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Author Topic: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)  (Read 12126 times)

Ixel

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #60 on: July 16, 2022, 04:29:42 PM »

To get some idea I guess you can take a look some resources such as these:

https://bgp.he.net/AS20712#_peers

https://bgp.he.net/AS20712#_graph4

https://www.peeringdb.com/net/2077

On their wiki they also mention something: https://support.aa.net.uk/Peering_and_Transit_-_Gamers

I believe AAISP only counts what you download towards your quota, upload is not counted. You also get the quota bonus each month, allowing you to rollover some unused quota from the previous month.

When I was with AAISP I don't recall having issues with throughput, no matter whether it was a single TCP connection or multiple TCP connections.

EDIT: I've done a BQM graph on TBB just in case that helps highlight something.

Today's snapshot:


Ignore the packet loss around 6:30pm as that was me doing something.
« Last Edit: July 16, 2022, 05:27:48 PM by Ixel »
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bogof

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #61 on: July 16, 2022, 06:36:13 PM »

Thanks, really interesting, though very hard to interpret of course.  I can see from peeringdb that AAISP are peered to the big locations Netflix are at, for instance, but of course it's virtually impossible to correlate that back to expected performance!  I did note that AAISP's total peering appears to be 50G and peeringdb put their traffic levels at 10-20G bracket.  Whereas Zen have 320G of peering and are in the 300-500G traffic bracket.  Does that mean that AAISP have over a 2:1 ratio between their requirement and their peering, yet Zen are closer to 1:1?  Or is this data just not reliably useful? 
It's interesting to see LightningFibre only appear to have 20G of peering and don't disclose their traffic levels (which begs the question how much use are the published traffic levels anyway if they're volunteered).

Anyway, all very interesting.  I'm going to try and figure out if I can see any pattern between where my traffic is going and which speedtest servers are particularly poor.  To be carried on in my own thread, sorry for the slightly off-topic :)
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Ixel

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #62 on: July 16, 2022, 06:59:24 PM »

Thanks, really interesting, though very hard to interpret of course.  I can see from peeringdb that AAISP are peered to the big locations Netflix are at, for instance, but of course it's virtually impossible to correlate that back to expected performance!  I did note that AAISP's total peering appears to be 50G and peeringdb put their traffic levels at 10-20G bracket.  Whereas Zen have 320G of peering and are in the 300-500G traffic bracket.  Does that mean that AAISP have over a 2:1 ratio between their requirement and their peering, yet Zen are closer to 1:1?  Or is this data just not reliably useful? 
It's interesting to see LightningFibre only appear to have 20G of peering and don't disclose their traffic levels (which begs the question how much use are the published traffic levels anyway if they're volunteered).

Anyway, all very interesting.  I'm going to try and figure out if I can see any pattern between where my traffic is going and which speedtest servers are particularly poor.  To be carried on in my own thread, sorry for the slightly off-topic :)

I guess it depends how often an ISP updates their PeeringDB profile as well as if the data they've input (e.g. traffic level) is reasonably accurate. AAISP aim to not be the bottleneck whenever possible, so it wouldn't surprise me if there is roughly a 2:1 ratio generally. For Zen to roughly be 1:1, given some performance issues in the past and perhaps even currently, doesn't shock me.

An ISP can choose not to disclose certain information, although it might be counter-productive because as I understand it many other networks tend to use PeeringDB to learn more about another network. PeeringDB recommend disclosing as much information on the profile as possible.

Cerberus Networks has a worse capacity at the internet exchanges. They have 1 x 10G (possibly a recent addition, I don't recall it seeing it before but maybe I missed it) and 2 x 1G at LINX. They also only have 2 x 1G at LONAP.

---

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Alex Atkin UK

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #63 on: July 16, 2022, 07:12:18 PM »

I think the key piece of information here is "we aim to not be the bottleneck" does not mean "we will have 1:1 ratio".

All it really means is they will monitor peak traffic and adjust accordingly so that contention effectively doesn't happen.

After all, having a 1:1 ratio wont do you any good if the route to the most used destination can only be reached down half the peers. ;)

That said, you also wouldn't technically be "the bottleneck" if half your customers DID have to go a convoluted route via your indirect peers due to the direct ones being overloaded.  So there's an awful lot of wiggle room.  Though I trust AAISP not to do that, I couldn't say the same of Zen.

