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Why the high speeds as asked by Gigabit Ethernet and crazy speeds in general

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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.

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