29 ms·

My upgrade to 25 Gbit/s Fiber To The Home

753 points by secure 4y ago

gigatexal 4y ago
I’m so envious.
xyst 4y ago
This is impressive. If everybody had data center like speeds to their home. Decentralization might actually work.
jagger27 4y ago
This is so depressing to read. I can’t imagine an ISP like this existing in Canada.
didibus 4y ago
If only one person has 25Gbit, it's not a drastic impact. But if 25Gbit becomes the norm, it means all new use cases can be delivered. 8k video streams at 15bit color ranges, games streaming assets over the wire, mounting file systems that live directly in the cloud, etc. I can't even think of it all probably. Maybe VR streaming and other things. Maybe we can finally have higher resolution gifs?
aetherspawn 4y ago
Our business has no access to anything like this in Australia. It would cost something like $25,000 per month to get this kind of connection. If we had this, it would allow us to literally grow at double or triple the speed.
eric4smith 4y ago
Here in Bangkok, Thailand 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up in Bangkok is around 650 Baht per month which is just under $20 USD. Now there is 2 Gbps up and down available which is slightly less than $40. Brah. USA/Canada/Australia is so far behind its not even funny anymore. Let's not even get started on things like banking.
intunderflow 4y ago
Sat in the UK with my 25 Mbps for £50 a month - definitely gives some perspective on things
system2 4y ago
This person is able download 5.4 day worth of data in 1 second that I was able to download with my 56k dialup internet back in the day.
jiveturkey 4y ago
Everyone is missing the fact that this is just the last mile speed. I would guess that the uplink is very heavily oversubscribed. Indeed, from TFA, his ISP is a boutique kind of ISP (at least in USA they are nearly nonexistent unless you are rural -- I happen to be and have similar access to my ISP) and he even had access to the POP. The edge switches only have a 4x40/100G uplink in this case. The connections can obviously be bonded but the ISP remarks on their own page that the uplink is "just" 100G, ie not utilizing the full capacity available to the hardware. This is great for sporadic (very high peak to average consumption), residential type of use. Sharing such a high speed link across many subscribers is great. But in no way is this capable of running high bandwidth streaming servers, datacenter-like, from your home, as some are suggesting. Just 4 customers like that would consume the entire bandwidth. No sane ISP would allow even 1 customer to use all their 25G, continuously, that they might argue they paid for. The peering/transit that the ISP has is also a hugely important factor to how "good" this 25G connection really is. I'm not knocking it -- I wish I could get even 100M. But at the end of the day, a 1G connection that many USA city dwellers can get will be just as useful as the provisioning of such will be vastly different than the provisioning of this 25G service.
jmakov 4y ago
The datahoarder and homelab community welcomes all the bandwidth you got, thank you.
ksec 4y ago
A lot of people are joking ( or not ) about 640Kb memory ought to be enough. Well the average computer system has the same 1Gbps Ethernet and 8GB Memory for the past 15+ years. And there are nothing on the current roadmap to suggest this is going to change in the next 8 years ( 2030 ). i.e The Power Law. With 1Gbps or 100MB/s you could download 6GB in a min, roughly the size of an OS update or with 10Gbps internet which isn't as far fetch as others have said in comments, it takes less than 10s to download the update. It then takes 15min if not more for the CPU to work those 6GB files before the update finishes. PCI-E 6.0 gets 8GB/s for 1x or 16GB/s for PCI-7.0. Ignoring the power / heat issue. We now have I/Os that are way quicker than how the CPU could response. The whole Software and Computer ecosystem may need a rethink to gain more performance.
traceroute66 4y ago
I smell marketing hype. Don't get me wrong, I'm super jealous and of course I'd love to have a 25Gbit connection at home. But I think we need to step back from the Kool Aid for a moment and ask ourselves: - What's the likelihood of the remote servers you are connecting to having a 25Gbit connection ? - Even if the servers do have >=25Gb connection, what are the chances of the server sysadmin allowing one user to hog a large chunk of capacity ? - Even *IF* the answer to the above two questions is positive, what are the chances of your magical 25Gbit ISP having sufficient backbone + peering + transit capacity to fulfill the 25Gbit to its users at all times ? I foresee a lot of contention/bottlenecking and basically a lot of reliance on "not everyone will be using it at the same time". I also suspect the small-print of the ISP could make for interesting reading. EDIT TO ADD: Found the relevant clause in their conditions: The Internet subscriptions for private customers are intended for normal personal use. Init7 reserves the right to temporarily or permanently restrict or discontinue the provision of services for connections whose data volume exceeds 0.5 petabyte (500 terabytes) in a period of 4 weeks, or to take another suitable measure. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to how long it takes to transfer 500TB on 25Gbit ;-)
_zoltan_ 4y ago
a lot of commenters asking why should take note that it costs exactly the same monthly as 1 or 10 gigabit. as for saturability, I had no issues to pull 25Gbit/s between .ch and .hu using bbr.
randomstate 4y ago
It feels surreal that I pay 100PLN/month (~25usd) for my symmetrical 1Gbit/s in Poland.
wdb 4y ago
Amazing, I can't even get 100mbit+ here in West London. the only way I can get faster internet is to pay a lot of money to get private fibre. I did see G.Network digging around near me. I am wondering if they easily support Mews houses
mickotron 4y ago
Fibre to Node connection in Australia max speed to my home is 29mbps. I have Starlink and 4G because our internet infrastructure here is abysmal.
gentleman11 4y ago
When we got fiber, our internet didn’t speed up. We just saw a monthly rate increase. The providers here throttle it so significantly that there isn’t any benefit, not even for upload. The plans that cost an extra $150 per month have far higher limits but that’s insane
- judge2020 4y ago
  What provider?
  - gentleman11 4y ago
    Shaw in canada. Maybe Telus is better, I’m not sure
    - FredPret 4y ago
      Ah, Shaw. What a scourge. I wish we could get more competition in the market here
    - ChoGGi 4y ago
      Nope :(
    - mrstone 4y ago
      I'm on Telus gigabit fibre, for $69/mo. I've never once had issues with throttling, even when I was on Shaw (the 300mbps plan). What kind of throttling are you getting and in what use cases?
    - CamJN 4y ago
      I'm on telus fibre, it's only fast within telus' local network because their peering is SHIT. So unless all you're going to do is speedtest all day long telus isn't going to help you.
- GaelFG 4y ago
  Which country if it not indiscreet ? I know internet access quality vary a lot between countries and I'm curious.
gaudat 4y ago
Holy shit how do I move to your place?
cm2187 4y ago
Not convinced by the use case section. Very few servers will allow you a full 25gbit download, let alone anything more than a 1gbit (and often less). And if you own the server on the other end, that sort of bandwidth comes at a cost. I think beyond 1gbit, the benefit become super marginal and the hardware expensive.
- Thaxll 4y ago
  Well you need to do some calculation first how much a single TCP stream can provide.
  - iso1210 4y ago
    It's not 1998 any more, you've got multiple TCP streams, things like QUIC and other UDP based protocols, and of course good old fashioned window scaling which will go upto an 8gbit window, so as long as you've got an rtt under 300ms you'll be fine at 25gbit.
    - Thaxll 4y ago
      I thought window was pretty limited on modern OS?
      - iso1210 4y ago
        You'll encounter other limitations, like processing 2 million 1500 byte packets a second, which is possible but you need to make sure you have the grunt to process and the right types of options in the kernel http://tm.kit.edu/doc/2019-LCN-100g-tuning-authors-copy.pdf http://tm.kit.edu/doc/2019-LCN-100g-tuning-authors-copy.pdf
- arcade79 4y ago
  So, I installed my 1Gbit home network around 20 years ago... Quite frankly, I'd expected a 100Gbit uplink by now.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
jonnylynchy 4y ago
On behalf of all tech-minded Americans, I would like to say... I hate you. I just got a notice in the mail that my ISP is "upgrading" their network so now I can pay $200 USD/month to get a whopping 2gbps, which I actually thought was pretty amazing until I read your post. So, thanks. In all seriousness, congrats! You made a good case for why one would need that much bandwidth. Also, we need to catch up here. :)
- kingcharles 4y ago
  AT&T called me. They said their technical guys think they might be able to upgrade the connection to my building from 1.5Mbps to 3Mbps if I want to sign-up with them. I'm in downtown Chicago.
  - arcade79 4y ago
    I really, really hope you told them to fuck the hell off.
    - kingcharles 4y ago
      The guy on the phone was so cool. He was totally "in" on how hilariously awful it was that they could only get 1.5Mbps into my building. He had access to the system that let him see all the contracts of my neighbors and what connections they had and was floored that every building next me had gigabit.
- FridgeSeal 4y ago
  I feel you. Here in Australia: $90/month nets you “100/40mb”, which is really more like “~85mb down, 25 up but only a quiet night, if you’re next to the router, and it hasn’t rained within the last week”.
  - joshschreuder 4y ago
    It’s much, much better than it used to be at least (depending on where you live + NBN technology choice of course). And yet still completely hamstrung by the mess the current government made of the original NBN plan. If you live in an area that can get HFC, FTTP, FTTN etc. it’s possible these days to get a pretty consistent 1000/50 for $150/month. Those fibre services are pretty stable in my experience, definitely a million times better than the old broadband which as you put got destroyed by bad weather and distance from the exchange.
Tepix 4y ago
Consider me drooling. I'm currently on 1000/50 cable internet, which is already quite nice. Telekom is laying fibre but it's not clear yet whether or not they will stop short of this house. Also i suspect it will be a while before they offer better than 1000/500 service.
- jotm 4y ago
  I hate asymmetric connections. You get gigabit download but something stupid like 20-100 Mbps upload? Just why... Upload speed matters just as much as download these days.
  - bick_nyers 4y ago
    What really sucks is the ratios these cable companies go with, 1000/50 is a 20/1 ratio. Having something like 500/100 would be light-years better for the vast majority of people even though you would be sacrificing overall bandwidth. Perhaps it's a conspiracy to have less tech-savvy work-from-homer's keep bumping up their speed plan because their upload speed isn't up to snuff for video meetings. Either that or cable companies feel they need to compete on advertised download speeds with fiber, which is a losing battle.
  - JaimeThompson 4y ago
    In the case of older versions of DOCSIS (cable) [1] didn't allow as many upload slots as download slots. However DOCSIS 4 does allow such connections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Throughput https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Throughput
    - geerlingguy 4y ago
      DOCSIS 3.1 can still use some improvements to eke out a lot more upload bandwidth too.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Because you have a single copper pair/coax cable with a finite bandwidth on it, and making a choice about how to split it. Eg, your tech and cable can support 40 Mbps. If you split that 20/20, your users will have trouble watching 4K video that wants 25 Mbps. Change that to 35/5, and for most people it'll actually work better. This issue goes away eventually as you either get a fiber for each direction, or you can just push terabits through fiber anyway, so there's plenty capacity to be symmetric without any compromises.
Klasiaster 4y ago
The speed aside there are multiple other positive aspects mentioned that serve as a role model for larger providers, sadly…
quercusa 4y ago
> fiber7 costs only 65 CHF per month and comes with a symmetric 1 Gbit/s connection. 65 CHF = US $67.89
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  Comparison data point: I pay 75.48 USD per month (including taxes) for Verizon FIOS gigabit fiber in NYC.
- denysvitali 4y ago
  You have to consider Swiss salaries / cost of living in Switzerland too...
- sschueller 4y ago
  In Zürich city a law was passed to pull fiber into every home. The fiber is serviced by the electric and partially the largest phone company. Any provider can use the network and therefore the fees a low. If you live outside the city you may not be so lucky and spend 100+ on maybe 500mbit internet. Init7 is also currently in a legal fight with swisscom because swisscom wants (has already started) to pull some alternative fiber that doesn't directly connect the customer to the pop therefore preventing competitors offering faster service than swisscom. The small cost savings that swisscom has is a huge problem for future upgrades and requires power in underground shafts. Not very green when you could pull the fibers directly.
thejosh 4y ago
My first internet, and my internet for up until my teenage years until ~2005 was 14.8kbps, we couldn't get faster than that for some reason. When we got 2Mbit I was AMAZED. The entire internet now actually semi-worked. Now in 2022 I have gigabit (down, 50Mbit up) internet, with WiFi6 on my devices it's amazing (I'm hardwired for my desktop). Aussie Broadband here in Australia is my current ISP, and they are amazing. FTTP was a major upgrade. But the thing which hurts where I am (Perth, AU) is the latency to everything, not the download speeds :).
raverbashing 4y ago
It's crazy that at this speeds (and I mean, it's not a new thing) your internal infrastructure can be the bottleneck You have 100Mbit internet? Cool, your 54Mbit only WLAN devices are now the bottleneck. But now it's your 10GB ethernet that's the limit.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  You easily run into problems even before that. I just upgraded to 10GB networking in my house and the old desktop I have hanging around mostly for guest use tops out at around 6 Gbps. The CPU just can't handle more than that. Granted, it's a 10 year old, cheap CPU with integrated video, so it was never much good. But still, it works just fine for web browsing. And of course hard disks get 200MB/s on the very rare occasion, and often a good amount less than that. Even SSDs are limited by SATA's maximum of 6 Gbps, so make a plan for upgrading everything to NVMEs.