Ultimately the bigger the ISP, the higher the contention ratio is going to be.  As you don't need a 1:1 ratio to run an effectively uncontended network in the real world, due to customer usage patterns.
« Last Edit: July 16, 2022, 07:15:15 PM by Alex Atkin UK »
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Weaver

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #64 on: July 16, 2022, 08:33:25 PM »

A note about the sniffer info. Packet size ~4k looks insane; it suggests either a bug in the tool somewhere, or else it’s seeing irrelevant LAN-internal traffic mucking the results up. Even though there are mentions of ‘jumbo packets’ this only means ‘baby jumbo’ in the case of WANs, ie <2000 bytes or more likely less than 1600 bytes including IP (and eg PPP) headers. The nodes in the middle of the internet, middle box routers, and the ISPs and carriers can’t currently AFAIK handle 4k IPv6 or IPv4 packets never mind 9k. 9k is confined to the LANs that have all of: jumbo-capable switches, and NICs and operating systems in hosts. Maybe there are jumbo packets in the LAN though, confined to the LAN, no reason why not, and they’re getting in the way of the results. Could be your o/s’s are clever, detecting 9k MTU and taking full advantage of it on the LAN. But your gateway to the internet shouldn’t have 9k MTU as it’s misleading, IP MTU can only be 1500 (for IP PDUs) and a little more for PPP+PPPoE (my PPP packets to the internet are 1530 bytes max)
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Ixel

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #65 on: July 17, 2022, 04:40:18 PM »

Good news, at least today... tomorrow, who knows? :D

Earlier today I asked a family member to do a single connection speed test on speedtest.net and see what their numbers are (they are also on Lightning Fibre). To my amazement they came back to me with nearly 1 gigabit down. After hearing that I thought I'd give mine another try and again to my amazement it's now nearly a gigabit down too!



Whether it stays this way... well, that's another matter. I hope so. I'll still go ahead with A&A but perhaps I can bond the connections with my usage of BGP, as long as the server at the other end which does the eBGP session can handle that amount of traffic that is. I believe it can.

Their upload was nearer gigabit too while mine isn't quite at that level but I'm not too fussed about that. It's still tons better than I can get via Openreach and it's probably something my end causing a slightly slower upload anyway. I'm just happy that I'm seeing near gigabit download again at last. I've made sure it's not just isolated to that speed test, I'm also seeing similar results with a few other servers and the TBB speed test too.

As I'm curious, I'm going to also see if there's something noticeably different on packet sniffer. I'll edit this post again shortly to mention what I found.

EDIT: The packet sizes are pretty much the same as before, when I was having the slow download speed. No noticeable difference in the packet sniffer output. So, whoever or whatever did something to fix the issue... I don't know what they did at the moment. I hope it doesn't go back to being slow tomorrow though!
« Last Edit: July 17, 2022, 04:50:24 PM by Ixel »
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burakkucat

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #66 on: July 17, 2022, 07:09:25 PM »

That is good news.  :)

But without knowing what was causing the slowness . . .  :-\
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Ixel

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #67 on: July 17, 2022, 08:24:31 PM »

Yeah I would like to know as well what has changed, unless today is just a one off and it returns again tomorrow or at some point next week.

I'll send a reply to Lightning Fibre in the morning to let them know that the problem has gone, assuming the problem hasn't returned in the morning that is :fingers:. They might be able to give me some insight into what's changed too, if so I'll post about it here.

After some further thought... I'm not absolutely certain if I will go ahead with A&A. If and that's a big if, the Lightning Fibre connection remains reasonably consistent for at least a week from now then I may cancel the migration from Cerberus Networks to AAISP.

As I understand it I have a fourteen day cooling off period if I wish to cancel the migration without penalty, at which point I could then cease with Cerberus Networks instead and just pay for Lightning Fibre (well, the first four months are free and then £34/mo). It's fairly important to consider with the way various costs such as energy have sky rocketed and may sky rocket further. I've just recently gone back on a fixed tariff which works out less than the next predicted increase, which is perhaps a small gamble but I'm confident that the recent prediction is either slightly conservative or accurate. I feel that the £85/mo (to AAISP) would be more useful in helping to pay for energy usage and other possible future uncertainties regarding the 'cost of living' crisis. If there's still some issues next week then I will likely allow the migration to go ahead, assuming that I'm right regarding the cooling off period.
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Ixel

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #68 on: July 18, 2022, 10:21:07 AM »

It's still running superb as of this morning, from many places in western EU I was able to generally download files at around 900 megabits or higher consistently.

I've informed Lightning Fibre of the good news and will see what they say, if they know of anything that was changed on their network over the weekend that might've been the cause of this issue originally. I'll either edit this post or post a new reply if they come back to me with anything useful.

I'm still connected to their ONT via a 1 gigabit port but I won't change back to 10 gigabit in case it breaks things again. When they offer a faster speed in the future and if I decide to upgrade to it then I'll do so at that point. It's working now so I feel it's best not to touch it in case it breaks again :D.

