10 ms·

How's the bandwidth?

jkilpatr 7y ago
100mbps isn't unreasonable to expect out of the gear, but I don't know what they get in practice considering the high RF noise environment.
- foxhop 7y ago
  Just for context, 100mbps is fast. That's like local wired LAN speeds from 15 years ago.
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    100Mbps was fast 15 years ago. These days it's the bare minimum. And remember that you'll be sharing this capacity with all your neighbors who sign up, and since it's wireless you can't just expand the capacity by adding more cables. And, as jkilpatr mentioned[0], the latency will make it pretty much useless for a lot of applications (such as real-time multiplayer games, or anything that creates a lot of short-lived TCP connections such as web browsing). The only way to build out decent Internet infrastructure is to dig. Even if they come from the best intentions then these WISP efforts ultimately just end up poisoning the well. Then again, maybe it'd be a good thing to keep connectivity at a point just before garbage like Stadia becomes viable. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20320949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20320949
    - jkilpatr 7y ago
      I have gigabit fiber at home. I also run a WISP. This is from one of my wisp customers taken literally seconds ago. root@OpenWrt:~# ping 1.1.1.1 PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: seq=0 ttl=61 time=7.791 ms 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: seq=1 ttl=61 time=7.084 ms 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: seq=2 ttl=61 time=6.691 ms Same server from my gigabit fiber to the apartment unit [justin@DESKTOP-UALBV95 ~]$ ping 1.1.1.1 PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=11.4 ms 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=11.2 ms The point to point customer antenna added ~6ms of latency the remaining ~2ms is the fiber line to the internet exchange. tl;dr Wireless point to point is easily competitive to Cable on speed and anything on latency.
      - Nullabillity 7y ago
        > The point to point customer antenna added ~6ms of latency For one hop. The OP literally has Mesh in the name, so I'd expect a large multiple of that. Especially given that NYC's highrises would likely make it harder to provide direct line of sight. > Same server from my gigabit fiber to the apartment unit That doesn't say much unless they're colocated geographically, and the rest of the equipment is equivalent. Especially since 1.1.1.1 is heavily anycasted (like most other public DNS servers). For the record, my results look like this (also using consumer-grade gigabit fiber): teo  ~  ping 1.1.1.1 PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=1.45 ms 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=1.49 ms 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=58 time=1.47 ms > tl;dr Wireless point to point is easily competitive to Cable on speed Very curious about your customer density here. It may be competitive for a few customers, but I suspect that interference from neighbors would cause a sharp drop in urban areas if everyone bought in.
        jkilpatr 7y ago
        > For one hop. The OP literally has Mesh in the name, so I'd expect a large multiple of that. Especially given that NYC's highrises would likely make it harder to provide direct line of sight. First off I will note that the goal posts here have been moved. Your original statement was that any wireless effort was doomed. This has now been revised to include many hops and distance to the internet exchange. NYC mesh uses very traditional WISP equipment and OSPF routing (for the most part, also last I talked to them was a while ago) If you look at their map they have several two hop nodes. https://www.nycmesh.net/map https://www.nycmesh.net/map althea.net also runs a multihop wireless network so I can get some samples to discuss right now. You can find a comprehensive overview of our design here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw But to get back on subject Althea has exactly the sort of network your interested in since we're focusing on building a distributed, incentivized, mesh WISP. More than half of our users are behind two or more hops. Here's a rough sample of some two hop users. fd62:e3a0:6100:ae2:2e0a:d8a7:7f25:294f metric 246 RTT 26.976 price 42840 fd64:30f4:7ea7:5700:f391:6c14:e9c7:6f11 metric 193 RTT 15.750 price 42840 fd65:9f14:c542:d97e:88dd:13ff:99f8:20d7 metric 239 RTT 29.966 price 42840 Most of these links are degraded by trees and distance, causing higher than ideal latencies. The users are ecstatic though, their only other options are 1mbps DSL or sat internet. No other WISP will enter the area because line of sight is so challenging. I will also note this is literally the cheapest gear off the shelf. It gets 100mbps to the user but has serious problems with retrying packets it should just drop. Each hop provides many degrees of freedom, we haven't found a need for more than two hops at all yet. If we where in an urban area getting a couple of ms would be much easier, interference free 60ghz and shorter distances.
