Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[XGS_Is_On]

This post by Gigabit Ethernet seems to ask why I had the services I did to be able to max a GPON split.

The answer is simple - myself, a not so key worker, and a key worker were working from home during the pandemic. We needed to guarantee her connectivity so there was a gigabit and a 550 Mbit Openreach FTTP service installed. The Openreach ONT had a 1 Gbit backplane and I wanted to avoid contention there so I purchased my own ONT with a 2.5 Gbit backplane, cloned the Openreach ONT and replaced it.

My wife now had a dedicated 550 Mbit connection that would fail over to the gigabit connection that everything else used if it were required.

I moved the gigabit service to another ISP however mindful of resilience the two overlapped for a little while so 3 ports on the ONT were active totalling 2.55 Gbit/s, and I could draw the entire PON in theory.

I am a niche network engineer. I have various virtual machines and products running at any one time, and the lab occasionally requires very high bandwidth for quality assurance.

Moving forward I now have symmetrical 8 Gbit/s with a 550 Mbit/s backup.

I have it because I do not want the Internet connection to ever be the bottleneck. I've invested heavily in the home network to future-proof it. We moved home in 2020 to a place with FTTP but no connectivity between rooms. My solution eventually arrived at was to use Invisilight fibre optic cable to connect the key parts of the home as copper would've been very disruptive and a bunch of cutting through walls wasn't an option.

That fibre runs a 25 Gbit/s spine with 10 Gbit/s leaves. My study where the 8 Gbit connection lives connects over fibre to the cupboard under the stairs where there's another communications cabinet and to the 'monster' gaming PC which has a 25 Gbit/s link direct to the switch the Internet connection goes to. There's another fibre to a switch next to the monster PC that feeds the TV and gaming consoles. 10 Gbit Ethernet, 10GBase-BX because it had to be subtle so why not spend more for the optics to future-proof over gigabit?

I want our online experience to be seamless, and for there to be no boundaries or limitations on our side. Is this 'needed'? No, of course not. However I never have to worry about having to rate limit anything. Even with the work related demands, and they are occasionally very, very high as I participate in a worldwide lab and testing network, everything in the home flows smoothly without intervention.

Simply: my approach to Internet access is to not tolerate congestion if I can help it but to over-provision so that it's really not an issue. That's why the high speeds. Between this and my high bandwidth, high performance computing lab locally I need every scrap of bandwidth I can get. Not because I need it 24x7 but to manage bursts.

I can afford higher bandwidth, with the equipment to match, it helps further my career and it's what I've chosen to spend my money on.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Thanks for the write up.

I've personally always thought over-provisioning just makes sense, if you use the Internet a lot.  I totally appreciate most people have better things to spend their money on, but given both of us in the household have medical issues then time is precious.  In an ideal world, we'd all have more bandwidth than we ever need, it just makes sense, but of course in the real world you have to balance that with cost.

I personally get bouts of fatigue, so if I want to play a specific game and its not installed or need an update, if it takes too long to download then the time can easily have passed where I was mentally capable of playing that game.

What I find particularly ironic is people HAVE bought into the idea of paying a flat-fee for more than they ever need, on mobile phone contracts.  I long since gave up on contracts because why pay £25/month when I make 30p/month of calls?  Sure there might be that one month I make a lot, or use data, but it makes more sense to just use PAYG and top up that one month.  A lot of people would probably be better off reducing their mobile contract and increasing their home broadband speed, but somehow they don't see it the same way.

Heck, now with VoIP its WAY cheaper to use that than a mobile contract.  I've seen a few discussions on other forums about PSTN switch-off pondering why anyone wants to keep a "landline" when they have unlimited weekend calls on their mobile.  But not once have I seen them actually mention how many calls they make, to do the maths to figure out if they're actually paying for nothing.

[XGS_Is_On]

You're welcome. This is Kitz. We do detail here.

[burakkucat]

Those details have now filled in the gaps in my understanding of your LAN. Thank you.

[XGS_Is_On]

That's just physical - I haven't covered the rest of the Network Access layer or anything above it.

For the old school I've only covered physical layer, I've not covered data link, network, transport or 5 and 6 that can and should be wrapped up into 7.

[GigabitEthernet]

Thanks for answering the question and not just calling me stupid or shouting me down as literally everyone else did. I have no need for such a speed but clearly you do, enjoy it!

[dee.jay]

Thanks for answering the question and not just calling me stupid or shouting me down as literally everyone else did. I have no need for such a speed but clearly you do, enjoy it!

To be fair I did apologise and I was hoping you could understand where at least my sentiment was coming from.

[XGS_Is_On]

This is timely as I'm having to document the network for an academic proposal. I'll pop a few bits into this thread as I complete them.

The actual physical connectivity is pretty simple. I left out the various devices connected wirelessly or into gigabit ports. The main ISP router actually has lots of GbE ports for some unknown reason and as it also has a Marvell switch chip so can bridge without CPU invoivement I use those ports in lieu of an access switch in the study.