jotm 4y ago
Damn, that's impressive. Technically I could get 2Gbps with the two providers running their own fiber in the neighborhood. But I don't even fully use one gigabit connection, running a torrent client is about the only thing that can do it. Any ideas welcome :D Curious thing, the ISPs don't oversell even though they easily could. I get exactly what I pay for, speed is never below ~940Mbps (down or up), and uptime has been stellar.
- lostcolony 4y ago
  Yeah; there really aren't any great use cases I can think of for more than 1 gbps to the home at the moment. A 4k stream runs ~25 mbps, a 100 GB game download will tend to cap out before saturating the connection and still take ~15 minutes (hardly a wasted evening if you have to wait for it). At 2 Gbps, if you actually saturated the connection downloading something, you'd better have an SDD, since you'll be downloading faster than a HDD can write. More bandwidth may be -nice-, for the few services that can take advantage of it (I'm not sure PSN, Steam, etc, even will), but it's hardly a game changer for home use. Even the backup/transfer cases he lists I'd hope are transferring diffs, which would likely make the speed increase unnoticeable. But, of course, I'd still love 25 gbps fiber to the home just because.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    How about remote work? Back when covid19 started, we all went home, the office closed, and then we had a server failure. And I spent multiple days downloading stuff to back it up before reinstalling the machine, because there was not enough spare storage inside the office. If you work with VM disk images even 1 Gbps starts feeling a tad sluggish.
    - lostcolony 4y ago
      What about remote work? Why the heck are you downloading stuff to hardware located -at your house-, and not a datacenter, another office, the cloud (someone else's datacenter :P), etc? I work with VMs. Disk images stay in the datacenter, and occasionally get sent between datacenters. They don't live at my house.
martini333 4y ago
25 Gb/s to the internet providers speedtest server is kinda cute. But most CDN's limit is much, much lower.
- k8sToGo 4y ago
  That's fine. No one said you need to use it all up in one connection.
k8sToGo 4y ago
My experience with fast internet has been that most CDNs are just not routed well and are quite slow (especially Microsoft). Only a few good ones allow me to saturate my Gbit internet. Not sure what I would do with 25 Gbit though. What I do enjoy is that rsync.net is using the same ISP so I can max out my upload to them.
- jotm 4y ago
  Many servers specifically throttle single connections, which is why there's stuff like JDownloader and browser add-ons that download the same file in several parts over multiple connections
  - k8sToGo 4y ago
    I use aria2 and often it works. But I can't do that if the download is happening inside an application (e.g. MS Flight Simulator).
explaingarlic 4y ago
I'm really unsure as to whether it's worth investing whatsoever in consumer grade fiber connections. My speeds are advertised as 1Gbits down and 100Mbits up. On speed tests, I get much higher downloads (~1.5Gbits per second). This might be because it's not capped properly, and I live in a place that they're still building houses in (I imagine that our "box" is not yet saturated). However, I rarely max that speed out in any download. Video games on Steam max out at maybe 65 megabytes per second. wget commands go from between 10 megabytes per second to maybe 40 max. The thing is, I know that the speed tests are legit, because I can do several of these things at once and none of them lose any speed.
- k8sToGo 4y ago
  I think it has to do with the routing and peering. I can get full speed on Steam, Origin, but not from Microsoft, for example.
  - msarchet 4y ago
    I have gotten 800+ downloading games onto my xbox
  - explaingarlic 4y ago
    Yeah, maybe. My connectivity feels pretty intermittent to some ASNs, but I don't know if that's what changes between a good peering connection and a bad one.
  - selectodude 4y ago
    Microsoft’s CDN is awful. I’m in Chicago so my fiber connection literally terminates at an Akamai and Cloudflare edge. Steam, Apple, et al I routinely pull 100+ megabytes per second. Microsoft, I’m lucky if I get a third of that.
- CraigJPerry 4y ago
  I think you can now put 800 gigabit per second today, via commercially available kit, down a single strand of fibre installed back in the early 1980s. Copper or radio connections just don’t seem like as worthwhile an investment to me. I’m not saying it makes sense to have an 800gbit connection to a residential property but from a longevity, cost per mile, use of less rare materials, reduced rf interference or whatever, fibre just seems a better proposition to me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zhdc1 4y ago
I had 10gb internet on what was essentially a shared connection when I lived in Zürich. That, along with a surplus server I literally housed in my shoe closet, gave me the firepower I needed to prototype out something that led to two research grants which now employ myself and a new PhD student. We discount technological investments like this as being “too much” and “unpractical”, but we forget that, even if it only one person in a hundred or a thousand take advantage of them, the impact can be enough to launch careers or start businesses with sizeable positive externalities.
- kortilla 4y ago
  What exactly did you do on 10gb that couldn’t be accomplished on 1gb?
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Also the fact that it would be cheaper for the people who need this tech to just rent out a VPS in a datacenter than to roll out 10gbps to every single person on the extremely rare chance someone needs it.
- azeirah 4y ago
  Please do tell us about your work!
  - amelius 4y ago
    I'm guessing the work involves a web-crawler.
- 101008 4y ago
  Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives. Even a low speed connection in a rural zone can achieve wonderful things. But I really wonder what was your prototype that needed that speed connection and that wouldn't work with something slower. Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work?
whinvik 4y ago
In neigbouring Germany, we had a lady from Deutsch Telekom asking us today if they should build a 250 Mbps line to our building!
- fransje26 4y ago
  Hahaha. And I'm sure the price is cheap. Only an arm and a leg. Oh. And your soul. And with the caveat that the 250 Mbps will only be available in the middle of the night, when everybody is sleeping. After having had to pay Vodafone 50 euros a month for 10Gb of data through LTE for years, due to the impossibility of getting any connection faster than 3Mbps (even as a business), we are also, through the miracles of governmental financial incentives and magnificent planning (only 2 years late), getting the joys of high speed internet in our area. 100 Mbps. Hoooray! Telecommunication in Germany is a cancerous, price-gouging cartel that needs to be eradicated at all costs, packaged on the first-available Falcon Heavy flight, and propelled at escape velocity out of our solar system.
- dx034 4y ago
  Telekom is cancer, especially their peering. 250mbits sounds fine though, I haven't upgraded from that yet, there are way too few instances where it restricts me to pay anything more.
Mikeb85 4y ago
Canada here. 500 Mbps is like $80/month lol.
- mrstone 4y ago
  It's all pretty negotiable. I pay $69/mo for gigabit fibre through Telus.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    Where? I pay 60$ for mildly spotty 120mbps and that was very good deal a year ago. It's pretty sad considering I live in Montréal. I know western Canada has way better internet/data prices though
  - Mikeb85 4y ago
    Telus fibre not available where I live only Shaw. And it's not bad all considered, just expensive compared to the rest of the world.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
I'm thrilled with my gigabit fiber from Sonic. I wonder how many of their customers even get the full gigabit though; if they are connecting with WiFi they almost certainly aren't. And even ethernet is still not reliably gigabit in homes with older wiring. But this 25gbit is in another category. I'm impressed the Ookla speedtest server can deliver 25Gbit. The 25gbit network card he mentions costs $400-$500, that's cheaper than I would have guessed.
- greenburger 4y ago
  Yeah, I’m a new Sonic customer and got their 10gbit service. $40/mo beats any of the other three providers pricing for much lower bandwidth. However, I only have a gigabit router, so most of that isn’t utilized, assuming that’s true for all my neighbors as well (Sonic’s only offering here is 10gbit)
  - kbenson 4y ago
    Just think of it as future proofing, like installing higher rated cabling in a house than you'll use initially. The cost isn't any more for you to have 10Gbit in this case, so for you it's just knowing that you could buy more equipment for your end at any time to use it if you needed, and not have to wait for a service change. :)
- Bud 4y ago
  I had Sonic fiber for a few years, in the Bay Area. I always got the full gigabit, basically. Speedtest always showed around 940Mbps up and down. This was over Ethernet, since I always ran Ethernet into the Thunderbolt dock for my main Mac. Usually got around 500-600Mbps over WiFi on a fast device.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >I'm impressed the Ookla speedtest server can deliver 25Gbit. It's not surprising since is testing against his ISP's test server.
shasts 4y ago
I fondly remember the days in 2010 in Zurich, and cablecom had good functional internet, don't remember the speed. Then I moved to Germany in 2013, and it surprised me that I can't have internet in my apartment for the next two months, because the technician appointment and when I finally received, I got a meagre DSL connection with bad ping and 32 Mbits. It has gotten better over the years, but even the best available consumer connection is 1000 Mbits down and 200Mbits up. Majority of the tech Germans I meet are embarassed about the internet and telecom infra, being an advanced economy. Hopefully the new government fixes things.
- dx034 4y ago
  1000/200mbit sounds more than enough to me, even for a family. I could have 1gbps but decided to stay with 250mbit because I just don't see how it would benefit me. Cloud vms are so cheap and tend to have lower ping to other services, so I go there if I really need faster speed. I do agree about the general state of German internet connectivity though. However, seems to be catching up quickly, especially in rural areas.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Germany is improving at exactly the rate it needs to. Yeah sure it's definitively behind but it's not stagnating like the US.
panick21_ 4y ago
I bought the same connection. It was the same monthly price, just a slightly higher upgrade fee. I have not actually upgraded my router at all so I not profiting as much from it as I could. Still, love init7 and their service.
LinuxBender 4y ago
25gb/s is nice. I am envious of locations that have a modern local fiber network and more options. My 2 fiber connections are 500mb/s and each cost $350 to activate, $150/mo each not counting the costs for static IP's. Trenching it in was $3k. I'm more than happy with 500mb but the price could be lower. For my specific use cases it is less about bandwidth and more about latency/peering arrangements. I would personally be happy splitting as low as 100mb/s across many devices with fq_codel or cake and cdg on my little firewalls. I can't really complain though. The alternatives here are 4G LTE or Starlink.
101008 4y ago
Stupid question, but if your hard drive cannot write 25Gbit/s, how is it handled? I don't knwo anything about SSD so maybe 25Gbit/s is easily achievable, just talking from my experience of copying from a USB Drive to my local disk.
- xmaayy 4y ago
  You'd need raid SSD's or a sizeable RAM disk to make sustained use of it. Very few SSD's support full 25GB/s
- dereknance 4y ago
  I would imagine an NVMe SSD would be capable of handling most, if not all, of that throughput for sequential reads and writes.
- Bud 4y ago
  The fastest internal SSD in a Mac now can write at 3.3GB/sec, so it would be able to keep up with 25Gbps connections, barely. Average SSD write speeds are usually around 1GB/sec these days, but most folks could build a RAID of several SSDs and be able to keep up with such a connection, as well. I would also assume that most folks who would bother to install 25Gbps, or anything close, probably have a lot of devices in their homes to take advantage of it at once. Personally, I find it very hard to saturate the 1Gbps link I have. Most servers won't push more than around 200Mbps out to you, and I'm basically never doing 5 tasks at once that are that bandwidth-intensive. But it's nice to have some overhead, just for fun.
- Youden 4y ago
  Modern SSDs can handle it: 25Gbps is ~3GB/s, which you can do with a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD. PCI 4.0 NVMe SSDs can do 5.1GB/s, or ~41Gbps.
- Lammy 4y ago
  I’ve had great results sticking a single Optane NVME drive in front of my 8x8GB array of spinning rust via ZFS’s built-in cache facility. I’m only doing write caching and only using 32GiB of my much larger drive (I forget exactly how large lol). That was my comfort zone for how much data I’m willing to lose if something very bad happens to the NAS during a write, and I like giving it a bunch of spare flash space for wear-leveling. https://www.servethehome.com/exploring-best-zfs-zil-slog-ssd-intel-optane-nand/ https://www.servethehome.com/exploring-best-zfs-zil-slog-ssd... is several years old but still a good read.
agilob 4y ago
What is the use case for this? How are you doing to utilise it? According to fast.com I have 29Mbps and I see no reason why I would need to go faster now. And to be said, I'm WFH all the time, I have a homelab and we stream movies, not once since pandemic started I had a thought I might need faster broadband. My home router has SFP port.
- thoughtpalette 4y ago
  I was also under the assumption fast.com was the standard speed test as speedtest.net had some ISP (xfinity) affiliations (in the US(?))
louwrentius 4y ago
