Maybe it'll be the return of the full motion videos (FMV) in games, at 4K!  ;D
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on April 02, 2020, 11:28:57 PM
I guess coming at it from those days, it does come across as bloat.

But I still say there is a huge difference between making coding easier at the cost of code being inefficient vs increasing bandwidth consumption for, what reason exactly?  Its a very different scenario.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: sevenlayermuddle on April 02, 2020, 11:47:32 PM
Ref increased bandwidth, my gripe is that 20 something years ago I could book hotel rooms, buy stuff from Maplin (Amazon not invented), check flight arrivals, all on a 28kbps dialup.

I’m willing to bet that today’s hotel booking sites, online shopping or flight checkers, would be so bloated they now depend on FTTC speeds, no longer viable on dialup, despite no change in the basic functionality they provide.

An exception might be video streaming.   Commercial cinema streaming rates are I think hundreds of Mbps and even then, some movie directors reckon quality is naff compared to film, they want even higher rates.   So streaming at cinema quality or better might be quite exciting, but would the core networks take the strain?   I doubt it - having trouble getting my head around it, but isn’t there an exponential factor involved?
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on April 03, 2020, 03:26:06 AM
I see your point, but from the shops/hotels point of view its not a waste of bandwidth if it helps them sell you other products and services.

Also if I say go on booking.com, sure I wouldn't want to load it on dialup but I'm not seeing anything excessive.  None of these businesses want to pay for more resources than they absolutely need.

In the dialup days, websites had to be basic, to the point of barely being functional IMO.  I consider being able to clearly SEE the place I will be saying in the photos as absolutely added functionality over what it likely would have looked like before.  Where a do object are auto-play adverts or even videos related to an article.   If I'm visiting an article, its to read the darn article, not watch a video.

The biggest culprits for bloat are obviously big sites where adverts are their primary (or only) source of income.  What we have to remember there is that websites back in the dialup days were mostly an afterthought.  Nobody was really considering how they could could be profitable, plenty of sites ran at a loss, many still do today even with all that bloat.

As for cinema-quality streaming, I'm sure if they ever are willing to do that (and I would be very pleased if they did) the infrastructure will absolutely have caught up.  But I have my doubts as none of the current streaming services are willing to support even Bluray quality for people who have the connections able to handle it.

Incidentally I actually saw a leaked copy of the My Little Pony movie which I'm not sure if it was the master or cinema release but its around 200Mbit (DNxHD codec).  It does have much nicer colours than the Bluray though, but its almost impossible to play as VLC refuses to show more than one frame every one in a while, despite it claiming to be decoding every frame fine.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: niemand on April 03, 2020, 11:16:20 AM
If concerned about bloat on web pages I would strongly recommend looking at research on how intolerant people are of slow load times. The web pages follow the bandwidth, not the other way around.

Extensive research has been done on how long people will tolerate waiting for a page to load. It's really not a long time.

Quote
North American fashion retailer Nordstrom saw online sales fall 11% when its website response time slowed by just half a second, says Gopal Brugalette, who was the retailer's senior applied architect in performance engineering at the time.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: sevenlayermuddle on April 03, 2020, 02:14:32 PM
@CarlIT, in case I forget to mention.. 

I am most certainly envious of your gigabit experience.  Wish I could have the same.  Don't let my cynicism spoil it.  :)
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: niemand on April 03, 2020, 07:21:57 PM
You aren't. To be quite honest I don't really notice the difference between this and 300/50 95%+ of the time.

End of the day it's an Internet connection. Once you're into ultrafast territory it's degrees not step changes.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on April 04, 2020, 05:08:26 AM
You aren't. To be quite honest I don't really notice the difference between this and 300/50 95%+ of the time.

End of the day it's an Internet connection. Once you're into ultrafast territory it's degrees not step changes.

Its a rather different scenario when you're a gamer, and I don't even mean online gaming as honestly I think QoS handles that fine for my filthy casual use.

I'm looking forward to going Gigabit and just not having to think about if something I'm doing on one machine is going to cause issues for what I'm (or my mum) is doing on another.

