4 ms·

> How Much Do I need? > You probably need less than you think. A 1Gbps fiber connection will easily serve 500-800 No thanks. I was intrigued, but ultimately I

by Naac 5y ago

> How Much Do I need? > You probably need less than you think. A 1Gbps fiber connection will easily serve 500-800 No thanks. I was intrigued, but ultimately I don't think my community is better served by having yet another oversubscribed Comcast-like ISP ( even though its run by individuals )

bombcar 5y ago
Any ISP that charges less than Datacenter transit rates (something like $200/mo per gigabit) is oversubscribed. And even those rates at hurricane electric are oversubscribed simply because it doesn’t make sense to pay for unused transit.
- marcus0x62 5y ago
  All IP networks are oversubscribed, even the ones charging "datacenter transit rates". The difference, in this respect at least, is that good providers monitor utilization and proactively upgrade capacity.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    It would be interesting for ISPs (especially municipal or small ones) to have a live graph showing ingress/outgress on their various routers and lines. There’s also “soft” limits (currently we pay for 10G on this fiber line that could do 1000G) vs hard limits (we are at 1G on this 1G copper connection).
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Over subscription makes complete sense because virtually no one maxes out their connection all the time so it makes sense to not reserve the maximum speed for every customer. My ISP lets you see a chart showing the nearest node's current usage and its capacity so you can see it just tap the top of the capacity each day at peak streaming hour and then spend most of the day almost unused.
  - tsjq 5y ago
    that's wow . do they also offer some discounts on non-peak hour usage ?
grahamburger 5y ago
(Author here) That is old, I'll update it. My recommendation today is to keep a 1gbps customer to 200-300 customers. FWIW, though, Comcast's oversell rates are probably worse (at least in some places) than even the old number that I've listed here.
- grahamburger 5y ago
  Also just a note for those curious: this is how I like to measure what's needed for a WISP, and track how it changes over time. Set up a 1gbps connection and start adding customers. Watch the usage on the circuit as your customer base grows. You want to make sure that any time a customer comes online, they can get their full speed according to the package you're selling. So if you're selling 100mbps packages, you always want to have at least 100mbps available on that circuit, even at peak times of day. As you add customers, you can start to estimate how much traffic, on average, each customer adds during the peak time of day (it's not as much as you'd expect.) Then you can estimate how many customers you'll have before you approach your limit (1gbps minus max speed package.)
  - bcrl 5y ago
    You have to monitor peak utilization of the network on the order of seconds to minutes. The rule of thumb from queuing theory is that network performance tends to tank when capacity utilization hits about 80% => a 1 Gbps link is only good if your max utilization is 800 Mbps. But if your monitoring only looks at 1 hour averages over the course of a month, you're going to miss the periods of seconds where everyone's getting ping times of >100ms and having their VoIP calls drop out. There are a lot of things you'll learn along the way if you try to run an ISP. =-)
    - grahamburger 5y ago
      Yes, should have specified - I always monitor usage in circuits at no more than 1 minute resolution.
bcrl 5y ago
I have 320 subscribers (on fibre) out of one of our PoPs, and the evening peak is around 1.6-1.8 Gbps these days. Oversubscribing 800 customers on a single 1 Gbps connection is going to result in an absolutely awful end user experience. Most WISPs make the mistake of failing to monitor airtime on their access points. With much of the low cost gear on the market the performance of a sector is going to be limited by the performance of the customer with the worst SNR. Newer gear that implements MU-MIMO significantly improves that since the access point can transmit to multiple subscribers at the same time. Have a look at some of the Cambium equipment. Other vendors have taken to implementing better QoS on the wireless phy side of things, but without MU-MIMO, it's just shuffling chairs on the deck of the titanic while the whole network sinks to the level of the guy with a bunch of trees in the fresnel zone of their 5 GHZ antenna.
dboreham 5y ago
It'll be nothing like as good as Comcast.
hansel_der 5y ago
commercial isp's do oversubscribe in the range of 1k-20k. it'll work fine if there is some form of fair-queueing that limits interference between customers.

by Naac 5y ago

bombcar 5y ago

Any ISP that charges less than Datacenter transit rates (something like $200/mo per gigabit) is oversubscribed. And even those rates at hurricane electric are oversubscribed simply because it doesn’t make sense to pay for unused transit.

marcus0x62 5y ago
All IP networks are oversubscribed, even the ones charging "datacenter transit rates". The difference, in this respect at least, is that good providers monitor utilization and proactively upgrade capacity.
- bombcar 5y ago
  It would be interesting for ISPs (especially municipal or small ones) to have a live graph showing ingress/outgress on their various routers and lines. There’s also “soft” limits (currently we pay for 10G on this fiber line that could do 1000G) vs hard limits (we are at 1G on this 1G copper connection).
SilverRed 5y ago
Over subscription makes complete sense because virtually no one maxes out their connection all the time so it makes sense to not reserve the maximum speed for every customer. My ISP lets you see a chart showing the nearest node's current usage and its capacity so you can see it just tap the top of the capacity each day at peak streaming hour and then spend most of the day almost unused.
- tsjq 5y ago
  that's wow . do they also offer some discounts on non-peak hour usage ?

grahamburger 5y ago

(Author here) That is old, I'll update it. My recommendation today is to keep a 1gbps customer to 200-300 customers. FWIW, though, Comcast's oversell rates are probably worse (at least in some places) than even the old number that I've listed here.

grahamburger 5y ago
Also just a note for those curious: this is how I like to measure what's needed for a WISP, and track how it changes over time. Set up a 1gbps connection and start adding customers. Watch the usage on the circuit as your customer base grows. You want to make sure that any time a customer comes online, they can get their full speed according to the package you're selling. So if you're selling 100mbps packages, you always want to have at least 100mbps available on that circuit, even at peak times of day. As you add customers, you can start to estimate how much traffic, on average, each customer adds during the peak time of day (it's not as much as you'd expect.) Then you can estimate how many customers you'll have before you approach your limit (1gbps minus max speed package.)
- bcrl 5y ago
  You have to monitor peak utilization of the network on the order of seconds to minutes. The rule of thumb from queuing theory is that network performance tends to tank when capacity utilization hits about 80% => a 1 Gbps link is only good if your max utilization is 800 Mbps. But if your monitoring only looks at 1 hour averages over the course of a month, you're going to miss the periods of seconds where everyone's getting ping times of >100ms and having their VoIP calls drop out. There are a lot of things you'll learn along the way if you try to run an ISP. =-)
  - grahamburger 5y ago
    Yes, should have specified - I always monitor usage in circuits at no more than 1 minute resolution.

bcrl 5y ago

I have 320 subscribers (on fibre) out of one of our PoPs, and the evening peak is around 1.6-1.8 Gbps these days. Oversubscribing 800 customers on a single 1 Gbps connection is going to result in an absolutely awful end user experience. Most WISPs make the mistake of failing to monitor airtime on their access points. With much of the low cost gear on the market the performance of a sector is going to be limited by the performance of the customer with the worst SNR. Newer gear that implements MU-MIMO significantly improves that since the access point can transmit to multiple subscribers at the same time. Have a look at some of the Cambium equipment. Other vendors have taken to implementing better QoS on the wireless phy side of things, but without MU-MIMO, it's just shuffling chairs on the deck of the titanic while the whole network sinks to the level of the guy with a bunch of trees in the fresnel zone of their 5 GHZ antenna.

dboreham 5y ago

It'll be nothing like as good as Comcast.

hansel_der 5y ago

commercial isp's do oversubscribe in the range of 1k-20k. it'll work fine if there is some form of fair-queueing that limits interference between customers.