    - vvanders 7y ago
      I run cable with WISP as fallback, their ping times in pfSense gateway monitoring for 1.1.1.1 are within ~5ms of each other. Point to point can be faster than cable due to fiber/copper running at a fraction of the speed of light. That's why some HFT firms prefer ptp links.
    - d-sc 7y ago
      I’ve been lucky to get 2Mbps at places I lived in the last couple years. 100 would be lucky for me.
    - darkpuma 7y ago
      No way, 100Mbps is fast today for most people. This 8K youtube video is 5m38s long and 850MiB large: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1La4QzGeaaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1La4QzGeaaQ Do the math on that and you need 21Mbps to stream that video without buffering, assuming a uniform bitrate: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=850MiB+%2F+(5+minutes+%2B+38+seconds)+to+Mbps https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=850MiB+%2F+(5+minutes+... 100Mbps down is fast for most people. What do you think the average user is doing that needs more than 100Mbps down?
      - Nullabillity 7y ago
        > 100Mbps down is fast for most people. What do you think the average user is doing that needs more than 100Mbps down? For streaming? Sure, you'll be fine as long as you're faster than the content. For downloads (Steam, etc) the difference between 100Mbps and 1Gbps is literally a 10x speedup. If you're waiting for a multi-GB game patch to download then there is a huge mental shift between waiting 20 seconds and 4 minutes. That said, I mainly interpreted the GP as talking about expectations. You could argue that driving at 30km/h is blazing fast compared to walking, but it's still the slowest car speed that we usually consider worth thinking about.
        darkpuma 7y ago
        > "If you're waiting for a multi-GB game patch to download then there is a huge mental shift between waiting 20 seconds and 4 minutes." It's not exactly a life altering shift though, is it? Four fewer minutes of gameplay time is not, for most people, the 'bare minimum.' A car that only does 30km/h would be a huge downgrade for any car owner, who would no longer be able to safely drive on any highway. That's a ridiculous comparison. Most users would only perceive any difference between 100Mbps and 1Gbps in uncommon circumstances and the severity of those circumstances would almost always be minimal. If I'm backing up multiple terabytes to rsync.net, am I going to notice the difference? Oh hell yeah. And ditto if I'm pirating HBO's entire back catalogue. But if I'm bopping around on facebook and youtube? Not a chance. Maybe a few times a month I get a big video game update and have enough time to bake some chicken tendies before it finishes downloading, but a gamer's got to eat anyway doesn't he?
    - rolltiide 7y ago
      Incentivize the nodes in a meaningful way and performance will quickly improve
      - jkilpatr 7y ago
        Althea.net is such a protocol and it's available for use today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw
        Nullabillity 7y ago
        So, back to pay-per-use pricing. Yay?
        woah 7y ago
        Flat rate just means that light users subsidize the heavy users.
        jkilpatr 7y ago
        Flat rate means that the user ends up paying an average 25c/gb in the United States. 5c/gb doesn't sound very bad in that context. Flat rate is also the biggest contributor to a lot of poor internet service. Providers (cable,dsl) will start selling service at a given speed then oversell it until it's crap. The incentives are all out of whack. For the 93% of the country without fiber to the door the 2018 FCC report shows that nearly 70% don't see their advertised speed during peak hours.
        darkpuma 7y ago
        It would suck for heavy use 'whales' like me, but most consumers would save money since they'd no longer be subsidizing my behavior. The selfish part of me is pretty comfortable with this status quo.
        rolltiide 7y ago
        This why staking and network administered rewards are so effective as they dont directly burden the consumer
  - cmroanirgo 7y ago
    Compared to my location in oz, it's blazingly fast. I'm limited to a max of 1.5mbps (due to long line distance to the nearest adsl exchange). Thankfully, I get 1 bar of 4g, so I use phone tethering to get about 4 times that. (For context, we have a national ponzi scheme called the nbn which was supposed to bring the internet to rural areas - even more remote than me, but rural still gets nothing, but city areas have had moderate fibre improvements)
    - the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
      Here we have actual unlimited 4G and I used it instead of DSL for two years. Got about 50/25 topping out at 80/30 or so. Was very stable and convenient. Definitely a reasonable setup for rural areas.