I mean sure, 300/50 would help there, but I think Gigabit is the way to go as the chance of a single client ever maxing that out on its own is pretty slim, or if it does its going to be for a VERY short period of time.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: niemand on April 05, 2020, 01:44:32 PM
Gaming doesn't really make a lot of difference.

Steam can't touch the sides, let alone PSN or XBL and the less said about Nintendo's effort the better.

Haven't tried Origin because it sucks but might give it a go.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Weaver on April 05, 2020, 02:31:46 PM
I think I mentioned some years ago how amazed I was when my sister said she couldn’t really see much difference going from 50kbps dialup (up to 200k including MPPC compression) download to 500kbps ADSL. 10x faster and you can’t see the difference - what’s wrong with you ? I thought. But the I thought about caching and cases where you’re improving something from 50ms to 5ms; in the latter case it was just not notably slow beforehand - do you have to pick your examples carefully!

In the dialup case, a many things had had a lot of design effort and tuning put into them over years, and these mitigations had clearly done a really good job. Nowadays web designers are not forced at gunpoint to live for a week in a slow dialup network so that they will sympathise with users who have slow links (maybe not dialup but slowness has not gone away). This will stop the web designers from requiring us to wait forever and waste our money fetching massive hires background bitmap.

Somehow we need a way of allowing website visitors to be able to choose speed/quality/cost options when browsing the web. I don’t know how that would work without being a total pain. Anyone any ideas?

The only thing I can think of would be to get the browser to expose something; publishing an "I’m paying for download (or download+upload)" flag as well would be very, very helpful, for use in say 3G/4G. Another reason to alert the considerate adaptive webserver as well as just slow browsers: “minimise byte-count”. For example: iOS now knows about internet connections that cost money per byte of download(+upload [?]) such as mobile data. I wish iOS could be told about cheap rate iMessage of day though
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on April 05, 2020, 05:58:44 PM
Gaming doesn't really make a lot of difference.

Steam can't touch the sides, let alone PSN or XBL and the less said about Nintendo's effort the better.

Haven't tried Origin because it sucks but might give it a go.

What's the maximum you've seen Steam reach?  Bearing in mind it may be throttled right now to help home workers.

But that's just it, I can let Steam, Xbox and Playstation update while both me and my mum watch Netflix 4K and downloading a torrent. :p

Or I can play a game of "what crashes first" by cranking the number of connections up on BitTorrent and see if pfSense or the client falls over first.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: niemand on April 05, 2020, 08:44:23 PM
Last I checked it couldn't reach 70 MB/s.

This was to a machine with SSDs and Ethernet connection.

Maybe I was just unlucky.

Throttling Steam would be a no-no as far as ISPs go. Only the server operators could do that.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on April 06, 2020, 02:14:41 AM
That's just it, Steam are supposed to be limiting automatic updates to off-peak hours more than usual, not sure if that means they are also throttling the actual downloads or not.

Also if Steam can hit 70MB, I could easily max out Gigabit by the Xbox One downloading an update at the same time and watching Netflix 4K on my TV.  A scenario I would absolutely have done today, had I not deliberately chosen to watch content off Plex instead to avoid said scenario.

Heck, there are times when Windows is updating, Steam is updating and I want to play GTA or something off UPlay that also wants to update.  The chance of that happening or being a problem if does, is dramatically reduced with Gigabit.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: niemand on April 06, 2020, 11:17:51 AM
Indeed didn't say there weren't times it would max out but they are few, far between, and brief.

95%+ of the time I don't notice the difference was I think my comment, even with all the toys in the house, and I'll run with that.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: dee.jay on April 06, 2020, 03:44:31 PM
I bet a decently seeded torrent will max 1Gbit.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on April 06, 2020, 05:54:02 PM
I bet a decently seeded torrent will max 1Gbit.

I'm kinda surprised Steam don't have a torrent option for updating games.  Or at least a way to use other PCs on the LAN that also have the game installed.