Assuming I'm right in my previous post, regarding the fourteen day cooling off period on the migration, then if Lightning Fibre remains fine for this week then I'll contact AAISP next week and ask them to cancel the migration and order. The only reason I did the migration was because Lightning Fibre's download speed was massively disappointing but now it's superb again and will hopefully stay reasonably like that for quite some time.
« Last Edit: July 18, 2022, 10:24:27 AM by Ixel »
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burakkucat

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #69 on: July 18, 2022, 04:36:32 PM »

EDIT: For the curious, the ONT looks like this: https://www.adtran.com/solutions/by-segment/products/by-category/fiber-access/optical-network-terminals-ont/621.html

I see it has a standard gigabit ethernet port as well, but I'm uncertain if the service is configured to also work over that and whether it's even wise to consider seeing if anything's different on that port if it did work.

Back on July 15th you posted the above which tells me that, up to that date, you were connecting to the Adtran SDX621 via its 10Gbps port and had never tried the 1Gbps port.

Subsequent edit: The above statement is correct.

I'm still connected to their ONT via a 1 gigabit port but I won't change back to 10 gigabit in case it breaks things again. When they offer a faster speed in the future and if I decide to upgrade to it then I'll do so at that point. It's working now so I feel it's best not to touch it in case it breaks again :D.

Today, July 18th, you disclose that you are connecting to the Adtran SDX621 via its 1Gbps port.

I've checked back through the posts and can't find when the port swap occurred . . . it could be that my reading is of fault. However, I now have to say that in terms of scientific experimentation the results are suspect . . . as more than one variable appears to have been changed.

[Subsequent edit: My last three sentences, above, are incorrect and, so, are struck out. See the following posts.]
« Last Edit: July 18, 2022, 05:04:47 PM by burakkucat »
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Ixel

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #70 on: July 18, 2022, 04:50:34 PM »

Back on July 15th you posted the above which tells me that, up to that date, you were connecting to the Adtran SDX621 via its 10Gbps port and had never tried the 1Gbps port.

Today, July 18th, you disclose that you are connecting to the Adtran SDX621 via its 1Gbps port.

I've checked back through the posts and can't find when the port swap occurred . . . it could be that my reading is of fault. However, I now have to say that in terms of scientific experimentation the results are suspect . . . as more than one variable appears to have been changed.  :-\

Sorry, let me clarify. I mean I'm connecting to a 1 gigabit capable port on my Mikrotik router. I'm still connecting to the 10 gigabit port on the ONT. Hope that clarifies!

I did try the 1 gigabit port on the ONT but it was unusable.
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burakkucat

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #71 on: July 18, 2022, 04:59:59 PM »

I did try the 1 gigabit port on the ONT but it was unusable.

Ah, so it is my mistake. I'll go and correct my post . . .

Thank you for the clarification.
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Ixel

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #72 on: July 21, 2022, 10:28:07 AM »

I've had a reply from Lightning Fibre from the person who originally did various network related tests and looked things over on their end. Unfortunately they aren't aware of any changes on their network which would've resulted in this problem being resolved, so sadly it remains a mystery as to what the cause was as well as what the solution was.

So, if things remain stable by Monday of next week then I will contact AAISP and see if I can cancel my migration of my Openreach FTTP service to them. If that's possible then I will ask Cerberus Networks to cease the FTTP service. Installation (migration) on AAISP is due to be completed on August 2nd. I hope I can cancel the migration if Lightning Fibre remains stable, otherwise it's another £85/mo for 12 months which could be put to better use in the current climate.
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burakkucat

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #73 on: July 21, 2022, 04:34:14 PM »

All understood. You will, I'm sure, post updates here, as and when.
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Ixel

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Re: Diary of My Experiences with Lightning Fibre (FTTP local ISP)
« Reply #74 on: July 13, 2023, 11:30:54 AM »

Hi everyone,
It's been almost a year so thought I'd share the latest on how my Lightning Fibre connection's performing.

I've hardly noticed any downtime issues. Performance has been consistently good, albeit I believe there may have been very brief blips of signs of congestion until recently for any traffic going via LINX LON1 (London Internet Exchange). These were primarily noticeable as brief spikes in jitter to double figures (in milliseconds), but speed wise things have been consistently excellent.

On Tuesday morning of this week Lightning Fibre upgraded their port at LINX LON1 from 10 gigabit to 100 gigabit. I'm no longer noticing the brief spikes of jitter into double figures that I was prior to that upgrade. This also means that they are a step closer to rolling out their upcoming 3 gigabit package.

While IPv6 support still appears to be broken/unavailable on my connection, I'm using my own prefix from RIPE NCC so that doesn't bother me.

I'm just waiting to see what the price will be for the 3 gigabit package when it becomes available.

Finally, regarding Cerberus Networks and AAISP, I managed to cancel my migration to AAISP at the time. AAISP themselves put in a cease and were very helpful. Unfortunately Cerberus Networks intercepted this cease request a short time after and blocked it, forcing me to stay with Cerberus Networks for a bit longer. If my memory is right, I ended up paying for two additional months with Cerberus Networks sadly. I contacted their support via ticket, who weren't particularly friendly or helpful either. That left me with a bad impression regarding Cerberus Networks.
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