5 ms·

I honestly have no idea. I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I

by bane 11y ago

I honestly have no idea. I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. FiOS keeps upgrading it every year or so (it started as a 15/5 I couldn't saturate), so that's nice. At least I'm basically in "first world" territory even if I live in the U.S. I suppose when 4k video becomes more common I'll feel it, but I don't even have anything that can display 4k right now and Verizon will probably just upgrade it to 75/75 or 100/100 by that point. One nice benefit, I have a plex server I can access remotely and it works well outside of my network. But I'd live with just my netflix account if I had to "rough it".

icelancer 11y ago
I have 50/20 with a family. Two laptops and Netflix going on the Media Center PC plus my work easily causes degraded service on certain appliances in peak times.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
simoncion 11y ago
> I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. Unless you've throttled your torrents, or you're connected to a really slow swarm, you have almost certainly saturated your download. I have -er- 100/10 or 100/15 service from Comcast. If I'm downloading anything >= 100MB, and a member of the household is going to start a new Netflix stream, I need to pause the download, or else the stream will be degraded for a long time. Also, unless you're using a decent router, it's very possible that your router can't route and/or NAT at 50mbit or faster. I know that Apple Airports can and Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[0] can. I would also expect that an ISP-provided router would route fast enough. [0] If you're in the market for a new router and are somewhat network savvy, or are comfortable with running OpenWRT on your router, I strongly recommend the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It routes and firewalls at ~1Gbit/sec (when offloading is enabled) and costs right around $100. Check out the Newegg reviews that aren't "It's slower than I expected" or "It's totally broken" for an idea of what you'll be getting in to. I've had mine for nearly a year and -other than the eventually dodgy external power supply[1] it shipped with- it has been rock solid. [1] The unit I got had been sitting in a box in a warehouse in Florida for ~two years before it arrived on my doorstep. The failing power supply presented as infrequent spontaneous reboots with nothing unusual in syslog, which became more and more frequent until the power supply just stopped providing power entirely. Replaced it with a wall wart that I had on hand and have had no trouble since.
- mrbill 11y ago
  The ERL-3, ER-X, etc, run a Vyatta fork, not OpenWRT. I love mine.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    I didn't intend to imply that the EdgeRouters run OpenWRT. I guess that wasn't clear. :( 'Tis true that the forked version of Vyatta (Vyatta 6?) that the EdgeRouters use is rather different than OpenWRT, but if one has figured out how to work with OpenWRT's UCI configuration system, one can figure out how to work with Vyatta's configuration system, too. And, both OpenWRT and Vyatta run on top of Linux, so -if needed- one has a Linux system that one can configure directly.
- bane 11y ago
  Nope, no attempt at bandwidth controls from my end. My wife is watching some kind of HD stream from her home country, I'm watching netflix or youtube and web surfing, and have 3 torrents pulling down from archive.org right now at around 1-2Mb/s. I'm sure there's some kind of fallback to SD from Netflix, their webpage claims I need 5Mb/s to get 720p, and 25Mb/s for "Ultra HD" (whatever that is and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting that for old episodes of Firefly) leaving me with somewhere between 25-45Mb/s. I'm pretty sure my wife isn't gobbling all that up with whatever it is she's watching. Web browsing is much lighter. So all told, worst case I'm looking at - 6Mb/s torrents - 5Mb/s Netflix - let's say 5Mb/s for my wife's video - some fraction of 1Mb/s for our collective web surfing Maybe 17-20Mb/s? Amazingly, with all that going on, if I go do a speed test, it still showed me around 40/50 so I'm definitely under that.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
I have a 35/35 connection that I regularly saturate, and unfortunately it's the best available. (Frontier offers better service elsewhere, but not here.) I don't saturate it 24 hours a day, but when I use it, I use all of it. For the download bandwidth, between videos, large packages, and source code, the limiting factor is almost always on my end. And for upload, I use it with VPN, with regular backups, with git, with scp, and with rsync. I would love to have a gigabit connection to see if that connection would still be the limiting factor, and I suspect it still would be sometimes.
georgerobinson 11y ago
Envy! We have a 3.0/0.5 DSL connection which can support 1 high quality or 2 medium to low quality Netflix streams. Web browsing is tolerable when everyone is online, but the second the uplink bandwidth is saturated (0.5Mbit/s) everything else grinds to a halt. I think you'd notice it too if your connection weren't symmetric. That is, your connection was 50/5 or 50/10. We were on-track to get a 50/50 fiber connection (the service supports up to 1000/1000) - however the ISP hasn't yet started to build the network out to our village - a year later than they said it would be available. In contrast, our neighboring villages all have their service, but there is a risk they will pull out since the build cost is 3x what they forecast (narrow country roads where the only option is to dig up the road, rather than run cable under verges or sidewalks). FWIW, the build cost is a measly £600,000 - or $929,670, which in my estimate works out at between £600 and £1200 per resident.
- willyk 11y ago
  FYI, based on my past experience, for avg urban customer the total acquisition cost for a cable ISP on DOCSIS 2/3.0 was about $750 -- small delta vs your new build cost.
  - georgerobinson 11y ago
    Virgin Media is the only UK-based ISP that uses cable (DOCSIS). All others use VDSL2 where available, ADSL2 or just plain old ADSL (g.DMT) if you're sufficiently rural. The trouble is that Virgin Media have much cut out for them if they want to match the availability of VDSL in the UK. Therefore, I can imagine they will be targeting large towns on the commuter belt long before they consider more rural villages.
- bane 11y ago
  I've been around the UK and Ireland so I know what you mean about the roads and the difficulty of running infrastructure around them. I remember back when we had DSL we could saturate it, even with just some casual youtubing. Funny thing is, we never asked for or paid for symmetric connections, our phone company just did it one day as part of a system upgrade and sent everybody new routers. And they've done at least one bandwidth upgrade since then. I grew up pretty rural so I can definitely sympathize with your pain. The first world will arrive soon!
dzhiurgis 11y ago
> I don't believe I come close to saturating it. Well your HD streams are very compressed and possibly downsized resolution. People DO want 4K 60 fps uncompressed streams, but there is just no way to support them all at once.
- bane 11y ago
  It looks like Netflix is claiming 4k at 25Mb/s (at their standard degraded quality). So we'll need more bandwidth in the future, but I don't even have anything in my house that can display 4k anyways so I'm not too concerned.

