Kitz Forum
Announcements => News Articles => Topic started by: Alex Atkin UK on August 01, 2022, 04:06:33 PM
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Very interested to see how Openreach will react to this.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/9251-cityfibre-to-upgrade-networks-to-10gbps-from-april-2023
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But who - other than large businesses, are going to even want that kind of speed ?? Never mind having to pay for it ??
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All the willy wavers that think they need 1Gbps now :wry:
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All the willy wavers that think they need 1Gbps now :wry:
:lol: :lol: - with you on this Licq - ;D ;D
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I guess it depends what their backhaul is, but I certainly would feel better going forward on Gigabit knowing the PON is 10G/10G rather than 2.4G/1.2G. I'd imagine it would also be a big pull for businesses.
All the willy wavers that think they need 1Gbps now :wry:
I take it you are not a gamer then? Because when I bought a new game a week back and could install and play it in a a few minutes vs a few hours, that was pretty game-changing (pun intended) to me.
I get I'm a niche case in that I know WHY I want it, how it works and my fibro fog means if I want to play a game I want to play it NOW, because in an hour my brain fog has probably come back.
But the PON less likely to get congested any time soon is a benefit for everyone. Remember, CityFibre is symmetrical so their Gigabit service just ONE user could practically max the upload, rather less likely on 10Gbit even if that customer HAS the 10Gbit package.
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All the willy wavers that think they need 1Gbps now :wry:
tbh, I am thinking of getting a 1Gbps connection. I know I don't need it - I would be happy with 100 Mbps+
The reason I am considering it? Community Fibre are currently charging £25/month - which is likely to be cheaper/the same price that BT would charge for switching my service from FTTC to FTTP.
I wonder how much difference in cost there is to the likes of Openreach between a 1 and 10G PON. If not much, it may make sense to install the 10G PONs for some FTTP builds.
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I wonder how much difference in cost there is to the likes of Openreach between a 1 and 10G PON. If not much, it may make sense to install the 10G PONs for some FTTP builds.
Probably a lot, with so many alt-nets installing XGSPON the decreased demand for GPON likely means the hardware is a lot cheaper.
Also the ONTs, the Nokia ONT uses less power than a 10Gbit ethernet port alone. Although to be fair, most XGS-PON ONTs only do Gigabit as its not about the end-user speed, its about having less contention on the PON.
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It's not all about package speeds as some here seem to believe. I'm happy with 1 gigabit and knowing there's a chance that I can download large amounts of data quickly (e.g. a major update to a large game on Steam).
What I feel is important to consider is that XGS-PON offers 10 gigabits down and up while GPON only offers 2.5 gigabits down and 1.25 gigabits up. Assuming a split ratio of 32:1 and assuming (although highly unlikely) all users were downloading at the same time then that would be the equivalent of around 310~ megabits per connection on XGS-PON and around 78~ megabits on GPON. Upload is obviously worse for GPON. Assuming all connections were 1 gigabit or even 500 megabits symmetrical, XGS-PON has much less chance of some noticeable congestion compared to GPON. I hope my numbers are correct.
Anyway... good for CityFibre! Had CityFibre been deploying XGS-PON already then I may have considered joining them instead of Lightning Fibre as CityFibre was available here a number of months before Lightning Fibre was.
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I think it’s really excellent news. Will keep BT on their toes and I’m very interested in the upstream.
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As I'm contracted with Zen for 2 years which presumably means they are contracted with OR for 2 years also, for me I'm just interested in anything that might push OR to offer symmetrical so I don't end up having to get a second connection for CityFibre.
I really want some sort of remote backup solution and while 100Mbit might be enough for that, I don't want to effectively max out my upstream for days on end while doing it.
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As I'm contracted with Zen for 2 years which presumably means they are contracted with OR for 2 years also, for me I'm just interested in anything that might push OR to offer symmetrical so I don't end up having to get a second connection for CityFibre.
I really want some sort of remote backup solution and while 100Mbit might be enough for that, I don't want to effectively max out my upstream for days on end while doing it.
I might be wrong on this but I believe that Zen's contract with Openreach would likely be 1 year. I'm uncertain whether Openreach also offer CPs a two year contract for FTTP, at least I can't find mention of a 24 month term on Openreach's pricing page. It's possible that it's just your contract with Zen that's 2 years.
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It's not all about package speeds as some here seem to believe. I'm happy with 1 gigabit and knowing there's a chance that I can download large amounts of data quickly (e.g. a major update to a large game on Steam).