At 25 Gbit/s your computer may likely not be able to keep up, unless you have NVME based SSD. We are talking about 3GB/s+ which my 24-drive NAS (old) can’t get beyond 2.6 GB/s with ZFS. Absolute madness. But this kind of bandwidth isn’t meant for a single machine.
- dx034 4y ago
  In the end it's just an arms race with basically no use cases. You could call it future proofing but the switches will have to be replaced before such speeds could realistically be used (8k/16k video or sth like that?) Having fiber without pon is great, means no new infrastructure for decades. But anything above 10gbits will be too much to use realistically, even for smaller companies.
  - kbenson 4y ago
    Well, the use case is multiple people doing things at the same location that add up to more than 1Gbit. For example, think of the connection on a switch with mostly 1Gbit ports but one or two 10Gbit or 25Gbit ports for the uplink. Switches such as this will also have a backplane capable of doing more than 1Gbit. Individually no one person/port can use more than a gigabit and can't saturate the switch in this case, but combined they could utilize far more.
mdb31 4y ago
25Gb/s is just overkill for residential use. It's really cool that's it's available, but I fail to see a use case over my 500Mb/s home connection. Even for the servers that I manage and that are bandwidth-heavy, 10Gb/s is way overprovisioned for now. WiFi goes up to 1Gb/s, if you're lucky. Sure, some WiFi-6 APs have a 2.5Gb/s connector, but that's not what you want or need, unless you're a high-density enterprise. WiFi-6E will possibly improve that a bit, but it will take WiFi-8 to get anywhere close to saturation. Wired, you can do 10Gb/s for server systems, which are, amongst other things very loud and not very suitable for placement anywhere near humans. 2.5Gb/s support is spotty, and 1Gb/s still the only thing that works reliably. So, exactly which residential application requires 25Gb/s is not very clear. Yes, it's cool, but not very useful, and faulting manufacturers (especially in times of crippling supply-chain limitations) for not fully supporting it is questionable.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- oynqr 4y ago
  In what world is 10GbE only available for servers?
  - mdb31 4y ago
    Without drowning in fan noise? This world... Sure, I guess you can get a Mac Studio, or some other 'workstation' class PC, but your switch will still need to be within a few meters of that endpoint, and it's not going to be very green nor silent. 2.5Gb/s can easily be done with a lot of laptops and workstations these days; 10 Gb/s isn't quite there yet (and 25, 40 and 100Gb/s are definitely in the server-only fiber-or-DAC-only realm)
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      Mikrotik makes a whole bunch of 10G hardware. The 8 port ones are fanless and have a heatsink on the back, and the 16 port model has a fan that only gets switched on when needed. I have one sitting behind me and it's been off all day. It's also easy to open and replace the fan with something less noisy. Just remove a few screws, it's a standard size with a normal connector on it. There's also big external heatsink so you could rig up a big, slow, fan to help it out a bit. If you want to be green by the way, use fiber/DAC. The 10G copper SFP+ modules are power hungry, and Mikrotik recommends not placing them next to each other. Also the extra power draw is likely to result in fan use if you have a lot of them.
zahma 4y ago
No %#*^ing way is he saturating a 25gbit connection to download a PS5 game — not on Sony’s EMEA servers anyway. He’d download the largest PS5 game out there (Borderlands at 50GB) in a minute anyway — probably before he could reach the full 25gbit. On a gigabit connection, he could download Borderlands in under 7 minutes. If that’s too long too wait, then having a faster connection isn’t this guy’s problem. The only use case I can think of would be bit torrent where lots of peers housed in server farms could lead to full saturation. I’ve seen download speeds at 150MB/s. That’s still a measly 1.2Gbit. But even when you’re talking about downloading remuxed 2160p files (~50-75GB) or the occasional collection (~100-200GB), I don’t see the need since it takes time to connect to the swarm and saturate those connections. Unless of course you want to seed it to the whole world. Cool to have such big pipes, and I’m glad Switzerland is doing some good for science and proving to other ISPs that there’s profit to be had in avoiding rate limiting, but this is so wildly unnecessary.
- thfuran 4y ago
  >On a gigabit connection, he could download Borderlands in under 7 minutes. If that’s too long too wait, then having a faster connection isn’t this guy’s problem Why should he have to wait several minutes?
- arcade79 4y ago
  First off, I trust Stapelberg, as I had him as an intern ~10 years ago :P Secondly, I'd like to point out that I wired up my house for 1Gbit about 20 years ago. And I've been frustrated about the lack of home equipment for 10Gbit for about 15 years. I mean, I reached download speeds of 150MB/s about ~15 years ago. What The Actual Fuck. No, I don't live in the US, nor the Neterlands, nor Switzerland.
- jshier 4y ago
  Borderlands at 50GB isn't the largest PS5 game. I don't know what is but Horizon Forbidden West was ~90GB.
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    The last spiderman was something around 200gb, and I think call of duty is even larger, but i don't play that. Their point still stands though: the download servers bandwidth usually throttles below gigabit, so it's gonna be hard to saturate that line today
yokoprime 4y ago
I have 1000/1000 fiber i my Oslo apartment. Pointless most of the time, especially since i only run gigabit network.
mastax 4y ago
Does anyone have a good primer about optical networking links? Single and multimode fiber, connectors, transcievers, etc. When and why you would choose different technologies, how much they cost, etc. I'm realizing that I have a large hole in my knowledge there. Google is full of mid-tier SEO garbage as usual.
- iptrans 4y ago
  Everything you wanted to know about optical networking - but were afraid to ask https://www.nanog.org/news-stories/nanog-tv/top-talks/tutorial-everything-you-always-wanted-know-about-optical-networking/ https://www.nanog.org/news-stories/nanog-tv/top-talks/tutori... You can check pricing on any of the many online stores, such as Fiberstore. r/fiberoptics for questions and discussions
mchusma 4y ago
For me it was the 2ms ping that had me jealous. After maybe 200 mbs I would trade almost all bandwidth for more latency.
- toast0 4y ago
  > I would trade almost all bandwidth for more latency. Well it's easy to get more latency ;)
  - mchusma 4y ago
    Sorry. Better latency :)
- mrweasel 4y ago
  It nice that 25Gbps is available, but I’d rather that ISPs started to lower prices, rather than upgrading speeds. I just cancels my 500mbps, because I now have to pay myself, 200mbps is plenty for online meetings, ssh and browsing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sylware 4y ago
With a simple and lean signaling p2p protocol, with sufficient nodes at that speed (and support of diffserv), popular live streamers with a few thousands of viewers could part from twitch/youtube and similar. For broadcast, namely the scale above (for instance a public TV channel), if I recall properly, IPv6 has many broadcast IPs... just need the IAPs of a "telecommunication zone" (state, country, etc) to manage to work together at that level. I think IPv6 multicast is "too much" for IAPs to handle though (the whole "subscription"/"unsubscription" propagation for domestic users, not limited to CDNs only).
- sylware 4y ago
  DOH! Correcting myself in the use case of a public TV channel, IP broadcast does not help here (would generate traffic for no users), only IP multicast would handle it properly. Namely, under the authority of the "local" telecommunication regulator, multicast IPs would be statically allocated for all IAPs to provide to users, and not only CDNs, efficiently distributing content like public TV channels (for a public TV channel, probably a high bandwidth IP and a low bandwidth IP, etc). I don't know the real reasons why this is not done, the IP multicast "subscribe/unsubscribe" state machine is not robust, etc?
fetzu 4y ago
Cool read ! Moved into a new apartment which (unbeknownst to me at first) also has the capability of 25 Gbps with init7, unfortunately that was before getting a locked-in into a 1 (or is it 2?) year contract with my current provider (1000/100 Mbps, so I can’t really complain). Looking forward to having that contract expire and upgrading though, but then the issue is going to be how to distribute all that bandwidth properly over the house (most devices I use are still 1 Gbps OOTB) :).
hdhdjdjd 4y ago
At my place residential 1gbps is $80/m, 2gbps $120, 5gbps $300 :-(
jnwatson 4y ago
“ The init7 engineer met me in front of the building and explained “Hey! You wrote my window manager!”” That’s so cool. Very cool he got to participate in the upgrade process. I had 1G up/down through FIOS (Verizon FTTH) but eventually downgraded to 500M because I was saving perhaps 10s a day for 50 bucks a month. There has to be a server at the other end willing to give you data that fast.
- patte 4y ago
  We were honored to have him and he was actually of real help ;)
ec109685 4y ago
In the linked blog post to init7 (translated), it says this: “Backhaul means the return of the data to the backbone, i.e. to the connecting area of the network. The backbone connects the various subnets. Each Fiber7 pop is newly connected with at least 100Gbit/sec backhaul capacity, which corresponds to 10 to 50 times over-provision” Is that a normal over provisioning rate for an internet connection? It seems like each pop can only support four people at maximum speed before bandwidth would drop. https://blog.init7.net/de/neue-infrastruktur/ https://blog.init7.net/de/neue-infrastruktur/
- secure 4y ago
  It’s not just normal, init7 is doing better than many big players in this regard. For comparison: init7 POPs used to be connected with 10 Gbit/s “only”, so even 10 people maxing out their Gigabit line would saturate the uplink. This turned out to never be a problem over the years, I would always get maximum speed. The average usage is very low, in part also because transfers complete so quickly.
- Bluecobra 4y ago
  I’m sure if they are a decent ISP and observe constant congestion on an uplink they would just upgrade it (e.g. create a port channel with two 100G links).
mmaunder 4y ago
The challenge with anything above a gig is the LAN. 10gig+ switches and SFP modules are expensive for consumers. So is the client hardware. We use thunderbolt 3 on our macs with ATTO Thunderlink to get 40Gbps locally and they’re kinda the only option and their hardware is bulky, expensive and their software sucks. Also config on Mac is awkward. There’s also some weirdness when you upgrade to that speed into a backbone with sub 10ms latency where, for example, Teamspeak’s servers kept booting us because a security mechanism thought we were doing something naughty. We had to use a VPN to connect to add back latency.
- moondev 4y ago
  An alternative to the Thunderlink is a TB3 -> PCIe expansion box. Then you can use whatever card you like without need for additional software.
- AdrianB1 4y ago
  I just upgraded some of my home network to 10 Gbps; it was way cheaper than I thought: - 3 NICs with SPF+ at ~ $45 a piece - 1 switch with 4 SFP+ and 1 RJ45@1Gbps: $140 - 1 switch with 2 SFP+ and 8 x RJ45@1Gbps: $100 - ~ $100 for all the DACs and AOCs So I have the backbone and 3 computers @ 10 Gbps and a number of other devices left at 1 Gbps, all for $500. This is just because I have many devices connected and some longer optic cables instead of DACs, otherwise it would be just half of that. But yes, going to 25 Gbps is a different game, probably 5x the price or more.
  - hedora 4y ago
    What's the power consumption on that stuff? Last time I checked 10GBit switches were drawing high 100's of watts.
    - glowingly 4y ago
      The specs of the two switches could be the Mikrotik CRS305 and the CSS610. Probably less than 20W under load (assuming DAC or SFP+ SR Multimode). My setup has a CRS309 (8 SFP+) and CSS610, and it's 12W with almost all ports active (though not much load).
annoyingnoob 4y ago
Looks like the speed tests revealed test providers with 10G connections, the 25G connection could fully saturate the test host. It is unusual for a single client to have more bandwidth than some services.
andrecarini 4y ago
As someone shopping around for a FTTH offering (to get out of my current DOCSIS plan) how can I figure out which routers are compatible with the ISP's GPON? I've had phone calls with them and the support/sales reps have no idea. They provide their own router+AP box that takes the fiber and spits out WiFi and Ethernet, but how would I go about replacing that? Their hardware is obsolete, insecure, outdated and just all-around poor! I know I could set it to bridge and place my own router in between, but I'd love to just replace their box instead. As far as I could figure out on my own, the best bet would be getting a EdgeRouter X SFP and then plugging in a compatible SFP module. Is that right? How would one figure out which SFP module to buy? On top of all that: do ISPs run proprietary handshake stuff on top of it, where even if the physical connection is correct, the ISP refuses working with your box? or is it just like the old ADSL days when all you needed was just a PPPoE stack?
- kruptos 4y ago
  At my ISP we offer XGSPON/GPON and we have to use our equipment for the ONT (In our case Adtran). We have adtran specific handshake stuff that we have to manage. Your ISP might offer to just use their ONT and put it in bridged mode so you can use your own router/ap. There are ONT SFPs that contain everything you need to connect back to the OLT. Maybe you can ask your ISP if that is supported?
gilbetron 4y ago
AT&T can only do 50Mbps to my house. Three orders of magnitude less than this person. "Fortunately" I also have Comcast which does a mighty 1.2Gbps. Both suck so much. But AT&T tells me not to worry, it has fiber rolling into my neighborhood. I know it must be true because they've been telling me that for the past 5+ years!
404mm 4y ago
