6 ms·

centurylink fiber is pretty great as well

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
loeg 8y ago
Yeah, my experience with Clink's fiber offerings has been a good one. It's definitely "Gigabit" — there are many fiber splitters in play, which means (a) your downstream traffic is broadcast to everyone on the same splitter network in plaintext and filtered at individual ISP-owned termination devices, much like cable networks, and (b) you definitely never reach 1000 Mbps down, but often can reach 900 Mbps up. Typical is 500-600 Down, 900 Up; the highest I've seen down on e.g. fast.com is 900 Mbps. And the price is extremely competitive with Comcast ($80/mo for "gigabit"), unlike their DSL offerings, which are complete crap. The major downside is that their IPv6 support is nonexistent and they have no plans for rolling it out.
- chocolatkey 8y ago
  Hi, I'm on centurylink's fiber offering and have the same experience as you getting much faster upload than download (though download speed increases quite a bit during sleeping hours). Are you saying this is because the DL is congested during the day hours? Or is there some other technological block in play?
  - loeg 8y ago
    > Are you saying this is because the DL is congested during the day hours? Yeah, it's congestion on the transmitter (upstream) end.
- pooppaint 8y ago
  You sure it’s plaintext? GPON networks should be using AES128 to each ONT.
  - loeg 8y ago
    No, not sure. I wasn't aware of that, thanks. Do you know more about the key negotiation and encryption protocol? Wikipedia doesn't have even mention AES. Thanks.
- ransford 8y ago
  I've been getting perfectly adequate IPv6 via their 6rd gateway (on fiber, in Seattle). I wrote some nerd notes on using one's own wifi router and setting up IPv6: http://b.tra.in/2015/07/notes-on-centurylink-fiber.html http://b.tra.in/2015/07/notes-on-centurylink-fiber.html
  - loeg 8y ago
    6rd is pretty awful, generally, and I couldn't get Centurylink's to work last time I tried. I appreciate the notes and will take a look, thank you. (One big problem I've experienced in the past is that any time you configure both IPv6 and IPv4, all programs prefer IPv6. But tunneled IPv6 has much worse performance than the native IPv4, so you really want applications to prefer IPv4 in a tunneled v6 environment.)
    - jandrese 8y ago
      I still use Hurricane Electric tunnels fir my v6 and ping times/throughout are so close as to be in the noise for most everything. It probably helps that I'm using a tunnel endpoint literally 10 miles from my house however.
      - loeg 8y ago
        My IPv4 ping times to Google and Facebook are 2.6 milliseconds. I suspect any HE tunnel is going to be worse than that (in a statistically significant sense). I don't know that latency would necessarily be perceptible the majority of the time, but I strongly suspect outliers would be worse and more frequent. Also, I doubt HE's ipv6 tunnel is going to carry anything close to 1Gbps for me for free ;-).
- gonzo 8y ago
  You do know that perfection with TCP over Ethernet (no 802.1q rages, no retransmits) at 1gbps is 941Mbps, right?
  - loeg 8y ago
    What is your point? All of the observed numbers I've provided are sufficiently well below that as to make the distinction between 941 and 1000 meaningless.
    - loeg 8y ago
      Come on, folks. > Typical is 500-600 Down 500/941 vs 500/1000 is 50% vs 53% of advertised. The 3% isn't really significant. I don't think it's bad service for the price, but it certainly isn't true 1gigE.
      - gonzo 8y ago
        Here’s what you wrote > but often can reach 900 Mbps up. Typical is 500-600 Down, 900 Up; the highest I've seen down on e.g. fast.com is 900 Mbps
        loeg 8y ago
        Yes, I wrote that as well. What comment are you making? Typical observed speeds down, which is what everyone cares about for residentical internet, are 500-600 Mbps — far below 1Gbps. I mentioned the outliers for color but they're either not useful to me (I don't need 900 Mbps upload) or not representative of real service delivered (I've only observed 900 Mbps once; as I said, 500-600 is much more typical). Off-peak is typically around 700 Mbps down. So I still don't know what comment or point you were trying to make by claiming GigE TCP can only reach 940 Mbps. It clearly isn't a counterargument to my claim that Centurylink's $80/mo, residential "gigabit" fiber offering does not deliver 1Gbps internet service (nor would I expect it to).
- penagwin 8y ago
  IMO the plaintext part isn't a real issue. With the recent dramatic increase in https usage it won't have much impact. I'd also consider that segment "comprimised" anyway, from a security perspective anything past my modem could be MITM'ing my connecting.
  - loeg 8y ago
    Yeah, I totally agree; at the end of the day end-to-end authenticated encryption is the way to go. But not everything is end-to-end encrypted, so it's worth mentioning as a caveat. It sounds like I may be mistaken anyways and some GPON networks negotiate an AES key for downstream traffic, but I have no way to confirm that this design or implementation is secure, or that in practice CenturyLink even uses it on my local fiber.
sharms 8y ago
Here in Denver we get full 1Gbps for $75/mo, every provider has outages and this was the first partial outage we experienced with the service (pages loaded just slowly most of the day)
- gonzo 8y ago
  If only it was available in Golden... I could hit the CL POP with a baseball (less than a block away).
joecool1029 8y ago
Doesn't exist across 99% of their last mile footprint. Just one or two cities. I would guess the vast majority of their revenue comes from extorting old people and farmers with shitty overpriced ADSL that squirrels eat into and take down annually.
- justtopost 8y ago
  Rural folk here. Biannually.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

loeg 8y ago

Yeah, my experience with Clink's fiber offerings has been a good one. It's definitely "Gigabit" — there are many fiber splitters in play, which means (a) your downstream traffic is broadcast to everyone on the same splitter network in plaintext and filtered at individual ISP-owned termination devices, much like cable networks, and (b) you definitely never reach 1000 Mbps down, but often can reach 900 Mbps up. Typical is 500-600 Down, 900 Up; the highest I've seen down on e.g. fast.com is 900 Mbps. And the price is extremely competitive with Comcast ($80/mo for "gigabit"), unlike their DSL offerings, which are complete crap. The major downside is that their IPv6 support is nonexistent and they have no plans for rolling it out.