by bane 11y ago

icelancer 11y ago

I have 50/20 with a family. Two laptops and Netflix going on the Media Center PC plus my work easily causes degraded service on certain appliances in peak times.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

simoncion 11y ago

> I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it. Unless you've throttled your torrents, or you're connected to a really slow swarm, you have almost certainly saturated your download. I have -er- 100/10 or 100/15 service from Comcast. If I'm downloading anything >= 100MB, and a member of the household is going to start a new Netflix stream, I need to pause the download, or else the stream will be degraded for a long time. Also, unless you're using a decent router, it's very possible that your router can't route and/or NAT at 50mbit or faster. I know that Apple Airports can and Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[0] can. I would also expect that an ISP-provided router would route fast enough. [0] If you're in the market for a new router and are somewhat network savvy, or are comfortable with running OpenWRT on your router, I strongly recommend the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It routes and firewalls at ~1Gbit/sec (when offloading is enabled) and costs right around $100. Check out the Newegg reviews that aren't "It's slower than I expected" or "It's totally broken" for an idea of what you'll be getting in to. I've had mine for nearly a year and -other than the eventually dodgy external power supply[1] it shipped with- it has been rock solid. [1] The unit I got had been sitting in a box in a warehouse in Florida for ~two years before it arrived on my doorstep. The failing power supply presented as infrequent spontaneous reboots with nothing unusual in syslog, which became more and more frequent until the power supply just stopped providing power entirely. Replaced it with a wall wart that I had on hand and have had no trouble since.