Firstly … 25Gbit symmetrical … WOW. Secondly - as a person living my whole life in IT - both passion and professionally - I have no idea what would 25Gbit be good for. I’m currently paying about $80 for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and have the option to upgrade to 5Gbit for about $180 but it seems so pointless. Here is the reasoning behind my grumpy opinion: 1. Living in a home with Cat5 throughout so the best I can do is to route 1Gbit. Running cables in multilevel (American) homes is a major PITA. 2. My Wi-Fi (802.11ax) is heavily affected by homes around me so only one AP can run with 80MHz channel width and the rest is 20-40MHz. Throughput ends up being somewhere between 150Mbit-500Mbit, depending on where you are. 3. I have a few smaller servers running ..stuff. The trouble is not about server performance or bandwidth.. it’s about reliability. Running any business on consumer line (in the USA) is just signing up for trouble. (Eg. “Is your line down because your modem received a fault firmware? No worries, the tech is going to be there within next 4 days to check your cables…”). 4. Things like game downloads on PS5 .. yes, they are amazingly fast (even on 1Gbit. They install faster from internet than from the built-in BD-ROM). But many games need to also “install” (whatever that means on PS5) and that takes 2x the time of download anyway. I can live with that once a month. 5. Big fan of streaming services, however many providers limit bitrate on their side so I am still watching the sometimes blurry 4k … Back to original question and with genuine curiosity - what is 25Gbit for???
- Sakos 4y ago
  > Back to original question and with genuine curiosity - what is 25Gbit for??? What a pointless question. I wish people would stop worrying about this instead of simply making it possible, so we can figure out what to do with it.
  - 404mm 4y ago
    … but that’s what I’m asking. What can I do with it? As I mentioned above, I have 1Gig and can go up to 5Gig. What can I do with it??
    - arcade79 4y ago
      You can start a company, as a private person, and expect everything to work when you run it from home. Just as if you were to run it from anywhere else.
dontcare007 4y ago
I live outside Atlanta and pay $100/mth for <50M...
Someone1234 4y ago
I'm in the US, and I could upgrade from 1 Gbps ($50/month) to 10 Gbps for $200/month. These are symmetrical speeds. That's because of fiber was built out as a community project, rather than waiting for the existing ISP duopoly (who were paid millions of dollars by the federal government, to do exactly this, but didn't). The reason I haven't, isn't that more isn't better, it is that equipment costs and hassle to deliver 10 Gbps around the residence is a giant PITA as the article kind of demonstrates. If 2.5 Gbps ethernet equipment becomes more common and cost-effective, I'd definitely consider the 10 Gbps offering but until then, it isn't worth $1K or more to get prepared.
vinay_ys 4y ago
I expect the 25Gbps link to be over-subscribed. Without minimum bandwidth guarantees, with 48Y4C * 2 switch and 100Gbps backhaul to the whole PoP (with minimum 64 customers for it to break-even), I suspect the sustained bandwidth will fluctuate wildly. In the worst case scenario, each customer may get a sustained bandwidth less than 50Mbps. Of course the big advantage is burst bandwidth is much higher.
Biganon 4y ago
TIL the creator of i3 is a fellow Swiss
denysvitali 4y ago
Swisscom customer (and employee) here, opinions are my own of course. They recently called me to upgrade my fiber connection from 1 Gbps to 10Gbps for free (every customer with a compatible connection gets it, AFAIK). I have to admit that, although the network is indeed faster (on the speed tests and file transfers), I really don't see the point quite yet. Considering that: - Most of the devices I use are anyways connected to WiFi 6 - Reaching a 10Gbps peak is highly unlikely - Most of my ethernet ports are anyways at most 1Gbps - Most of the servers won't serve you more than 1Gbps anyways I do not really consider this a must-have upgrade for a residential customer, especially if you live alone / less than 4 people. On top of that, as demonstrated by these tests, servers aren't quite there yet, and the 10Gbps / 25Gbps you are getting are not fully dedicated to your connection. Don't get me wrong, I love to be able to use the fastest internet I can - but realistically speaking this is just useful in a few specific cases. If you are hosting your own server at home, a 10 / 25 Gbps upload is definitely interesting though. It a nice thing to have already, and I'm really thankful to live in a country where I have the privilege of having such a luxury, but as of today a >1Gbps connection is overkill (heck, for most of the stuff even a >100Mbps is overkill sometimes).
- lukasLansky 4y ago
  My ethernet is also capped at 1 Gb/s for most of my computers. The 10 Gb/s connection is still useful as it makes sure that things running at different devices won't affect each other. Streaming won't affect games won't affect work-related video calls. It's great.
  - denysvitali 4y ago
    Yes, in that sense you'd have a "dedicated" 1Gbps for each device. But realistically, how often do you need that? I don't know about you, but the only time I would reach such a peak would be in case I download something huge while watching Netflix at 4k (which I don't have) and while at the same time downloading an update for my phone and a game for the PS5 (which I don't own). I would argue that the likelihood of all the above things happening at the same time is quite low, at least for me :)
sologoub 4y ago
Swiss 26 Gbit/s symmetrical… while in US getting 1Gbit/s down is a minor miracle and anything resembling that up is downright impossible. My area in a major VHCOL metro area has a wonderful choice of 1 cable provider and maybe 2 fixed cell providers (may be because they can’t tell you if the tower will give you a decent speed until you unpack and install the system). How US gets so little for so much spent is really beyond me. So excited that at least somewhere sanity and quality prevail!!!
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  The US has one of the fastest average internet speed in the world. It beats pretty much every other western country, with only Denmark and Monaco being ahead. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed
  - Tepix 4y ago
    Umm.. no
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      You can also just check the source I've linked?
      - hedora 4y ago
        There's no way the median US download speed is over 100mbps. Also, that link doesn't consider upload bandwidth.
      - Tepix 4y ago
        Indeed, it shows many western countries with higher average bandwidth than the US.
thelittleone 4y ago
Wow... I remember frothing over the 128k ISDN at my office in the 90s. For perspective, an 8k video stream requires ~40-50Mbps[1]. Theoretically, 25Gbps is sufficient to stream ~500 * 8k streams concurrently. [1] https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Short-Cuts/Video-How-Much-Bandwidth-Will-You-Need-to-Deliver-8K-131687.aspx https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Short-Cuts...
JaggerJo 4y ago
Meanwhile in Germany the fastest connection is 100 MBit down.. 20 up
agsamek 4y ago
We have 500mbps for 50 people in the office in Poland (EU) and it seems fine. Ping under <1ms does the real job (this is a commercial connection). People don't watch movies but download Linux and other software on regular basis. We also do offline backups and this is the biggest bandwidth usage. Our servers are 1Gbps and the bandwidth is rarely the biggest bottleneck. I have 200/20 in my own office and the biggest problem is that it works unreliably with Microsoft Teams and Google very often. PS5 seems to have a 1Gbps interface. I wonder if 25Gbit has any impact and what is the real stability of it in the Switzerland and the connection to major DCs and services. Entire Internet just doesn't feel stable enough to use that bandwidth but maybe this is a problem here in Poland. Do you encounter problems with Teams or Meets in your countries?
Aeolun 4y ago
I saw this, and immediately went to check if my ISP does something similar. Lo and behold, I can get a 10G line, and in a little while, probably 20G. Then I realized that I don’t even come close to saturating the 2G I currently have. Cables are limited to 1Gbit, and the wifi doesn’t go higher than 500Mbit.
kfrzcode 4y ago
Here I am 3 months after move in and $5500 later and Charter STILL hasn't installed my 1 gb cable.
FullyFunctional 4y ago
That was a delightful write up. My first _personal_ Internet connection was in France and was a dial-up 56kb/s modem connection (I could saturate it! :) Just before moving from Denmark to USA I had dirt cheap 1 Gb/s cable network so I was floored to find that not only not generally available in Silicon Valley, but also generally much more expensive and less reliable. In _Silicon_ Valley! (Yes, in SF there are more options today, but in the original Silicon Valley in the south bay, options are very poor and I refuse to ever again deal with Comcast). My current provider (Sail Internet) provides a symmetric connection so I have experimented with cloud backup. The difference between my internal network (10G and some 100G) and the external (< 1G) is pretty sad. ADD: I'm so sick of hearing ("why do you need that" or "what's the point"). There are plenty of applications TODAY, but even if you don't have any, new ones will manifest themselves once the technology is available - it's the way technology works (who would have imagined that daily video conference would be a part of life?).
2ion 4y ago
What's impressive to me here is not the capacity but the price for the capacity. At allegedly 777 CHF per year this is a steal so far removed from my reality it's obscene.
- Bluecobra 4y ago
  If you make the assumption that they are using 100G switches or line cards with 32 ports, those ports can be broken out to 128x 25G ports. That comes out to ~$100,000 USD in revenue per 1U per year. Not too shabby.
- tonfa 4y ago
  And Init7 is solid quality (and probably the perfect ISP for people who like to have fun with their network), but not exactly cheap for Zurich. You can get like 10Gb/s for half the price with other ISPs.
flatearth22 4y ago
abridgett 4y ago
I wonder what systems the ISP has in place to avoid such networks becoming sthe source of DDoS attacks. Given the generally dire security of home routers (and understandably low security of most home networks/users) it feels a little like giving people far more power than most can safely wield.
- tonfa 4y ago
  It's a niche/small ISP, which mostly targets advanced users. Though for regular users, they can get 10Gb/s for half the price of init7 with other isps (but probably worse peering as mentioned in the post).
rdevsrex 4y ago
Ok, I knew I wanted to move to Switzerland, but now it's official :) Fortunately, my wife is from there, but we always lived in other countries. Hot Damn.
linuxhansl 4y ago
Hmm... I just downgraded my Internet because I did not feel like paying the cable fees/taxes (I do not watch cable or sports) and they came bundled with the higher speed. (You can now guess who my provider might be.) My guaranteed speed is just 50Mbit/s, and despite being a software engineer and streaming movies, I did not notice a difference. My son has to wait longer for his steam downloads sometimes. 25GBit/s is impressive, though, and if I could get it here without strings attached I'd probably go for it, too. BTW. My first experience was a dial-up model with 9600 baud, so maybe my expectations are just lower :)
machineleaning 4y ago
I don't get the "lack of use case" comments. There is no use case TODAY. But what does having 25Gbit fiber enable to be built TOMORROW? Shared photorealistic VR spaces immediately come to mind.
- SamuelAdams 4y ago
  Exactly, I’m wondering the same thing. Like, who cares “why”. The same reason Android supports a USB mouse. We build it because we can. Now if they can lower the cost of the network equipment that would be ideal.
lillecarl 4y ago
Latency means he will probably need at least 50 TCP streams to saturate this connection, how fast something blinks doesn't matter if protocols doesn't allow continuous blinking.
Linda703 4y ago
[dead]
AviationAtom 4y ago
I have a few different comments that came to mind from this post. The first one being ADSL/xDSL. ADSL is still very much alive in rural America. My sister pays about $50/mo for 6 Mbps ADSL. Having worked as a telephone tech, I can tell you that many people would be pretty surprised by the speeds that DSL is capable of. With a a new/good condition cable, and a VDSL2, or the like modem, even without bonding, you can exceed 100 Mbps. With a shorter line, and bonding, you can go well beyond that. The mention of PPPoE is interesting, because I recall having to use proprietary dialer software back in the day, before Windows and Linux baked in PPPoE, and home routers really weren't a thing. One would think PPPoE has gone by the wayside, but the aforementioned sister is forced to use it with Frontier. Trying to disable all the routing functions on the ISP-provided router, and get creds to setup PPPoE on a customer provided router, is somewhat of a pain. You'd think we moved passed it all with fiber, but I can personally say that AT&T does not work this way. They actually use 802.1x authentication on their network, where their gateway they force you to use has the certificates built in. It really then comes down to being only able to set up a 1:1 NAT with a public IP, but then your traffic is still routed through their gateway, not a true network bridge. Having AT&T even set generic PTR records for the /64 they assign you is unheard of, let alone getting them to delegate to you. It's a fact of life in the US, where few ISPs can actually operate in the broadband market, short of the megacorps.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Where I receive live an ADSL line maxes out at 6/0.75Mbps and it's painfully slow, especially if you need to upload anything. It's frustrating seeing everyone else with higher speeds when my location will probably never get broadband in my lifetime ignoring something like starlink.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
farzher 4y ago
in California the fastest internet available to me is 50Mb/s. and it constantly spikes to 1000ms pings. i saw a dude living miles off-grid in Sweeden with a fiber connection routed to his tiny house in the woods ...
jdrc 4y ago
high upload speeds is what will bring the decentralization we are looking for
Aragorn2331 4y ago
Another guy with the same connection ^^ https://henschel.network/dual-stack-router-with-ubuntu-20-04-lts/ https://henschel.network/dual-stack-router-with-ubuntu-20-04... https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/515d9bf5-2c10-4555-90ef-18e1144399a1 https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/515d9bf5-2c10-4555-90ef-1... https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/7de2e830-7737-4330-90d1-4e55074e1ca2 https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/7de2e830-7737-4330-90d1-4...