100mbps isn't unreasonable to expect out of the gear, but I don't know what they get in practice considering the high RF noise environment.

foxhop 7y ago
Just for context, 100mbps is fast. That's like local wired LAN speeds from 15 years ago.
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  100Mbps was fast 15 years ago. These days it's the bare minimum. And remember that you'll be sharing this capacity with all your neighbors who sign up, and since it's wireless you can't just expand the capacity by adding more cables. And, as jkilpatr mentioned[0], the latency will make it pretty much useless for a lot of applications (such as real-time multiplayer games, or anything that creates a lot of short-lived TCP connections such as web browsing). The only way to build out decent Internet infrastructure is to dig. Even if they come from the best intentions then these WISP efforts ultimately just end up poisoning the well. Then again, maybe it'd be a good thing to keep connectivity at a point just before garbage like Stadia becomes viable. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20320949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20320949
  - jkilpatr 7y ago
    I have gigabit fiber at home. I also run a WISP. This is from one of my wisp customers taken literally seconds ago. root@OpenWrt:~# ping 1.1.1.1 PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: seq=0 ttl=61 time=7.791 ms 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: seq=1 ttl=61 time=7.084 ms 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: seq=2 ttl=61 time=6.691 ms Same server from my gigabit fiber to the apartment unit [justin@DESKTOP-UALBV95 ~]$ ping 1.1.1.1 PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=11.4 ms 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=11.2 ms The point to point customer antenna added ~6ms of latency the remaining ~2ms is the fiber line to the internet exchange. tl;dr Wireless point to point is easily competitive to Cable on speed and anything on latency.
    - Nullabillity 7y ago
      > The point to point customer antenna added ~6ms of latency For one hop. The OP literally has Mesh in the name, so I'd expect a large multiple of that. Especially given that NYC's highrises would likely make it harder to provide direct line of sight. > Same server from my gigabit fiber to the apartment unit That doesn't say much unless they're colocated geographically, and the rest of the equipment is equivalent. Especially since 1.1.1.1 is heavily anycasted (like most other public DNS servers). For the record, my results look like this (also using consumer-grade gigabit fiber): teo  ~  ping 1.1.1.1 PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=1.45 ms 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=58 time=1.49 ms 64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=58 time=1.47 ms > tl;dr Wireless point to point is easily competitive to Cable on speed Very curious about your customer density here. It may be competitive for a few customers, but I suspect that interference from neighbors would cause a sharp drop in urban areas if everyone bought in.
      - jkilpatr 7y ago
        > For one hop. The OP literally has Mesh in the name, so I'd expect a large multiple of that. Especially given that NYC's highrises would likely make it harder to provide direct line of sight. First off I will note that the goal posts here have been moved. Your original statement was that any wireless effort was doomed. This has now been revised to include many hops and distance to the internet exchange. NYC mesh uses very traditional WISP equipment and OSPF routing (for the most part, also last I talked to them was a while ago) If you look at their map they have several two hop nodes. https://www.nycmesh.net/map https://www.nycmesh.net/map althea.net also runs a multihop wireless network so I can get some samples to discuss right now. You can find a comprehensive overview of our design here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw But to get back on subject Althea has exactly the sort of network your interested in since we're focusing on building a distributed, incentivized, mesh WISP. More than half of our users are behind two or more hops. Here's a rough sample of some two hop users. fd62:e3a0:6100:ae2:2e0a:d8a7:7f25:294f metric 246 RTT 26.976 price 42840 fd64:30f4:7ea7:5700:f391:6c14:e9c7:6f11 metric 193 RTT 15.750 price 42840 fd65:9f14:c542:d97e:88dd:13ff:99f8:20d7 metric 239 RTT 29.966 price 42840 Most of these links are degraded by trees and distance, causing higher than ideal latencies. The users are ecstatic though, their only other options are 1mbps DSL or sat internet. No other WISP will enter the area because line of sight is so challenging. I will also note this is literally the cheapest gear off the shelf. It gets 100mbps to the user but has serious problems with retrying packets it should just drop. Each hop provides many degrees of freedom, we haven't found a need for more than two hops at all yet. If we where in an urban area getting a couple of ms would be much easier, interference free 60ghz and shorter distances.