Then again Windows 10 is supposed to use other PCs on the LAN to distribute Windows Updates and I've never ONCE seen it actually do it.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: aesmith on April 07, 2020, 02:10:10 PM
If the bloat does not happen, it’ll be a first.

We’ve seen the same in CPU speeds, memory and disk capacity, all of which have gone up by many orders of magnitude in two or three decades.   Yet we still face the need to regularly upgrade, the more the manufacturers have provided, the more consumers have consumed.
The difference with bandwidth bloat is that lots of people will simply have no option of upgrading to a Gigabit (or even 20 or 30 meg) connection, as the technologies aren't available at their locations.

On the other hand, even on a 4 meg ADSL for most real applications, the limiting factor has been response from the remote host rather than the amount of data vs the available bandwidth. 
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: jelv on April 07, 2020, 02:54:27 PM
I began my career in mainframes.   A half Megabyte of memory was not untypical, and discs that resembled top loading washing machines ranged from around 80 to 200 MB.   These machines were plenty capable, supporting many users.

I started my career at an electricity board where we do doing meter readings, payroll, stock control for the shops and a load of other systems on our two mainframes. The System 4/70 had 256K memory and the System 4/72 had a massive 384K memory. The disk drives were EDS8 and EDS20's (8MB and 20MB). Most of the processing was done tape to tape using 1/2 tape at I think 800bpi if I remember correctly.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Chrysalis on April 07, 2020, 11:17:59 PM
Dare I say it I find myself considering VM again, especially as I can try it on the monthly contracts l although may have stopped now due to social distancing.

I feel like VDSL is getting silly, no new techs from openreach in my area,  an over eagerness to apply heavy interleaving on top of that as well, I think is enough to push me.

If cityfibre was circa £100 a month instead of circa £300 I think I would have pulled the trigger.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on April 08, 2020, 05:34:10 AM
Its always tricky with VM.  I mean when they work, they work really really well.  My friends VM connection always had low latency and web pages seemed to load faster, even when my connection was technically faster.

But when it doesn't work, man their latency can be terrible.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: j0hn on April 08, 2020, 02:28:27 PM
If cityfibre was circa £100 a month instead of circa £300 I think I would have pulled the trigger.

Out of interest what do CityFibre sell that's available to you that costs £300 and has no massive installation charge?

Their residential FTTP is done through Vodafone only and has very little coverage and their business internet  products are sold through Entanet.

Their Ethernet pricing can be pretty insane and I think it's safe to assume you don't want dark fibre   :D

I've looked in to CityFibre in the past for a site in Edinburgh where their GPON isn't yet available and the costs were eye watering.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Chrysalis on April 08, 2020, 06:39:55 PM
Its via one of their resellers called giganet, 1000/1000.

https://www.giga.net.uk/ and https://www.giga.net.uk/partners/

They resell FTTP from Openreach for consumer, and from cityfibre for business.  cityfibre is already in my city.

I posted a screenshot on a different thread j0hn to show proof that I could order, and the price I was quoted.  But because its a business product,, its pricing is at a business level, so over £300, and 3 year contract.

I think they are selling it FTTPoD style, so if I was in a neighbouring street that doesnt have already direct proximity, then I probably would have had an install fee.

If you really want I will give you my postcode via PM, and you can check on their checker.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: brutos on April 11, 2020, 03:57:47 PM
I have the following for you:

Speedtest.net hosts that can handle a gigabit in my experience don't exist.
The Think Broadband speedtest doesn't come close to handling a gigabit. Presumably all the other BT customers with a gigabit have overwhelmed it.
Fast.com is about the only thing that comes close.

The main cool thing about having a gigabit is that you basically can't max it out downstream.

It's not transformative. I'm not even touching the sides of the capacity. It's a good to have but really no difference noticed from 300 Mbit apart from running speed tests just now.

BT Wholesale and Openreach have nailed it in Wakefield: hasn't skipped a beat.