753 points by secure 4y ago

gigatexal 4y ago

I’m so envious.

xyst 4y ago

This is impressive. If everybody had data center like speeds to their home. Decentralization might actually work.

jagger27 4y ago

This is so depressing to read. I can’t imagine an ISP like this existing in Canada.

didibus 4y ago

If only one person has 25Gbit, it's not a drastic impact. But if 25Gbit becomes the norm, it means all new use cases can be delivered. 8k video streams at 15bit color ranges, games streaming assets over the wire, mounting file systems that live directly in the cloud, etc. I can't even think of it all probably. Maybe VR streaming and other things. Maybe we can finally have higher resolution gifs?

aetherspawn 4y ago

Our business has no access to anything like this in Australia. It would cost something like $25,000 per month to get this kind of connection. If we had this, it would allow us to literally grow at double or triple the speed.

eric4smith 4y ago

Here in Bangkok, Thailand 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up in Bangkok is around 650 Baht per month which is just under $20 USD. Now there is 2 Gbps up and down available which is slightly less than $40. Brah. USA/Canada/Australia is so far behind its not even funny anymore. Let's not even get started on things like banking.

intunderflow 4y ago

Sat in the UK with my 25 Mbps for £50 a month - definitely gives some perspective on things

system2 4y ago

This person is able download 5.4 day worth of data in 1 second that I was able to download with my 56k dialup internet back in the day.

jiveturkey 4y ago

Everyone is missing the fact that this is just the last mile speed. I would guess that the uplink is very heavily oversubscribed. Indeed, from TFA, his ISP is a boutique kind of ISP (at least in USA they are nearly nonexistent unless you are rural -- I happen to be and have similar access to my ISP) and he even had access to the POP. The edge switches only have a 4x40/100G uplink in this case. The connections can obviously be bonded but the ISP remarks on their own page that the uplink is "just" 100G, ie not utilizing the full capacity available to the hardware. This is great for sporadic (very high peak to average consumption), residential type of use. Sharing such a high speed link across many subscribers is great. But in no way is this capable of running high bandwidth streaming servers, datacenter-like, from your home, as some are suggesting. Just 4 customers like that would consume the entire bandwidth. No sane ISP would allow even 1 customer to use all their 25G, continuously, that they might argue they paid for. The peering/transit that the ISP has is also a hugely important factor to how "good" this 25G connection really is. I'm not knocking it -- I wish I could get even 100M. But at the end of the day, a 1G connection that many USA city dwellers can get will be just as useful as the provisioning of such will be vastly different than the provisioning of this 25G service.

jmakov 4y ago

The datahoarder and homelab community welcomes all the bandwidth you got, thank you.

ksec 4y ago

A lot of people are joking ( or not ) about 640Kb memory ought to be enough. Well the average computer system has the same 1Gbps Ethernet and 8GB Memory for the past 15+ years. And there are nothing on the current roadmap to suggest this is going to change in the next 8 years ( 2030 ). i.e The Power Law. With 1Gbps or 100MB/s you could download 6GB in a min, roughly the size of an OS update or with 10Gbps internet which isn't as far fetch as others have said in comments, it takes less than 10s to download the update. It then takes 15min if not more for the CPU to work those 6GB files before the update finishes. PCI-E 6.0 gets 8GB/s for 1x or 16GB/s for PCI-7.0. Ignoring the power / heat issue. We now have I/Os that are way quicker than how the CPU could response. The whole Software and Computer ecosystem may need a rethink to gain more performance.

traceroute66 4y ago

I smell marketing hype. Don't get me wrong, I'm super jealous and of course I'd love to have a 25Gbit connection at home. But I think we need to step back from the Kool Aid for a moment and ask ourselves: - What's the likelihood of the remote servers you are connecting to having a 25Gbit connection ? - Even if the servers do have >=25Gb connection, what are the chances of the server sysadmin allowing one user to hog a large chunk of capacity ? - Even *IF* the answer to the above two questions is positive, what are the chances of your magical 25Gbit ISP having sufficient backbone + peering + transit capacity to fulfill the 25Gbit to its users at all times ? I foresee a lot of contention/bottlenecking and basically a lot of reliance on "not everyone will be using it at the same time". I also suspect the small-print of the ISP could make for interesting reading. EDIT TO ADD: Found the relevant clause in their conditions: The Internet subscriptions for private customers are intended for normal personal use. Init7 reserves the right to temporarily or permanently restrict or discontinue the provision of services for connections whose data volume exceeds 0.5 petabyte (500 terabytes) in a period of 4 weeks, or to take another suitable measure. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to how long it takes to transfer 500TB on 25Gbit ;-)

_zoltan_ 4y ago

a lot of commenters asking why should take note that it costs exactly the same monthly as 1 or 10 gigabit. as for saturability, I had no issues to pull 25Gbit/s between .ch and .hu using bbr.

randomstate 4y ago

It feels surreal that I pay 100PLN/month (~25usd) for my symmetrical 1Gbit/s in Poland.

wdb 4y ago

Amazing, I can't even get 100mbit+ here in West London. the only way I can get faster internet is to pay a lot of money to get private fibre. I did see G.Network digging around near me. I am wondering if they easily support Mews houses

mickotron 4y ago

Fibre to Node connection in Australia max speed to my home is 29mbps. I have Starlink and 4G because our internet infrastructure here is abysmal.

gentleman11 4y ago

When we got fiber, our internet didn’t speed up. We just saw a monthly rate increase. The providers here throttle it so significantly that there isn’t any benefit, not even for upload. The plans that cost an extra $150 per month have far higher limits but that’s insane

judge2020 4y ago
What provider?
- gentleman11 4y ago
  Shaw in canada. Maybe Telus is better, I’m not sure
  - FredPret 4y ago
    Ah, Shaw. What a scourge. I wish we could get more competition in the market here
  - ChoGGi 4y ago
    Nope :(
  - mrstone 4y ago
    I'm on Telus gigabit fibre, for $69/mo. I've never once had issues with throttling, even when I was on Shaw (the 300mbps plan). What kind of throttling are you getting and in what use cases?
  - CamJN 4y ago
    I'm on telus fibre, it's only fast within telus' local network because their peering is SHIT. So unless all you're going to do is speedtest all day long telus isn't going to help you.
GaelFG 4y ago
Which country if it not indiscreet ? I know internet access quality vary a lot between countries and I'm curious.

gaudat 4y ago

Holy shit how do I move to your place?

cm2187 4y ago

Not convinced by the use case section. Very few servers will allow you a full 25gbit download, let alone anything more than a 1gbit (and often less). And if you own the server on the other end, that sort of bandwidth comes at a cost. I think beyond 1gbit, the benefit become super marginal and the hardware expensive.

Thaxll 4y ago
Well you need to do some calculation first how much a single TCP stream can provide.
- iso1210 4y ago
  It's not 1998 any more, you've got multiple TCP streams, things like QUIC and other UDP based protocols, and of course good old fashioned window scaling which will go upto an 8gbit window, so as long as you've got an rtt under 300ms you'll be fine at 25gbit.
  - Thaxll 4y ago
    I thought window was pretty limited on modern OS?
    - iso1210 4y ago
      You'll encounter other limitations, like processing 2 million 1500 byte packets a second, which is possible but you need to make sure you have the grunt to process and the right types of options in the kernel http://tm.kit.edu/doc/2019-LCN-100g-tuning-authors-copy.pdf http://tm.kit.edu/doc/2019-LCN-100g-tuning-authors-copy.pdf
arcade79 4y ago
So, I installed my 1Gbit home network around 20 years ago... Quite frankly, I'd expected a 100Gbit uplink by now.
chrisseaton 4y ago

jonnylynchy 4y ago

On behalf of all tech-minded Americans, I would like to say... I hate you. I just got a notice in the mail that my ISP is "upgrading" their network so now I can pay $200 USD/month to get a whopping 2gbps, which I actually thought was pretty amazing until I read your post. So, thanks. In all seriousness, congrats! You made a good case for why one would need that much bandwidth. Also, we need to catch up here. :)

kingcharles 4y ago
AT&T called me. They said their technical guys think they might be able to upgrade the connection to my building from 1.5Mbps to 3Mbps if I want to sign-up with them. I'm in downtown Chicago.
- arcade79 4y ago
  I really, really hope you told them to fuck the hell off.
  - kingcharles 4y ago
    The guy on the phone was so cool. He was totally "in" on how hilariously awful it was that they could only get 1.5Mbps into my building. He had access to the system that let him see all the contracts of my neighbors and what connections they had and was floored that every building next me had gigabit.
FridgeSeal 4y ago
I feel you. Here in Australia: $90/month nets you “100/40mb”, which is really more like “~85mb down, 25 up but only a quiet night, if you’re next to the router, and it hasn’t rained within the last week”.
- joshschreuder 4y ago
  It’s much, much better than it used to be at least (depending on where you live + NBN technology choice of course). And yet still completely hamstrung by the mess the current government made of the original NBN plan. If you live in an area that can get HFC, FTTP, FTTN etc. it’s possible these days to get a pretty consistent 1000/50 for $150/month. Those fibre services are pretty stable in my experience, definitely a million times better than the old broadband which as you put got destroyed by bad weather and distance from the exchange.

Tepix 4y ago

Consider me drooling. I'm currently on 1000/50 cable internet, which is already quite nice. Telekom is laying fibre but it's not clear yet whether or not they will stop short of this house. Also i suspect it will be a while before they offer better than 1000/500 service.

jotm 4y ago
I hate asymmetric connections. You get gigabit download but something stupid like 20-100 Mbps upload? Just why... Upload speed matters just as much as download these days.
- bick_nyers 4y ago
  What really sucks is the ratios these cable companies go with, 1000/50 is a 20/1 ratio. Having something like 500/100 would be light-years better for the vast majority of people even though you would be sacrificing overall bandwidth. Perhaps it's a conspiracy to have less tech-savvy work-from-homer's keep bumping up their speed plan because their upload speed isn't up to snuff for video meetings. Either that or cable companies feel they need to compete on advertised download speeds with fiber, which is a losing battle.
- JaimeThompson 4y ago
  In the case of older versions of DOCSIS (cable) [1] didn't allow as many upload slots as download slots. However DOCSIS 4 does allow such connections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Throughput https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Throughput
  - geerlingguy 4y ago
    DOCSIS 3.1 can still use some improvements to eke out a lot more upload bandwidth too.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Because you have a single copper pair/coax cable with a finite bandwidth on it, and making a choice about how to split it. Eg, your tech and cable can support 40 Mbps. If you split that 20/20, your users will have trouble watching 4K video that wants 25 Mbps. Change that to 35/5, and for most people it'll actually work better. This issue goes away eventually as you either get a fiber for each direction, or you can just push terabits through fiber anyway, so there's plenty capacity to be symmetric without any compromises.

Klasiaster 4y ago

The speed aside there are multiple other positive aspects mentioned that serve as a role model for larger providers, sadly…

quercusa 4y ago

> fiber7 costs only 65 CHF per month and comes with a symmetric 1 Gbit/s connection. 65 CHF = US $67.89

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
Comparison data point: I pay 75.48 USD per month (including taxes) for Verizon FIOS gigabit fiber in NYC.
denysvitali 4y ago
You have to consider Swiss salaries / cost of living in Switzerland too...
sschueller 4y ago
In Zürich city a law was passed to pull fiber into every home. The fiber is serviced by the electric and partially the largest phone company. Any provider can use the network and therefore the fees a low. If you live outside the city you may not be so lucky and spend 100+ on maybe 500mbit internet. Init7 is also currently in a legal fight with swisscom because swisscom wants (has already started) to pull some alternative fiber that doesn't directly connect the customer to the pop therefore preventing competitors offering faster service than swisscom. The small cost savings that swisscom has is a huge problem for future upgrades and requires power in underground shafts. Not very green when you could pull the fibers directly.

thejosh 4y ago

My first internet, and my internet for up until my teenage years until ~2005 was 14.8kbps, we couldn't get faster than that for some reason. When we got 2Mbit I was AMAZED. The entire internet now actually semi-worked. Now in 2022 I have gigabit (down, 50Mbit up) internet, with WiFi6 on my devices it's amazing (I'm hardwired for my desktop). Aussie Broadband here in Australia is my current ISP, and they are amazing. FTTP was a major upgrade. But the thing which hurts where I am (Perth, AU) is the latency to everything, not the download speeds :).

raverbashing 4y ago

It's crazy that at this speeds (and I mean, it's not a new thing) your internal infrastructure can be the bottleneck You have 100Mbit internet? Cool, your 54Mbit only WLAN devices are now the bottleneck. But now it's your 10GB ethernet that's the limit.