What I feel is important to consider is that XGS-PON offers 10 gigabits down and up while GPON only offers 2.5 gigabits down and 1.25 gigabits up. Assuming a split ratio of 32:1 and assuming (although highly unlikely) all users were downloading at the same time then that would be the equivalent of around 310~ megabits per connection on XGS-PON and around 78~ megabits on GPON. Upload is obviously worse for GPON. Assuming all connections were 1 gigabit or even 500 megabits symmetrical, XGS-PON has much less chance of some noticeable congestion compared to GPON. I hope my numbers are correct.
Anyway... good for CityFibre! Had CityFibre been deploying XGS-PON already then I may have considered joining them instead of Lightning Fibre as CityFibre was available here a number of months before Lightning Fibre was.
I'm only guessing ;) ... but I suspect there's an OR business model in place around the wants and needs of 'todays customer', but also with a view to ensuring any hardware upgrade is a straightforward card swap on the OCR/ODF racks in the Exchange ... as and when the time is right to do so ??
A few folk visiting these kinds of forum are always going to want more, just because it's out there - but realistically, the average punter won't have a clue if the whole PON is maxed out and they are only getting 310Mbps, not that that situation would ever happen anyway, or is unlikely in the extreme.
Try and see the bigger picture from a business perspective, affordability to the majority of customers, plus the actual need for such incredible bandwidths to the majority of customers.
This isn't an alt-net cherry picking where they want a presence, this is a nationwide roll-out. :)
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I think we all understand why, not least Ofcoms restrictions that makes it less practical for Openreach than an alt-net.
Its good in that way too, as if we get enough competition then Ofcom can allow everyone to drop their prices.
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All the willy wavers that think they need 1Gbps now :wry:
I have yet to see anyone on a symmetric FTTP service actually make use of the upload speed.
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I have yet to see anyone on a symmetric FTTP service actually make use of the upload speed.
That's kinda the point. With any network the ideal scenario is to have more bandwidth than you need so you never hit contention related issues.
My server has 10Gbit, I'll likely never hit that, but its good to have. I do however sometimes move large video files around and having faster broadband means there may come a time where its more practical to move those files to the cloud rather than locally to, for example, do AI upscaling without cooking my house.
Its not necessarily for what you do today, its for what potential it opens up for tomorrow - which will only happen once the technology becomes more common.
Some people have cloud based CCTV, when I'm away from home I VPN into my home LAN. You don't think it opens up a lot of potential to be able to be at a friend house and access your home LAN as if you are there?
How about a family with a Plex server they can share across the entire family in different locations, without transcoding the quality down? It might not be a common use-case today, but it could very well be tomorrow. You need the infrastructure first before you think of ways you can use it.
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I wonder why the phrase 'solution looking for a problem' always jumps into my head :)
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You need the infrastructure first before you think of ways you can use it.
With respect, I disagree ...... as would any business worth its salt.
You don't work your model on if's, but's and maybe's ... you work it to demands with a modicum of future-proofing thrown in.
Your scenario's may never, ever happen in the real world, or, it may be a very small percentage make use of a 1G symmetrical bandwidth. Fast forward 5-10yrs from now and demand may scale up from the customer, that is when you apply the future-proof hardware that was factored in originally.
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Some people have cloud based CCTV, when I'm away from home I VPN into my home LAN. You don't think it opens up a lot of potential to be able to be at a friend house and access your home LAN as if you are there?
How about a family with a Plex server they can share across the entire family in different locations, without transcoding the quality down? It might not be a common use-case today, but it could very well be tomorrow. You need the infrastructure first before you think of ways you can use it.
None of those need an upstream faster than 115 Mbps.
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Is there any CityFibre presence in Scotland? (Since I read, did I not, about a possible deal between CityFibre and A&A ? If so then hopefully I could have a CF link and an OR link to A&A.)
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Is there any CityFibre presence in Scotland? (Since I read, did I not, about a possible deal between CityFibre and A&A ? If so then hopefully I could have a CF link and an OR link to A&A.)
Yes, there's lots of Cityfibre in Scotland.
There's not a hope in hells chance of them rolling out to you though.
There's zero chance of you ever getting 2 separate commercial network operators rolling out to such a remote location.
Openreach are only covering you with FTTP because they are being subsidised by the R100 project to do so or I suspect even they wouldn't be covering you.
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Thanks J0hn. That’s what I expected unless CityFibre might grow so huge as to challenge BT one day in the far far future. Is CityFibre in general an urban-only network in Scotland, not rural?
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None of those need an upstream faster than 115 Mbps.