After having it since the 26th  I can concur also that its really overkill, but I don't care I still want it, and I would upgrade again if I was doing the process over.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Ixel on April 11, 2020, 08:14:04 PM
Assuming no issues occur with BT Wholesale or Openreach with my regrade, I've been told the regrade will be placed on Tuesday (when my FTTPoD contract is out of the minimum term) and should have it on Wednesday in the early hours of the morning. I'm looking forward to it, assuming there's no delay. A gigabit connection (downstream) is overkill but at least there won't be a need for QoS on the downstream :D, besides I mainly want it for the higher upstream speed.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on April 12, 2020, 04:43:52 AM
Its amazing how many I see on forums complaining that they can't download at Gigabit, or only download slightly under.  They seem to completely miss the point that the idea is to have more bandwidth that you'll ever need, so you basically never have any problems.

Particularly people in certain parts of the US that seem puzzled that they bought 1.5Gib and the combined ONT/router only has Gigabit ports.

If I never need to worry about QoS again I will be overjoyed.  It never really works that well on downstream anyway.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: busterboy on April 12, 2020, 07:06:10 AM
Its amazing how many I see on forums complaining that they can't download at Gigabit, or only download slightly under.

I would be happy to get 2mbps instead of the measly 1mbps I get now. :lol:
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Weaver on April 12, 2020, 10:01:04 AM
Busterboy: I have adsl2 lines that are 2.8 / 0.5 Mbps sync rate which equates to  2.47 / 0.44 Mbps IP PDU rate. I was frustrated with having to live with that so I bonded several lines together to get a multiple speed link. With a suitable ISP and the right router, even a single download works or upload at n times speed in both directions. I have posted many times before years back about this setup. Just in case you’re interested - It is possible to get out of a very slow situation. Using four such ADSL2 lines I now get ~10.0 / ~1.6 rates from speed testers.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: busterboy on April 12, 2020, 10:11:21 AM
Busterboy: I have adsl2 lines that are 2.8 / 0.5 Mbps sync rate which equates to  2.47 / 0.44 Mbps IP PDU rate. I was frustrated with having to live with that so I bonded several lines together to get a multiple speed link. With a suitable ISP and the right router, even a single download works or upload at n times speed in both directions. I have posted many times before years back about this setup. Just in case you’re interested - It is possible to get out of a very slow situation. Using four such ADSL2 lines I now get ~10.0 / ~1.6 rates from speed testers.

We were literally days away from getting our FTTP commissioned and completed until COVID-19 stopped the progress. Come June - July when work commences we shouldn't have a long wait. ;)

You can explain what bonding lines involves though, do you pay extra for two lines etc.  ???
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Weaver on April 12, 2020, 11:19:57 AM
Yes, pay for n lines. I have four lines. The charging scheme I have chosen is where I pay a certain small amount for a copper line and then a certain amount for fownllad traffic according to how much download I need. Adding another line is about £30 pm can’t remember about VAT and line rental. I pay line rental included anyway (not separately to BT).

My ISP (https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/l2tp-service/) handles the downstream splitting of traffic and my router, a Firebrick FB2900, handles the upstream splitting. My lines are not all equal speed, so the traffic is split in the right fraction according to each line’s capabilities. That way you just have a single IP address and everything works at multiple speed. It’s also the cheapest way of doing it, or can be at least, as I pay just a small amount for each copper line and I have a lot of lines yet I pay only once for traffic, not n times over. This is the zero hassle route.

If you choose use two different ISPs, a router on the internet would be needed to handle the traffic splitting; without such a ‘remote’ router you would have several IP addresses at your end and single downloads would not go any faster although with multiple downloads in progress then you would see the speed benefit, but overall the value of such a system would be much more limited. If you use a capable ISP, then everything is done for you; without this, if you want fully effective bonding, then you would need to do things yourself and either park your own traffic-splitting router on the internet or you can rent the use of one from Andrews and Arnold (https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/l2tp-service) for example.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: busterboy on April 12, 2020, 11:34:07 AM
Very informative and thank you but after struggling with this for the last 10 years I'll hang on another few weeks. :fingers:
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on April 12, 2020, 01:16:04 PM
Its also worth noting that if you don't need the combined upload, you don't need to bond to get the combined download, just basic load balancing works just fine as most downloads can be multi-threaded and loading web pages naturally is.