dale_glass 4y ago
You easily run into problems even before that. I just upgraded to 10GB networking in my house and the old desktop I have hanging around mostly for guest use tops out at around 6 Gbps. The CPU just can't handle more than that. Granted, it's a 10 year old, cheap CPU with integrated video, so it was never much good. But still, it works just fine for web browsing. And of course hard disks get 200MB/s on the very rare occasion, and often a good amount less than that. Even SSDs are limited by SATA's maximum of 6 Gbps, so make a plan for upgrading everything to NVMEs.

jotm 4y ago

Damn, that's impressive. Technically I could get 2Gbps with the two providers running their own fiber in the neighborhood. But I don't even fully use one gigabit connection, running a torrent client is about the only thing that can do it. Any ideas welcome :D Curious thing, the ISPs don't oversell even though they easily could. I get exactly what I pay for, speed is never below ~940Mbps (down or up), and uptime has been stellar.

lostcolony 4y ago
Yeah; there really aren't any great use cases I can think of for more than 1 gbps to the home at the moment. A 4k stream runs ~25 mbps, a 100 GB game download will tend to cap out before saturating the connection and still take ~15 minutes (hardly a wasted evening if you have to wait for it). At 2 Gbps, if you actually saturated the connection downloading something, you'd better have an SDD, since you'll be downloading faster than a HDD can write. More bandwidth may be -nice-, for the few services that can take advantage of it (I'm not sure PSN, Steam, etc, even will), but it's hardly a game changer for home use. Even the backup/transfer cases he lists I'd hope are transferring diffs, which would likely make the speed increase unnoticeable. But, of course, I'd still love 25 gbps fiber to the home just because.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  How about remote work? Back when covid19 started, we all went home, the office closed, and then we had a server failure. And I spent multiple days downloading stuff to back it up before reinstalling the machine, because there was not enough spare storage inside the office. If you work with VM disk images even 1 Gbps starts feeling a tad sluggish.
  - lostcolony 4y ago
    What about remote work? Why the heck are you downloading stuff to hardware located -at your house-, and not a datacenter, another office, the cloud (someone else's datacenter :P), etc? I work with VMs. Disk images stay in the datacenter, and occasionally get sent between datacenters. They don't live at my house.

martini333 4y ago

25 Gb/s to the internet providers speedtest server is kinda cute. But most CDN's limit is much, much lower.

k8sToGo 4y ago
That's fine. No one said you need to use it all up in one connection.

k8sToGo 4y ago

My experience with fast internet has been that most CDNs are just not routed well and are quite slow (especially Microsoft). Only a few good ones allow me to saturate my Gbit internet. Not sure what I would do with 25 Gbit though. What I do enjoy is that rsync.net is using the same ISP so I can max out my upload to them.

jotm 4y ago
Many servers specifically throttle single connections, which is why there's stuff like JDownloader and browser add-ons that download the same file in several parts over multiple connections
- k8sToGo 4y ago
  I use aria2 and often it works. But I can't do that if the download is happening inside an application (e.g. MS Flight Simulator).

explaingarlic 4y ago

I'm really unsure as to whether it's worth investing whatsoever in consumer grade fiber connections. My speeds are advertised as 1Gbits down and 100Mbits up. On speed tests, I get much higher downloads (~1.5Gbits per second). This might be because it's not capped properly, and I live in a place that they're still building houses in (I imagine that our "box" is not yet saturated). However, I rarely max that speed out in any download. Video games on Steam max out at maybe 65 megabytes per second. wget commands go from between 10 megabytes per second to maybe 40 max. The thing is, I know that the speed tests are legit, because I can do several of these things at once and none of them lose any speed.

k8sToGo 4y ago
I think it has to do with the routing and peering. I can get full speed on Steam, Origin, but not from Microsoft, for example.
- msarchet 4y ago
  I have gotten 800+ downloading games onto my xbox
- explaingarlic 4y ago
  Yeah, maybe. My connectivity feels pretty intermittent to some ASNs, but I don't know if that's what changes between a good peering connection and a bad one.
- selectodude 4y ago
  Microsoft’s CDN is awful. I’m in Chicago so my fiber connection literally terminates at an Akamai and Cloudflare edge. Steam, Apple, et al I routinely pull 100+ megabytes per second. Microsoft, I’m lucky if I get a third of that.
CraigJPerry 4y ago
I think you can now put 800 gigabit per second today, via commercially available kit, down a single strand of fibre installed back in the early 1980s. Copper or radio connections just don’t seem like as worthwhile an investment to me. I’m not saying it makes sense to have an 800gbit connection to a residential property but from a longevity, cost per mile, use of less rare materials, reduced rf interference or whatever, fibre just seems a better proposition to me.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zhdc1 4y ago

I had 10gb internet on what was essentially a shared connection when I lived in Zürich. That, along with a surplus server I literally housed in my shoe closet, gave me the firepower I needed to prototype out something that led to two research grants which now employ myself and a new PhD student. We discount technological investments like this as being “too much” and “unpractical”, but we forget that, even if it only one person in a hundred or a thousand take advantage of them, the impact can be enough to launch careers or start businesses with sizeable positive externalities.

kortilla 4y ago
What exactly did you do on 10gb that couldn’t be accomplished on 1gb?
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Also the fact that it would be cheaper for the people who need this tech to just rent out a VPS in a datacenter than to roll out 10gbps to every single person on the extremely rare chance someone needs it.
azeirah 4y ago
Please do tell us about your work!
- amelius 4y ago
  I'm guessing the work involves a web-crawler.
101008 4y ago
Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives. Even a low speed connection in a rural zone can achieve wonderful things. But I really wonder what was your prototype that needed that speed connection and that wouldn't work with something slower. Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work?

whinvik 4y ago

In neigbouring Germany, we had a lady from Deutsch Telekom asking us today if they should build a 250 Mbps line to our building!

fransje26 4y ago
Hahaha. And I'm sure the price is cheap. Only an arm and a leg. Oh. And your soul. And with the caveat that the 250 Mbps will only be available in the middle of the night, when everybody is sleeping. After having had to pay Vodafone 50 euros a month for 10Gb of data through LTE for years, due to the impossibility of getting any connection faster than 3Mbps (even as a business), we are also, through the miracles of governmental financial incentives and magnificent planning (only 2 years late), getting the joys of high speed internet in our area. 100 Mbps. Hoooray! Telecommunication in Germany is a cancerous, price-gouging cartel that needs to be eradicated at all costs, packaged on the first-available Falcon Heavy flight, and propelled at escape velocity out of our solar system.
dx034 4y ago
Telekom is cancer, especially their peering. 250mbits sounds fine though, I haven't upgraded from that yet, there are way too few instances where it restricts me to pay anything more.

Mikeb85 4y ago

Canada here. 500 Mbps is like $80/month lol.

mrstone 4y ago
It's all pretty negotiable. I pay $69/mo for gigabit fibre through Telus.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Where? I pay 60$ for mildly spotty 120mbps and that was very good deal a year ago. It's pretty sad considering I live in Montréal. I know western Canada has way better internet/data prices though
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  Telus fibre not available where I live only Shaw. And it's not bad all considered, just expensive compared to the rest of the world.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

I'm thrilled with my gigabit fiber from Sonic. I wonder how many of their customers even get the full gigabit though; if they are connecting with WiFi they almost certainly aren't. And even ethernet is still not reliably gigabit in homes with older wiring. But this 25gbit is in another category. I'm impressed the Ookla speedtest server can deliver 25Gbit. The 25gbit network card he mentions costs $400-$500, that's cheaper than I would have guessed.

greenburger 4y ago
Yeah, I’m a new Sonic customer and got their 10gbit service. $40/mo beats any of the other three providers pricing for much lower bandwidth. However, I only have a gigabit router, so most of that isn’t utilized, assuming that’s true for all my neighbors as well (Sonic’s only offering here is 10gbit)
- kbenson 4y ago
  Just think of it as future proofing, like installing higher rated cabling in a house than you'll use initially. The cost isn't any more for you to have 10Gbit in this case, so for you it's just knowing that you could buy more equipment for your end at any time to use it if you needed, and not have to wait for a service change. :)
Bud 4y ago
I had Sonic fiber for a few years, in the Bay Area. I always got the full gigabit, basically. Speedtest always showed around 940Mbps up and down. This was over Ethernet, since I always ran Ethernet into the Thunderbolt dock for my main Mac. Usually got around 500-600Mbps over WiFi on a fast device.
charcircuit 4y ago
>I'm impressed the Ookla speedtest server can deliver 25Gbit. It's not surprising since is testing against his ISP's test server.

shasts 4y ago

I fondly remember the days in 2010 in Zurich, and cablecom had good functional internet, don't remember the speed. Then I moved to Germany in 2013, and it surprised me that I can't have internet in my apartment for the next two months, because the technician appointment and when I finally received, I got a meagre DSL connection with bad ping and 32 Mbits. It has gotten better over the years, but even the best available consumer connection is 1000 Mbits down and 200Mbits up. Majority of the tech Germans I meet are embarassed about the internet and telecom infra, being an advanced economy. Hopefully the new government fixes things.

dx034 4y ago
1000/200mbit sounds more than enough to me, even for a family. I could have 1gbps but decided to stay with 250mbit because I just don't see how it would benefit me. Cloud vms are so cheap and tend to have lower ping to other services, so I go there if I really need faster speed. I do agree about the general state of German internet connectivity though. However, seems to be catching up quickly, especially in rural areas.
imtringued 4y ago
Germany is improving at exactly the rate it needs to. Yeah sure it's definitively behind but it's not stagnating like the US.

panick21_ 4y ago

I bought the same connection. It was the same monthly price, just a slightly higher upgrade fee. I have not actually upgraded my router at all so I not profiting as much from it as I could. Still, love init7 and their service.

LinuxBender 4y ago

25gb/s is nice. I am envious of locations that have a modern local fiber network and more options. My 2 fiber connections are 500mb/s and each cost $350 to activate, $150/mo each not counting the costs for static IP's. Trenching it in was $3k. I'm more than happy with 500mb but the price could be lower. For my specific use cases it is less about bandwidth and more about latency/peering arrangements. I would personally be happy splitting as low as 100mb/s across many devices with fq_codel or cake and cdg on my little firewalls. I can't really complain though. The alternatives here are 4G LTE or Starlink.

101008 4y ago

Stupid question, but if your hard drive cannot write 25Gbit/s, how is it handled? I don't knwo anything about SSD so maybe 25Gbit/s is easily achievable, just talking from my experience of copying from a USB Drive to my local disk.

xmaayy 4y ago
You'd need raid SSD's or a sizeable RAM disk to make sustained use of it. Very few SSD's support full 25GB/s
dereknance 4y ago
I would imagine an NVMe SSD would be capable of handling most, if not all, of that throughput for sequential reads and writes.
Bud 4y ago
The fastest internal SSD in a Mac now can write at 3.3GB/sec, so it would be able to keep up with 25Gbps connections, barely. Average SSD write speeds are usually around 1GB/sec these days, but most folks could build a RAID of several SSDs and be able to keep up with such a connection, as well. I would also assume that most folks who would bother to install 25Gbps, or anything close, probably have a lot of devices in their homes to take advantage of it at once. Personally, I find it very hard to saturate the 1Gbps link I have. Most servers won't push more than around 200Mbps out to you, and I'm basically never doing 5 tasks at once that are that bandwidth-intensive. But it's nice to have some overhead, just for fun.
Youden 4y ago
Modern SSDs can handle it: 25Gbps is ~3GB/s, which you can do with a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD. PCI 4.0 NVMe SSDs can do 5.1GB/s, or ~41Gbps.
Lammy 4y ago
I’ve had great results sticking a single Optane NVME drive in front of my 8x8GB array of spinning rust via ZFS’s built-in cache facility. I’m only doing write caching and only using 32GiB of my much larger drive (I forget exactly how large lol). That was my comfort zone for how much data I’m willing to lose if something very bad happens to the NAS during a write, and I like giving it a bunch of spare flash space for wear-leveling. https://www.servethehome.com/exploring-best-zfs-zil-slog-ssd-intel-optane-nand/ https://www.servethehome.com/exploring-best-zfs-zil-slog-ssd... is several years old but still a good read.

agilob 4y ago

What is the use case for this? How are you doing to utilise it? According to fast.com I have 29Mbps and I see no reason why I would need to go faster now. And to be said, I'm WFH all the time, I have a homelab and we stream movies, not once since pandemic started I had a thought I might need faster broadband. My home router has SFP port.

thoughtpalette 4y ago
I was also under the assumption fast.com was the standard speed test as speedtest.net had some ISP (xfinity) affiliations (in the US(?))

louwrentius 4y ago

At 25 Gbit/s your computer may likely not be able to keep up, unless you have NVME based SSD. We are talking about 3GB/s+ which my 24-drive NAS (old) can’t get beyond 2.6 GB/s with ZFS. Absolute madness. But this kind of bandwidth isn’t meant for a single machine.