mrbill 11y ago
The ERL-3, ER-X, etc, run a Vyatta fork, not OpenWRT. I love mine.
- simoncion 11y ago
  I didn't intend to imply that the EdgeRouters run OpenWRT. I guess that wasn't clear. :( 'Tis true that the forked version of Vyatta (Vyatta 6?) that the EdgeRouters use is rather different than OpenWRT, but if one has figured out how to work with OpenWRT's UCI configuration system, one can figure out how to work with Vyatta's configuration system, too. And, both OpenWRT and Vyatta run on top of Linux, so -if needed- one has a Linux system that one can configure directly.
bane 11y ago
Nope, no attempt at bandwidth controls from my end. My wife is watching some kind of HD stream from her home country, I'm watching netflix or youtube and web surfing, and have 3 torrents pulling down from archive.org right now at around 1-2Mb/s. I'm sure there's some kind of fallback to SD from Netflix, their webpage claims I need 5Mb/s to get 720p, and 25Mb/s for "Ultra HD" (whatever that is and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting that for old episodes of Firefly) leaving me with somewhere between 25-45Mb/s. I'm pretty sure my wife isn't gobbling all that up with whatever it is she's watching. Web browsing is much lighter. So all told, worst case I'm looking at - 6Mb/s torrents - 5Mb/s Netflix - let's say 5Mb/s for my wife's video - some fraction of 1Mb/s for our collective web surfing Maybe 17-20Mb/s? Amazingly, with all that going on, if I go do a speed test, it still showed me around 40/50 so I'm definitely under that.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

I have a 35/35 connection that I regularly saturate, and unfortunately it's the best available. (Frontier offers better service elsewhere, but not here.) I don't saturate it 24 hours a day, but when I use it, I use all of it. For the download bandwidth, between videos, large packages, and source code, the limiting factor is almost always on my end. And for upload, I use it with VPN, with regular backups, with git, with scp, and with rsync. I would love to have a gigabit connection to see if that connection would still be the limiting factor, and I suspect it still would be sometimes.

georgerobinson 11y ago

Envy! We have a 3.0/0.5 DSL connection which can support 1 high quality or 2 medium to low quality Netflix streams. Web browsing is tolerable when everyone is online, but the second the uplink bandwidth is saturated (0.5Mbit/s) everything else grinds to a halt. I think you'd notice it too if your connection weren't symmetric. That is, your connection was 50/5 or 50/10. We were on-track to get a 50/50 fiber connection (the service supports up to 1000/1000) - however the ISP hasn't yet started to build the network out to our village - a year later than they said it would be available. In contrast, our neighboring villages all have their service, but there is a risk they will pull out since the build cost is 3x what they forecast (narrow country roads where the only option is to dig up the road, rather than run cable under verges or sidewalks). FWIW, the build cost is a measly £600,000 - or $929,670, which in my estimate works out at between £600 and £1200 per resident.

willyk 11y ago
FYI, based on my past experience, for avg urban customer the total acquisition cost for a cable ISP on DOCSIS 2/3.0 was about $750 -- small delta vs your new build cost.
- georgerobinson 11y ago
  Virgin Media is the only UK-based ISP that uses cable (DOCSIS). All others use VDSL2 where available, ADSL2 or just plain old ADSL (g.DMT) if you're sufficiently rural. The trouble is that Virgin Media have much cut out for them if they want to match the availability of VDSL in the UK. Therefore, I can imagine they will be targeting large towns on the commuter belt long before they consider more rural villages.
bane 11y ago
I've been around the UK and Ireland so I know what you mean about the roads and the difficulty of running infrastructure around them. I remember back when we had DSL we could saturate it, even with just some casual youtubing. Funny thing is, we never asked for or paid for symmetric connections, our phone company just did it one day as part of a system upgrade and sent everybody new routers. And they've done at least one bandwidth upgrade since then. I grew up pretty rural so I can definitely sympathize with your pain. The first world will arrive soon!

dzhiurgis 11y ago

> I don't believe I come close to saturating it. Well your HD streams are very compressed and possibly downsized resolution. People DO want 4K 60 fps uncompressed streams, but there is just no way to support them all at once.

bane 11y ago
It looks like Netflix is claiming 4k at 25Mb/s (at their standard degraded quality). So we'll need more bandwidth in the future, but I don't even have anything in my house that can display 4k anyways so I'm not too concerned.