chocolatkey 8y ago
Hi, I'm on centurylink's fiber offering and have the same experience as you getting much faster upload than download (though download speed increases quite a bit during sleeping hours). Are you saying this is because the DL is congested during the day hours? Or is there some other technological block in play?
- loeg 8y ago
  > Are you saying this is because the DL is congested during the day hours? Yeah, it's congestion on the transmitter (upstream) end.
pooppaint 8y ago
You sure it’s plaintext? GPON networks should be using AES128 to each ONT.
- loeg 8y ago
  No, not sure. I wasn't aware of that, thanks. Do you know more about the key negotiation and encryption protocol? Wikipedia doesn't have even mention AES. Thanks.
ransford 8y ago
I've been getting perfectly adequate IPv6 via their 6rd gateway (on fiber, in Seattle). I wrote some nerd notes on using one's own wifi router and setting up IPv6: http://b.tra.in/2015/07/notes-on-centurylink-fiber.html http://b.tra.in/2015/07/notes-on-centurylink-fiber.html
- loeg 8y ago
  6rd is pretty awful, generally, and I couldn't get Centurylink's to work last time I tried. I appreciate the notes and will take a look, thank you. (One big problem I've experienced in the past is that any time you configure both IPv6 and IPv4, all programs prefer IPv6. But tunneled IPv6 has much worse performance than the native IPv4, so you really want applications to prefer IPv4 in a tunneled v6 environment.)
  - jandrese 8y ago
    I still use Hurricane Electric tunnels fir my v6 and ping times/throughout are so close as to be in the noise for most everything. It probably helps that I'm using a tunnel endpoint literally 10 miles from my house however.
    - loeg 8y ago
      My IPv4 ping times to Google and Facebook are 2.6 milliseconds. I suspect any HE tunnel is going to be worse than that (in a statistically significant sense). I don't know that latency would necessarily be perceptible the majority of the time, but I strongly suspect outliers would be worse and more frequent. Also, I doubt HE's ipv6 tunnel is going to carry anything close to 1Gbps for me for free ;-).
gonzo 8y ago
You do know that perfection with TCP over Ethernet (no 802.1q rages, no retransmits) at 1gbps is 941Mbps, right?
- loeg 8y ago
  What is your point? All of the observed numbers I've provided are sufficiently well below that as to make the distinction between 941 and 1000 meaningless.
  - loeg 8y ago
    Come on, folks. > Typical is 500-600 Down 500/941 vs 500/1000 is 50% vs 53% of advertised. The 3% isn't really significant. I don't think it's bad service for the price, but it certainly isn't true 1gigE.
    - gonzo 8y ago
      Here’s what you wrote > but often can reach 900 Mbps up. Typical is 500-600 Down, 900 Up; the highest I've seen down on e.g. fast.com is 900 Mbps
      - loeg 8y ago
        Yes, I wrote that as well. What comment are you making? Typical observed speeds down, which is what everyone cares about for residentical internet, are 500-600 Mbps — far below 1Gbps. I mentioned the outliers for color but they're either not useful to me (I don't need 900 Mbps upload) or not representative of real service delivered (I've only observed 900 Mbps once; as I said, 500-600 is much more typical). Off-peak is typically around 700 Mbps down. So I still don't know what comment or point you were trying to make by claiming GigE TCP can only reach 940 Mbps. It clearly isn't a counterargument to my claim that Centurylink's $80/mo, residential "gigabit" fiber offering does not deliver 1Gbps internet service (nor would I expect it to).
penagwin 8y ago
IMO the plaintext part isn't a real issue. With the recent dramatic increase in https usage it won't have much impact. I'd also consider that segment "comprimised" anyway, from a security perspective anything past my modem could be MITM'ing my connecting.
- loeg 8y ago
  Yeah, I totally agree; at the end of the day end-to-end authenticated encryption is the way to go. But not everything is end-to-end encrypted, so it's worth mentioning as a caveat. It sounds like I may be mistaken anyways and some GPON networks negotiate an AES key for downstream traffic, but I have no way to confirm that this design or implementation is secure, or that in practice CenturyLink even uses it on my local fiber.

sharms 8y ago

Here in Denver we get full 1Gbps for $75/mo, every provider has outages and this was the first partial outage we experienced with the service (pages loaded just slowly most of the day)

gonzo 8y ago
If only it was available in Golden... I could hit the CL POP with a baseball (less than a block away).

joecool1029 8y ago

Doesn't exist across 99% of their last mile footprint. Just one or two cities. I would guess the vast majority of their revenue comes from extorting old people and farmers with shitty overpriced ADSL that squirrels eat into and take down annually.

justtopost 8y ago
Rural folk here. Biannually.