Bonding is better as it fully combines everything, but its WAY more expensive.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Ixel on April 15, 2020, 11:02:11 AM
Well unfortunately it looks like I may not be experiencing gigabit FTTP just yet (with a much higher upstream speed, which is what interests me the most). My regrade to 900/110 may have sadly hit a further delay. It was supposed to be processed yesterday as my minimum contract term for FTTPoD realistically ended yesterday (although I was told it was actually the 10th when I called the ISP today, but given the weekend and easter holidays nobody would be around to process the regrade order). I called Cerberus and the person who's managing my order isn't currently responding when I was tried to be put through to them, so I'm hoping they'll call me back later today with some good news. Obviously with COVID-19 delays are to be expected.

EDIT: Got a response, sadly bad news. There's a system issue at BT's end and is currently being raised with the product manager. Well at least I've had an update on the matter haha.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Weaver on July 12, 2020, 03:06:26 PM
Quote
Bonding is better as it fully combines everything, but its WAY more expensive.

@Alex. Indeed, agreed. True bonding on a per-packet scheduling, sharing between lines is the bees’ knees as a single TCP flow will go n times faster. Web page downloads often won’t be faster without real bonding because of caching; if there are multiple objects to fetch such as images, CSS and javascript files plus the main page html content, then if they are not cached then you can do the multiple downloads in parallel, but if everything apart from the main page content is cached already, then there’s only the one TCP connection and so in that case you need to be able to speed one single flow to get an improvement.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: psychopomp1 on September 22, 2020, 10:26:09 PM
Speedtest.net hosts that can handle a gigabit in my experience don't exist.

I find the Xilo server on speedtest.net handles 1 Gigabit quite well - I'm seeing 800+Mbps consistently on this server. No doubt speeds on this will plummet now, as everyone on Gigabit overloads this server  :lol:

(https://i.postimg.cc/L6zmVJNQ/speedtest-net.jpg) (https://postimages.org/)
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: niemand on September 22, 2020, 10:50:57 PM
Actually seemed to be browser issue.

The app is better as is the CLI tool.

Have managed 1.4 Gbit/s from a couple of servers though they were just defaults.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: Chrysalis on September 25, 2020, 03:36:28 AM
The cli tool as you said is great as it has no browser overheads or manipulation to mess with it.

Carl like you I have a 10gbit pfSense VM on a server, and behind that is another VM connected on a virtual switch hosting some game mod files which can push over 1gbit of second traffic fed by spindles.
Title: Re: After a week on a gigabit
Post by: thesmileyone on September 25, 2020, 03:52:55 PM
I have the following for you:

Speedtest.net hosts that can handle a gigabit in my experience don't exist.
The Think Broadband speedtest doesn't come close to handling a gigabit. Presumably all the other BT customers with a gigabit have overwhelmed it.
Fast.com is about the only thing that comes close.

The main cool thing about having a gigabit is that you basically can't max it out downstream.

It's not transformative. I'm not even touching the sides of the capacity. It's a good to have but really no difference noticed from 300 Mbit apart from running speed tests just now.

BT Wholesale and Openreach have nailed it in Wakefield: hasn't skipped a beat.

Probably an example of residential peering rather than speed throughput. I'm sure you can get the full 110MB/s that gigabit provides with the right protocol such as bit torrent or Plex.

Try streaming a 4K plex movie whilst downloading your favorite Linux ISO via bit torrent for example.

There's many times gigabit would be handy for me such as the above or downloading via sFTP whilst browsing even. Currently I have to limit sFTP to 3.5MB/s so I still have enough pipe left to browse web pages.

As for speedtest, Google have their own or for download speed tests you can use EU datacentre test files like this one http://mirror.mia11.us.leaseweb.net/speedtest/10000mb.bin