[XGS_Is_On]

Thanks for answering the question and not just calling me stupid or shouting me down as literally everyone else did. I have no need for such a speed but clearly you do, enjoy it!

Yep. As I said, in bursts! The attached are the Internet connected port.

EDIT: Enjoy is perhaps not the right word though. Absolutely nothing besides speed tests comes close to using the full capacity. Even Steam's CDN caps out at about 2.5 Gbit/s. u

It is perfectly legitimate for you to say that there are no consumer applications at all for the kind of speeds I have here and it's absolutely true. Vodafone have released a 2G product over CityFibre, a few others will follow and I think that'll be the sweet spot for super duper power home users for a while. I imagine Virgin Media will release some 2.2 Gbit/s down, 100 Mbit/s up, maybe, maybe, maybe 200 Mbit up in some areas just to say they're faster on widely available but there's nothing that takes advantage of that kind of capacity.

Tiers like gigabit and 2 gigabit are in the industry called vanity tiers and they are just that for home users nearly all the time.

I am not a home user, I've basically a branch office that happens to live in my home as a result of my job and that the nearest company office used to be 6,000 miles away 

[GigabitEthernet]

I suppose you could make an argument it would reduce bufferbloat as you'll never come close to using up your bandwidth.

[Chrysalis]

Thanks for the detail, it is always nice to learn about a setup.

[burakkucat]

I suppose you could make an argument it would reduce bufferbloat as you'll never come close to using up your bandwidth.

Ah, yes. That could justify the set-up. 

[XGS_Is_On]

What is this buffer bloat thing you are talking about? 

I do still get it but not on the Internet side, I actually see it internally. An 8G Internet connection going across 10 or 25 gigabit Ethernet to feed a phone over WiFi, even the WiFi 6E my AP uses, is going to cause bloat.

I don't really care and am not going to start writing shaping profiles. The bloat is on that one device and the WiFi link rate constantly changes so be pointless and silly to try and manage it.

Where I am in the home now the phone gets about 300 Mbit, near the access point it is over a gigabit. Could I manage this? Sure. I've a lot better things to do with my time though!

[dee.jay]

Good luck with your dissertation!

[XGS_Is_On]

I know some love details.

There are two Internet connections involved, on an active-passive basis. The redundancy between the two connections is pretty simple. I have a pair of Raspberry PIs handing out IP addresses, whichever gets there first wins. They are handing out different ranges in the same larger subnet. As I recall one has 192.168.0.2-192.168.0.255, the other 192.168.2.1 to 192.168.2.255 The default gateway they hand out is, most originally, 192.168.0.1. No kit has this IP address, it's a VRRP VIP that the two routers both can own.

Under normal operation everything uses the router in the study/home office. This is the one connected to YouFibre. If I lose YouFibre everything still goes to the study but is then sent to the router in the Comms cabinet: the link is more than phat enough that it doesn't matter, and many internal resources are connected to that router anyways.

This happens because the main router keeps the VRRP VIP, and the two routers talk over eBGP. The backup router advertises a default route to the primary, the primary doesn't advertise a default to the secondary router simple because nothing should ever go there that's intended for the YouFibre connection.

The main router is lost entirely the secondary will claim the VIP in a few seconds, it now has 192.168.0.1 and data flows out of its Internet connection.

Caveat here is that existing connections will drop and have to reestablish as their public IP will change. I could, of course, work around this by using SD-WAN or some other tunnelling but it's fine: the delay is acceptable.

The BGP is also there so that the secondary router can learn routes from the primary as the primary has a few other things connected to it via the main switch. There is an SD-WAN virtual appliance running on the VMWare host, indeed it's actually the gateway for almost everything else on there, and it chats BGP to both routers so that they know about the subnets behind it. There are quite a few as that appliance is the hub appliance for a small, entirely virtual WAN, with my 'home' network behaving as the upstream datacentre giving said network Internet access.

There's another SD-WAN virtual appliance that is connected to a global network and it has BGP sessions also for test purposes - some of the mega bandwidth bursts are tests being conducted across said SD-WAN and my kit needs to know where to send traffic for those tests.

Security is provided in a very few ways. Firstly there is of course Weaver's beloved NAT although I suspect most of what I'm doing here is like Kryptonite to him: sorry Sir!

IOT devices have their own SSID, own access point and its only connection into the network is to a routed port not permitted to do anything other than go to the Internet. Their traffic is also captured and forwarded to an IDS VM living on the VMWare/ESXi host for inspection.

The routers run Netflow. A collector consumes this telemetry and may be viewed though I'm rarely that bothered

If I were super concerned I could have all traffic go through the SD-WAN VM via some policy-based routing, where it would all be inspected by an IDS/IDP.

For network engineers this is all pretty basic stuff: it doesn't need to be complicated so why make it complicated?