  - vvanders 7y ago
    I run cable with WISP as fallback, their ping times in pfSense gateway monitoring for 1.1.1.1 are within ~5ms of each other. Point to point can be faster than cable due to fiber/copper running at a fraction of the speed of light. That's why some HFT firms prefer ptp links.
  - d-sc 7y ago
    I’ve been lucky to get 2Mbps at places I lived in the last couple years. 100 would be lucky for me.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    No way, 100Mbps is fast today for most people. This 8K youtube video is 5m38s long and 850MiB large: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1La4QzGeaaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1La4QzGeaaQ Do the math on that and you need 21Mbps to stream that video without buffering, assuming a uniform bitrate: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=850MiB+%2F+(5+minutes+%2B+38+seconds)+to+Mbps https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=850MiB+%2F+(5+minutes+... 100Mbps down is fast for most people. What do you think the average user is doing that needs more than 100Mbps down?
    - Nullabillity 7y ago
      > 100Mbps down is fast for most people. What do you think the average user is doing that needs more than 100Mbps down? For streaming? Sure, you'll be fine as long as you're faster than the content. For downloads (Steam, etc) the difference between 100Mbps and 1Gbps is literally a 10x speedup. If you're waiting for a multi-GB game patch to download then there is a huge mental shift between waiting 20 seconds and 4 minutes. That said, I mainly interpreted the GP as talking about expectations. You could argue that driving at 30km/h is blazing fast compared to walking, but it's still the slowest car speed that we usually consider worth thinking about.
      - darkpuma 7y ago
        > "If you're waiting for a multi-GB game patch to download then there is a huge mental shift between waiting 20 seconds and 4 minutes." It's not exactly a life altering shift though, is it? Four fewer minutes of gameplay time is not, for most people, the 'bare minimum.' A car that only does 30km/h would be a huge downgrade for any car owner, who would no longer be able to safely drive on any highway. That's a ridiculous comparison. Most users would only perceive any difference between 100Mbps and 1Gbps in uncommon circumstances and the severity of those circumstances would almost always be minimal. If I'm backing up multiple terabytes to rsync.net, am I going to notice the difference? Oh hell yeah. And ditto if I'm pirating HBO's entire back catalogue. But if I'm bopping around on facebook and youtube? Not a chance. Maybe a few times a month I get a big video game update and have enough time to bake some chicken tendies before it finishes downloading, but a gamer's got to eat anyway doesn't he?
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    Incentivize the nodes in a meaningful way and performance will quickly improve
    - jkilpatr 7y ago
      Althea.net is such a protocol and it's available for use today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw
      - Nullabillity 7y ago
        So, back to pay-per-use pricing. Yay?
        woah 7y ago
        Flat rate just means that light users subsidize the heavy users.
        jkilpatr 7y ago
        Flat rate means that the user ends up paying an average 25c/gb in the United States. 5c/gb doesn't sound very bad in that context. Flat rate is also the biggest contributor to a lot of poor internet service. Providers (cable,dsl) will start selling service at a given speed then oversell it until it's crap. The incentives are all out of whack. For the 93% of the country without fiber to the door the 2018 FCC report shows that nearly 70% don't see their advertised speed during peak hours.
        darkpuma 7y ago
        It would suck for heavy use 'whales' like me, but most consumers would save money since they'd no longer be subsidizing my behavior. The selfish part of me is pretty comfortable with this status quo.
        rolltiide 7y ago
        This why staking and network administered rewards are so effective as they dont directly burden the consumer
- cmroanirgo 7y ago
  Compared to my location in oz, it's blazingly fast. I'm limited to a max of 1.5mbps (due to long line distance to the nearest adsl exchange). Thankfully, I get 1 bar of 4g, so I use phone tethering to get about 4 times that. (For context, we have a national ponzi scheme called the nbn which was supposed to bring the internet to rural areas - even more remote than me, but rural still gets nothing, but city areas have had moderate fibre improvements)
  - the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
    Here we have actual unlimited 4G and I used it instead of DSL for two years. Got about 50/25 topping out at 80/30 or so. Was very stable and convenient. Definitely a reasonable setup for rural areas.