One 4K Bluray rip from Plex can do 60-80Mbit, Gigabit would allow an extended family to share the same library without the quality loss of streaming services and not having to be cautious of more than one person streaming at the same time. It might not be something most people care about today, but I'd certainly do it and I'm sure I could find others who would too.
With respect, I disagree ...... as would any business worth its salt.
You don't work your model on if's, but's and maybe's ... you work it to demands with a modicum of future-proofing thrown in.
Your scenario's may never, ever happen in the real world, or, it may be a very small percentage make use of a 1G symmetrical bandwidth. Fast forward 5-10yrs from now and demand may scale up from the customer, that is when you apply the future-proof hardware that was factored in originally.
You mistake my point, I didn't mean this from the network perspective - I meant from the end-user perspective which in turn will drive the network.
Like I said, I totally understand ORs viewpoint on rolling out GPON because its a much cheaper starting point and right now enough for 99% of customers. Then if demand for Gigabit starts to cause contention, they can roll out XGSPON on a PON by PON basis, that makes total sense on the scale OR are working on.
As an alt-net I can also understand how wanting to one-up the competition, and having a smaller rollout to OR, it might make sense to go straight to XGSPON. No doubt there are contractual reasons such as 5G towers along the path, etc, that may make it more financially viable. I can't see them doing this if there is no benefit to them. Even if that benefit is just marketing, its good for them to be able to claim "faster than BT" and potentially get contracts with ISPs that want to sell faster services exclusively through them. At the very least it could pull business contracts away from Openreach.
Personally I can't imagine getting 10Gbit as surely not going to be cheap, the cost of a router to push that would be insane unless I ditched pfSense. However I might consider 2Gbit, and I certainly would rather have symmetrical Gigabit than 900/115 as it opens up interesting options for hosting my websites by proxying the content off my LAN rather than paying for more VPS storage. Sure I could do that now, but its far more likely to impact my normal usage if I did.
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I would need a faster switch first, then a faster router, and faster WAPs. What’s a good 10G small switch that can handle 10G copper, has some SFP, and 2.5 G and 5G copper ports?
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<cough> Just a reminder that this topic was started in the "News Articles" section with regard to one service provider's plans. It is beginning to meander . . . so, I guess, someone will need to "make adjustments", in due course. :)
What’s a good 10G small switch that can handle 10G copper, has some SFP, and 2.5 G and 5G copper ports?
I will suggest that you review the MikroTik Catalogue (https://mikrotik.com/download/pdf/MikroTik_2022.pdf) for ideas. (There does not appear to be version for 2021 or 2022, at the moment.)
Edit: Adjusted the link to point to the 2022 catalogue.
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Indeed, meander acknowledged- mea culpa, and shifting this part of the thread sideways to a more appropriate place would be appreciated. MikroTik had already occurred to me.
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I'm using the Netgear MS510TXUP but it sure wasn't cheap. Handy though, as I'm now running the router off a 2.5Gbit port using PoE (officially the PoE splitter is only Gigabit but works fine at 2.5Gbit).
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CF need to get their 1gbit rolled out, hope this distraction doesnt take much resources away from areas currently been built.
If I ever do get CF installed here, I will be uploading my video recordings to do reencode's using the datacentre's electric bill then download again. :)
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Why would it be a distraction? All they've confirmed is they've upgraded the hardware they are rolling out.
If I ever do get CF installed here, I will be uploading my video recordings to do reencode's using the datacentre's electric bill then download again. :)
EXACTLY! No way I want to do that at 100Mbit upload. I mean its a huge improvement, but it still took 10 minutes to upload a 10GB backup of my website.
With Gigabit you could establish a VPN between the two and remotely mount the drive, no need to even upload the file.
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Not sure I get the use case to store files locally, if you have a fast WAN?
When WAN was bottle neck, computing / storage was local, but now its not, why store files/websites locally, just access them when you need them remotely via your fast download connection?
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Cost and security. Not to mention its kinda legally iffy for me to upload my Bluray rips to remote storage.
Ideally you'd want both a local and remote copy for backup purposes anyway though.
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Sharing with extended family and friends via streaming or file sharing is more dubious than storing off-site. Backups are legitimate under UK and US law however they're stored. Sharing with others is not.
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Sharing with extended family and friends via streaming or file sharing is more dubious than storing off-site. Backups are legitimate under UK and US law however they're stored. Sharing with others is not.
True, but I'm not sure the storage providers will see it that way and its kinda hard to catch people sharing a video library unless they are allowing anyone access. (some people foolishly do this which must be a matter of time before they get huge fines)
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I think I should clarify, these are recordings of games I play.