dx034 4y ago
In the end it's just an arms race with basically no use cases. You could call it future proofing but the switches will have to be replaced before such speeds could realistically be used (8k/16k video or sth like that?) Having fiber without pon is great, means no new infrastructure for decades. But anything above 10gbits will be too much to use realistically, even for smaller companies.
- kbenson 4y ago
  Well, the use case is multiple people doing things at the same location that add up to more than 1Gbit. For example, think of the connection on a switch with mostly 1Gbit ports but one or two 10Gbit or 25Gbit ports for the uplink. Switches such as this will also have a backplane capable of doing more than 1Gbit. Individually no one person/port can use more than a gigabit and can't saturate the switch in this case, but combined they could utilize far more.

mdb31 4y ago

25Gb/s is just overkill for residential use. It's really cool that's it's available, but I fail to see a use case over my 500Mb/s home connection. Even for the servers that I manage and that are bandwidth-heavy, 10Gb/s is way overprovisioned for now. WiFi goes up to 1Gb/s, if you're lucky. Sure, some WiFi-6 APs have a 2.5Gb/s connector, but that's not what you want or need, unless you're a high-density enterprise. WiFi-6E will possibly improve that a bit, but it will take WiFi-8 to get anywhere close to saturation. Wired, you can do 10Gb/s for server systems, which are, amongst other things very loud and not very suitable for placement anywhere near humans. 2.5Gb/s support is spotty, and 1Gb/s still the only thing that works reliably. So, exactly which residential application requires 25Gb/s is not very clear. Yes, it's cool, but not very useful, and faulting manufacturers (especially in times of crippling supply-chain limitations) for not fully supporting it is questionable.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
oynqr 4y ago
In what world is 10GbE only available for servers?
- mdb31 4y ago
  Without drowning in fan noise? This world... Sure, I guess you can get a Mac Studio, or some other 'workstation' class PC, but your switch will still need to be within a few meters of that endpoint, and it's not going to be very green nor silent. 2.5Gb/s can easily be done with a lot of laptops and workstations these days; 10 Gb/s isn't quite there yet (and 25, 40 and 100Gb/s are definitely in the server-only fiber-or-DAC-only realm)
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Mikrotik makes a whole bunch of 10G hardware. The 8 port ones are fanless and have a heatsink on the back, and the 16 port model has a fan that only gets switched on when needed. I have one sitting behind me and it's been off all day. It's also easy to open and replace the fan with something less noisy. Just remove a few screws, it's a standard size with a normal connector on it. There's also big external heatsink so you could rig up a big, slow, fan to help it out a bit. If you want to be green by the way, use fiber/DAC. The 10G copper SFP+ modules are power hungry, and Mikrotik recommends not placing them next to each other. Also the extra power draw is likely to result in fan use if you have a lot of them.

zahma 4y ago

No %#*^ing way is he saturating a 25gbit connection to download a PS5 game — not on Sony’s EMEA servers anyway. He’d download the largest PS5 game out there (Borderlands at 50GB) in a minute anyway — probably before he could reach the full 25gbit. On a gigabit connection, he could download Borderlands in under 7 minutes. If that’s too long too wait, then having a faster connection isn’t this guy’s problem. The only use case I can think of would be bit torrent where lots of peers housed in server farms could lead to full saturation. I’ve seen download speeds at 150MB/s. That’s still a measly 1.2Gbit. But even when you’re talking about downloading remuxed 2160p files (~50-75GB) or the occasional collection (~100-200GB), I don’t see the need since it takes time to connect to the swarm and saturate those connections. Unless of course you want to seed it to the whole world. Cool to have such big pipes, and I’m glad Switzerland is doing some good for science and proving to other ISPs that there’s profit to be had in avoiding rate limiting, but this is so wildly unnecessary.

thfuran 4y ago
>On a gigabit connection, he could download Borderlands in under 7 minutes. If that’s too long too wait, then having a faster connection isn’t this guy’s problem Why should he have to wait several minutes?
arcade79 4y ago
First off, I trust Stapelberg, as I had him as an intern ~10 years ago :P Secondly, I'd like to point out that I wired up my house for 1Gbit about 20 years ago. And I've been frustrated about the lack of home equipment for 10Gbit for about 15 years. I mean, I reached download speeds of 150MB/s about ~15 years ago. What The Actual Fuck. No, I don't live in the US, nor the Neterlands, nor Switzerland.
jshier 4y ago
Borderlands at 50GB isn't the largest PS5 game. I don't know what is but Horizon Forbidden West was ~90GB.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  The last spiderman was something around 200gb, and I think call of duty is even larger, but i don't play that. Their point still stands though: the download servers bandwidth usually throttles below gigabit, so it's gonna be hard to saturate that line today

yokoprime 4y ago

I have 1000/1000 fiber i my Oslo apartment. Pointless most of the time, especially since i only run gigabit network.

mastax 4y ago

Does anyone have a good primer about optical networking links? Single and multimode fiber, connectors, transcievers, etc. When and why you would choose different technologies, how much they cost, etc. I'm realizing that I have a large hole in my knowledge there. Google is full of mid-tier SEO garbage as usual.

iptrans 4y ago
Everything you wanted to know about optical networking - but were afraid to ask https://www.nanog.org/news-stories/nanog-tv/top-talks/tutorial-everything-you-always-wanted-know-about-optical-networking/ https://www.nanog.org/news-stories/nanog-tv/top-talks/tutori... You can check pricing on any of the many online stores, such as Fiberstore. r/fiberoptics for questions and discussions

mchusma 4y ago

For me it was the 2ms ping that had me jealous. After maybe 200 mbs I would trade almost all bandwidth for more latency.

toast0 4y ago
> I would trade almost all bandwidth for more latency. Well it's easy to get more latency ;)
- mchusma 4y ago
  Sorry. Better latency :)
mrweasel 4y ago
It nice that 25Gbps is available, but I’d rather that ISPs started to lower prices, rather than upgrading speeds. I just cancels my 500mbps, because I now have to pay myself, 200mbps is plenty for online meetings, ssh and browsing.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sylware 4y ago

With a simple and lean signaling p2p protocol, with sufficient nodes at that speed (and support of diffserv), popular live streamers with a few thousands of viewers could part from twitch/youtube and similar. For broadcast, namely the scale above (for instance a public TV channel), if I recall properly, IPv6 has many broadcast IPs... just need the IAPs of a "telecommunication zone" (state, country, etc) to manage to work together at that level. I think IPv6 multicast is "too much" for IAPs to handle though (the whole "subscription"/"unsubscription" propagation for domestic users, not limited to CDNs only).

sylware 4y ago
DOH! Correcting myself in the use case of a public TV channel, IP broadcast does not help here (would generate traffic for no users), only IP multicast would handle it properly. Namely, under the authority of the "local" telecommunication regulator, multicast IPs would be statically allocated for all IAPs to provide to users, and not only CDNs, efficiently distributing content like public TV channels (for a public TV channel, probably a high bandwidth IP and a low bandwidth IP, etc). I don't know the real reasons why this is not done, the IP multicast "subscribe/unsubscribe" state machine is not robust, etc?

fetzu 4y ago

Cool read ! Moved into a new apartment which (unbeknownst to me at first) also has the capability of 25 Gbps with init7, unfortunately that was before getting a locked-in into a 1 (or is it 2?) year contract with my current provider (1000/100 Mbps, so I can’t really complain). Looking forward to having that contract expire and upgrading though, but then the issue is going to be how to distribute all that bandwidth properly over the house (most devices I use are still 1 Gbps OOTB) :).

hdhdjdjd 4y ago

At my place residential 1gbps is $80/m, 2gbps $120, 5gbps $300 :-(

jnwatson 4y ago

“ The init7 engineer met me in front of the building and explained “Hey! You wrote my window manager!”” That’s so cool. Very cool he got to participate in the upgrade process. I had 1G up/down through FIOS (Verizon FTTH) but eventually downgraded to 500M because I was saving perhaps 10s a day for 50 bucks a month. There has to be a server at the other end willing to give you data that fast.

patte 4y ago
We were honored to have him and he was actually of real help ;)

ec109685 4y ago

In the linked blog post to init7 (translated), it says this: “Backhaul means the return of the data to the backbone, i.e. to the connecting area of the network. The backbone connects the various subnets. Each Fiber7 pop is newly connected with at least 100Gbit/sec backhaul capacity, which corresponds to 10 to 50 times over-provision” Is that a normal over provisioning rate for an internet connection? It seems like each pop can only support four people at maximum speed before bandwidth would drop. https://blog.init7.net/de/neue-infrastruktur/ https://blog.init7.net/de/neue-infrastruktur/

secure 4y ago
It’s not just normal, init7 is doing better than many big players in this regard. For comparison: init7 POPs used to be connected with 10 Gbit/s “only”, so even 10 people maxing out their Gigabit line would saturate the uplink. This turned out to never be a problem over the years, I would always get maximum speed. The average usage is very low, in part also because transfers complete so quickly.
Bluecobra 4y ago
I’m sure if they are a decent ISP and observe constant congestion on an uplink they would just upgrade it (e.g. create a port channel with two 100G links).

mmaunder 4y ago

The challenge with anything above a gig is the LAN. 10gig+ switches and SFP modules are expensive for consumers. So is the client hardware. We use thunderbolt 3 on our macs with ATTO Thunderlink to get 40Gbps locally and they’re kinda the only option and their hardware is bulky, expensive and their software sucks. Also config on Mac is awkward. There’s also some weirdness when you upgrade to that speed into a backbone with sub 10ms latency where, for example, Teamspeak’s servers kept booting us because a security mechanism thought we were doing something naughty. We had to use a VPN to connect to add back latency.

moondev 4y ago
An alternative to the Thunderlink is a TB3 -> PCIe expansion box. Then you can use whatever card you like without need for additional software.
AdrianB1 4y ago
I just upgraded some of my home network to 10 Gbps; it was way cheaper than I thought: - 3 NICs with SPF+ at ~ $45 a piece - 1 switch with 4 SFP+ and 1 RJ45@1Gbps: $140 - 1 switch with 2 SFP+ and 8 x RJ45@1Gbps: $100 - ~ $100 for all the DACs and AOCs So I have the backbone and 3 computers @ 10 Gbps and a number of other devices left at 1 Gbps, all for $500. This is just because I have many devices connected and some longer optic cables instead of DACs, otherwise it would be just half of that. But yes, going to 25 Gbps is a different game, probably 5x the price or more.
- hedora 4y ago
  What's the power consumption on that stuff? Last time I checked 10GBit switches were drawing high 100's of watts.
  - glowingly 4y ago
    The specs of the two switches could be the Mikrotik CRS305 and the CSS610. Probably less than 20W under load (assuming DAC or SFP+ SR Multimode). My setup has a CRS309 (8 SFP+) and CSS610, and it's 12W with almost all ports active (though not much load).

annoyingnoob 4y ago

Looks like the speed tests revealed test providers with 10G connections, the 25G connection could fully saturate the test host. It is unusual for a single client to have more bandwidth than some services.

andrecarini 4y ago

As someone shopping around for a FTTH offering (to get out of my current DOCSIS plan) how can I figure out which routers are compatible with the ISP's GPON? I've had phone calls with them and the support/sales reps have no idea. They provide their own router+AP box that takes the fiber and spits out WiFi and Ethernet, but how would I go about replacing that? Their hardware is obsolete, insecure, outdated and just all-around poor! I know I could set it to bridge and place my own router in between, but I'd love to just replace their box instead. As far as I could figure out on my own, the best bet would be getting a EdgeRouter X SFP and then plugging in a compatible SFP module. Is that right? How would one figure out which SFP module to buy? On top of all that: do ISPs run proprietary handshake stuff on top of it, where even if the physical connection is correct, the ISP refuses working with your box? or is it just like the old ADSL days when all you needed was just a PPPoE stack?

kruptos 4y ago
At my ISP we offer XGSPON/GPON and we have to use our equipment for the ONT (In our case Adtran). We have adtran specific handshake stuff that we have to manage. Your ISP might offer to just use their ONT and put it in bridged mode so you can use your own router/ap. There are ONT SFPs that contain everything you need to connect back to the OLT. Maybe you can ask your ISP if that is supported?

gilbetron 4y ago

AT&T can only do 50Mbps to my house. Three orders of magnitude less than this person. "Fortunately" I also have Comcast which does a mighty 1.2Gbps. Both suck so much. But AT&T tells me not to worry, it has fiber rolling into my neighborhood. I know it must be true because they've been telling me that for the past 5+ years!