OBSS files encoded via NVENC are huge. So I want to reencode to get the size down.
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I have yet to see anyone on a symmetric FTTP service actually make use of the upload speed.
A few weeks ago, I had to use Google Cloud CLI (gsutil) to download around 332 GB of data from two separate Google Workspace instances. I then had to <do stuff> to the data and then upload it to OneDrive. Can't remember how long the download took (left it running overnight - but roughly 12 hours) but the upload took around 51 hours. With me praying that it won't disconnect midway as there is no way to resume an upload to OneDrive. I'd have had to start it all over again.
For a lot of complicated (network related) reasons, I couldn't get this working on a machine at work; gsutil just refused to work over a proxy for some reason.
I have VDSL and my line syncs at the maximum speed possible. In the "real world", that translates to around 74.5 Mbps down and 18.5 Mbps up.
If I had symmetric 1 gig up and down, that upload would have been fifty times faster, meaning it would have finished in about 1 hour. The download would have taken about the same (1 hour) instead of 12.
That's the difference it makes to people who need, and can use that kind of bandwidth. For the kind of work I do, and I now work exclusively from home, it is an absolute necessity now. Pre-COVID, I would have just done this sort of work from the office. Now, it's no longer an option. Not easily anyway.
Oh, and when I'm doing something like this and max the line out, everyone else at home suffers and has to fight for bandwidth. My wife works from home as well so I need to be careful.
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Oh, and when I'm doing something like this and max the line out, everyone else at home suffers and has to fight for bandwidth. My wife works from home as well so I need to be careful.
Precisely. While the average household usage might not be that high, that's not taking into account users where its more important that it works or that typically everyone will be using it at the same time.
I frequent linustechtips forum, the number of times people complain of bad latency in gaming, those are exactly the kinds of people where having more bandwidth than they need is the most useful, as it keeps latency down. Ideally, everyone would have more bandwidth than they ever need so buffering and packet loss would be rare, the majority of the time it wouldn't be used but its there to handle transients.
Another example I've used in the past is my own Fibromyalgia, the symptoms vary throughout the day so I might feel able to play a game RIGHT NOW and that game needs an update. (because you can guarantee auto-updates decided NOT to update that one game) That update now downloads in about 10 minutes max. When it used to take an hour or longer, I'd usually find brain fog/fatigue had kicked in by the time it had finished so I no longer felt able to play that game.
In a household working from home, its going to even be more critical as you point out, you don't want one persons usage to impact anothers.
I also frequent the Topaz AI forums, where a few people have suggested how useful it could be to upload a video to a cloud service to run the AI upscaling. There is little benefit to that if the upload takes longer than the upscale. I myself had to avoid any long upscales during the heatwave, if I could run it remotely then I wouldn't have had to (though in my case the cost would outweigh the benefit, but to a professional not so much).
There's probably a multitude of things we've not even thought of yet that might make it even more useful. YouTube only became a thing once enough people had fast enough broadband to stream video, then the other streaming services.
To suggest that "nobody needs faster than x" is extremely short-sighted, its literally the progress in speeds (both broadband and computing) that has made the Internet what it is today, the good and the bad. Every technological evolution has been mocked as "but nobody needs that", and almost every time we've found uses for it. Because finding new uses is a process of playing with what we have to see what it can do.
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I'm certainly not going to criticise anyone for wanting more bandwidth to home or office. Can't have too much.
On the topic in common with HS2 it's going to be about capacity rather than speed initially. Selling gigabit upstream over GPON is I'm sure placing the odd PON into congestion territory and XGSPON will relieve it without any need for work in the field.
XGSPON will be combining 2 PONs at the fibre exchange, feeding the combined overlay PON to an OLT port and the job's done. When XGSPON capacity starts getting strained decombine them or, more likely given how long that'll take, 25/50GPON time.
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Can somebody explain. Is there hardware change involved in this or is it all outside the home.
If and when Openreach do it do they have to send a person round
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This is nothing to do with Openreach.
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And no they wouldn't have to send anyone round. If Openreach do similar your current ONT will continue to work.
GPON and XGS-PON can co-exist on the same fibre.
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I'd imagine when Openreach do it, they would do so for new customers ordering Gigabit or existing ones re-grading, to avoid having too many Gigabit customers on the same PON. Unlikely to happen any time soon I'd expect.
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This is nothing to do with Openreach.
I didn't mean to imply it did, just was curious in general about how it works
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But who - other than large businesses, are going to even want that kind of speed ?? Never mind having to pay for it ??
:giggle:
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I didn't mean to imply it did, just was curious in general about how it works
I misread. My apologies.