404mm 4y ago

Firstly … 25Gbit symmetrical … WOW. Secondly - as a person living my whole life in IT - both passion and professionally - I have no idea what would 25Gbit be good for. I’m currently paying about $80 for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and have the option to upgrade to 5Gbit for about $180 but it seems so pointless. Here is the reasoning behind my grumpy opinion: 1. Living in a home with Cat5 throughout so the best I can do is to route 1Gbit. Running cables in multilevel (American) homes is a major PITA. 2. My Wi-Fi (802.11ax) is heavily affected by homes around me so only one AP can run with 80MHz channel width and the rest is 20-40MHz. Throughput ends up being somewhere between 150Mbit-500Mbit, depending on where you are. 3. I have a few smaller servers running ..stuff. The trouble is not about server performance or bandwidth.. it’s about reliability. Running any business on consumer line (in the USA) is just signing up for trouble. (Eg. “Is your line down because your modem received a fault firmware? No worries, the tech is going to be there within next 4 days to check your cables…”). 4. Things like game downloads on PS5 .. yes, they are amazingly fast (even on 1Gbit. They install faster from internet than from the built-in BD-ROM). But many games need to also “install” (whatever that means on PS5) and that takes 2x the time of download anyway. I can live with that once a month. 5. Big fan of streaming services, however many providers limit bitrate on their side so I am still watching the sometimes blurry 4k … Back to original question and with genuine curiosity - what is 25Gbit for???

Sakos 4y ago
> Back to original question and with genuine curiosity - what is 25Gbit for??? What a pointless question. I wish people would stop worrying about this instead of simply making it possible, so we can figure out what to do with it.
- 404mm 4y ago
  … but that’s what I’m asking. What can I do with it? As I mentioned above, I have 1Gig and can go up to 5Gig. What can I do with it??
  - arcade79 4y ago
    You can start a company, as a private person, and expect everything to work when you run it from home. Just as if you were to run it from anywhere else.

dontcare007 4y ago

I live outside Atlanta and pay $100/mth for <50M...

Someone1234 4y ago

I'm in the US, and I could upgrade from 1 Gbps ($50/month) to 10 Gbps for $200/month. These are symmetrical speeds. That's because of fiber was built out as a community project, rather than waiting for the existing ISP duopoly (who were paid millions of dollars by the federal government, to do exactly this, but didn't). The reason I haven't, isn't that more isn't better, it is that equipment costs and hassle to deliver 10 Gbps around the residence is a giant PITA as the article kind of demonstrates. If 2.5 Gbps ethernet equipment becomes more common and cost-effective, I'd definitely consider the 10 Gbps offering but until then, it isn't worth $1K or more to get prepared.

vinay_ys 4y ago

I expect the 25Gbps link to be over-subscribed. Without minimum bandwidth guarantees, with 48Y4C * 2 switch and 100Gbps backhaul to the whole PoP (with minimum 64 customers for it to break-even), I suspect the sustained bandwidth will fluctuate wildly. In the worst case scenario, each customer may get a sustained bandwidth less than 50Mbps. Of course the big advantage is burst bandwidth is much higher.

Biganon 4y ago

TIL the creator of i3 is a fellow Swiss

denysvitali 4y ago

Swisscom customer (and employee) here, opinions are my own of course. They recently called me to upgrade my fiber connection from 1 Gbps to 10Gbps for free (every customer with a compatible connection gets it, AFAIK). I have to admit that, although the network is indeed faster (on the speed tests and file transfers), I really don't see the point quite yet. Considering that: - Most of the devices I use are anyways connected to WiFi 6 - Reaching a 10Gbps peak is highly unlikely - Most of my ethernet ports are anyways at most 1Gbps - Most of the servers won't serve you more than 1Gbps anyways I do not really consider this a must-have upgrade for a residential customer, especially if you live alone / less than 4 people. On top of that, as demonstrated by these tests, servers aren't quite there yet, and the 10Gbps / 25Gbps you are getting are not fully dedicated to your connection. Don't get me wrong, I love to be able to use the fastest internet I can - but realistically speaking this is just useful in a few specific cases. If you are hosting your own server at home, a 10 / 25 Gbps upload is definitely interesting though. It a nice thing to have already, and I'm really thankful to live in a country where I have the privilege of having such a luxury, but as of today a >1Gbps connection is overkill (heck, for most of the stuff even a >100Mbps is overkill sometimes).

lukasLansky 4y ago
My ethernet is also capped at 1 Gb/s for most of my computers. The 10 Gb/s connection is still useful as it makes sure that things running at different devices won't affect each other. Streaming won't affect games won't affect work-related video calls. It's great.
- denysvitali 4y ago
  Yes, in that sense you'd have a "dedicated" 1Gbps for each device. But realistically, how often do you need that? I don't know about you, but the only time I would reach such a peak would be in case I download something huge while watching Netflix at 4k (which I don't have) and while at the same time downloading an update for my phone and a game for the PS5 (which I don't own). I would argue that the likelihood of all the above things happening at the same time is quite low, at least for me :)

sologoub 4y ago

Swiss 26 Gbit/s symmetrical… while in US getting 1Gbit/s down is a minor miracle and anything resembling that up is downright impossible. My area in a major VHCOL metro area has a wonderful choice of 1 cable provider and maybe 2 fixed cell providers (may be because they can’t tell you if the tower will give you a decent speed until you unpack and install the system). How US gets so little for so much spent is really beyond me. So excited that at least somewhere sanity and quality prevail!!!

mardifoufs 4y ago
The US has one of the fastest average internet speed in the world. It beats pretty much every other western country, with only Denmark and Monaco being ahead. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed
- Tepix 4y ago
  Umm.. no
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    You can also just check the source I've linked?
    - hedora 4y ago
      There's no way the median US download speed is over 100mbps. Also, that link doesn't consider upload bandwidth.
    - Tepix 4y ago
      Indeed, it shows many western countries with higher average bandwidth than the US.

thelittleone 4y ago

Wow... I remember frothing over the 128k ISDN at my office in the 90s. For perspective, an 8k video stream requires ~40-50Mbps[1]. Theoretically, 25Gbps is sufficient to stream ~500 * 8k streams concurrently. [1] https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Short-Cuts/Video-How-Much-Bandwidth-Will-You-Need-to-Deliver-8K-131687.aspx https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Short-Cuts...

JaggerJo 4y ago

Meanwhile in Germany the fastest connection is 100 MBit down.. 20 up

agsamek 4y ago

We have 500mbps for 50 people in the office in Poland (EU) and it seems fine. Ping under <1ms does the real job (this is a commercial connection). People don't watch movies but download Linux and other software on regular basis. We also do offline backups and this is the biggest bandwidth usage. Our servers are 1Gbps and the bandwidth is rarely the biggest bottleneck. I have 200/20 in my own office and the biggest problem is that it works unreliably with Microsoft Teams and Google very often. PS5 seems to have a 1Gbps interface. I wonder if 25Gbit has any impact and what is the real stability of it in the Switzerland and the connection to major DCs and services. Entire Internet just doesn't feel stable enough to use that bandwidth but maybe this is a problem here in Poland. Do you encounter problems with Teams or Meets in your countries?

Aeolun 4y ago

I saw this, and immediately went to check if my ISP does something similar. Lo and behold, I can get a 10G line, and in a little while, probably 20G. Then I realized that I don’t even come close to saturating the 2G I currently have. Cables are limited to 1Gbit, and the wifi doesn’t go higher than 500Mbit.

kfrzcode 4y ago

Here I am 3 months after move in and $5500 later and Charter STILL hasn't installed my 1 gb cable.

FullyFunctional 4y ago

That was a delightful write up. My first _personal_ Internet connection was in France and was a dial-up 56kb/s modem connection (I could saturate it! :) Just before moving from Denmark to USA I had dirt cheap 1 Gb/s cable network so I was floored to find that not only not generally available in Silicon Valley, but also generally much more expensive and less reliable. In _Silicon_ Valley! (Yes, in SF there are more options today, but in the original Silicon Valley in the south bay, options are very poor and I refuse to ever again deal with Comcast). My current provider (Sail Internet) provides a symmetric connection so I have experimented with cloud backup. The difference between my internal network (10G and some 100G) and the external (< 1G) is pretty sad. ADD: I'm so sick of hearing ("why do you need that" or "what's the point"). There are plenty of applications TODAY, but even if you don't have any, new ones will manifest themselves once the technology is available - it's the way technology works (who would have imagined that daily video conference would be a part of life?).

2ion 4y ago

What's impressive to me here is not the capacity but the price for the capacity. At allegedly 777 CHF per year this is a steal so far removed from my reality it's obscene.

Bluecobra 4y ago
If you make the assumption that they are using 100G switches or line cards with 32 ports, those ports can be broken out to 128x 25G ports. That comes out to ~$100,000 USD in revenue per 1U per year. Not too shabby.
tonfa 4y ago
And Init7 is solid quality (and probably the perfect ISP for people who like to have fun with their network), but not exactly cheap for Zurich. You can get like 10Gb/s for half the price with other ISPs.

flatearth22 4y ago

abridgett 4y ago

I wonder what systems the ISP has in place to avoid such networks becoming sthe source of DDoS attacks. Given the generally dire security of home routers (and understandably low security of most home networks/users) it feels a little like giving people far more power than most can safely wield.

tonfa 4y ago
It's a niche/small ISP, which mostly targets advanced users. Though for regular users, they can get 10Gb/s for half the price of init7 with other isps (but probably worse peering as mentioned in the post).

rdevsrex 4y ago

Ok, I knew I wanted to move to Switzerland, but now it's official :) Fortunately, my wife is from there, but we always lived in other countries. Hot Damn.

linuxhansl 4y ago

Hmm... I just downgraded my Internet because I did not feel like paying the cable fees/taxes (I do not watch cable or sports) and they came bundled with the higher speed. (You can now guess who my provider might be.) My guaranteed speed is just 50Mbit/s, and despite being a software engineer and streaming movies, I did not notice a difference. My son has to wait longer for his steam downloads sometimes. 25GBit/s is impressive, though, and if I could get it here without strings attached I'd probably go for it, too. BTW. My first experience was a dial-up model with 9600 baud, so maybe my expectations are just lower :)

machineleaning 4y ago

I don't get the "lack of use case" comments. There is no use case TODAY. But what does having 25Gbit fiber enable to be built TOMORROW? Shared photorealistic VR spaces immediately come to mind.

SamuelAdams 4y ago
Exactly, I’m wondering the same thing. Like, who cares “why”. The same reason Android supports a USB mouse. We build it because we can. Now if they can lower the cost of the network equipment that would be ideal.

lillecarl 4y ago

Latency means he will probably need at least 50 TCP streams to saturate this connection, how fast something blinks doesn't matter if protocols doesn't allow continuous blinking.

Linda703 4y ago

[dead]

AviationAtom 4y ago

I have a few different comments that came to mind from this post. The first one being ADSL/xDSL. ADSL is still very much alive in rural America. My sister pays about $50/mo for 6 Mbps ADSL. Having worked as a telephone tech, I can tell you that many people would be pretty surprised by the speeds that DSL is capable of. With a a new/good condition cable, and a VDSL2, or the like modem, even without bonding, you can exceed 100 Mbps. With a shorter line, and bonding, you can go well beyond that. The mention of PPPoE is interesting, because I recall having to use proprietary dialer software back in the day, before Windows and Linux baked in PPPoE, and home routers really weren't a thing. One would think PPPoE has gone by the wayside, but the aforementioned sister is forced to use it with Frontier. Trying to disable all the routing functions on the ISP-provided router, and get creds to setup PPPoE on a customer provided router, is somewhat of a pain. You'd think we moved passed it all with fiber, but I can personally say that AT&T does not work this way. They actually use 802.1x authentication on their network, where their gateway they force you to use has the certificates built in. It really then comes down to being only able to set up a 1:1 NAT with a public IP, but then your traffic is still routed through their gateway, not a true network bridge. Having AT&T even set generic PTR records for the /64 they assign you is unheard of, let alone getting them to delegate to you. It's a fact of life in the US, where few ISPs can actually operate in the broadband market, short of the megacorps.

charcircuit 4y ago
Where I receive live an ADSL line maxes out at 6/0.75Mbps and it's painfully slow, especially if you need to upload anything. It's frustrating seeing everyone else with higher speeds when my location will probably never get broadband in my lifetime ignoring something like starlink.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

farzher 4y ago

in California the fastest internet available to me is 50Mb/s. and it constantly spikes to 1000ms pings. i saw a dude living miles off-grid in Sweeden with a fiber connection routed to his tiny house in the woods ...

jdrc 4y ago

high upload speeds is what will bring the decentralization we are looking for

Aragorn2331 4y ago

Another guy with the same connection ^^ https://henschel.network/dual-stack-router-with-ubuntu-20-04-lts/ https://henschel.network/dual-stack-router-with-ubuntu-20-04... https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/515d9bf5-2c10-4555-90ef-18e1144399a1 https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/515d9bf5-2c10-4555-90ef-1... https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/7de2e830-7737-4330-90d1-4e55074e1ca2 https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/7de2e830-7737-4330-90d1-4...