Anyone else doing it? Do you like your gear? Ms. Lady Benjamin PD Cannon, ASCE 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC CEO ben@6by7.net "The only fully end-to-end encrypted global telecommunications company in the world.” FCC License KJ6FJJ Sent from my iPhone via RFC1149.
On Dec 24, 2020, at 5:44 PM, Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net> wrote: Anyone else doing it? Do you like your gear? Ms. Lady Benjamin PD Cannon, ASCE 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC CEO ben@6by7.net<mailto:ben@6by7.net> "The only fully end-to-end encrypted global telecommunications company in the world.” FCC License KJ6FJJ Sent from my iPhone via RFC1149. Copper 2.5 Gbps Multi-gig uplinks on Wifi 6 gateways are coming out in 2021 from most vendors. I am using XGS PON in trials and have been impressed with the speed and cost. Steven
On 12/24/20 7:13 PM, Steven Karp wrote:
Copper 2.5 Gbps Multi-gig uplinks on Wifi 6 gateways are coming out in 2021 from most vendors.
I am using XGS PON in trials and have been impressed with the speed and cost.
Pretty much this. XGS-PON seems to be "here now" and the costs on both the CO and CPE side have gotten down to where it's probably worth going straight to it (skipping GPON) in new deployments unless you think you can get away with just GPON for 5+ years. I'm not sure if it's worth overlaying existing GPON deployments yet, but we're getting close, and offering "multi-gig" is, while still not very useful from a practical point of view for most customers, a potential marketing advantage. I've been only recommending GPON for new, greenfield deployments in rural situations where expected speeds are low to begin with, density is low, and there may be a desire to push the optical link budget as it is a bit better than typical XGS-PON systems. That's been the case for about a year, now. Customer facing routers are not quite there, yet. I think Asus has one, but I've seen mixed reviews. And what's out now is still limited to 2.5GBASE-T and often only on the WAN port (LAN ports are still 1000BASE-T) meaning in practice customers can't get any more than gigabit speeds to a single endpoint (not that many endpoints can keep up, anyway) for that all-important speed test. One of my router vendors has been teasing me with a "true 10Gb" router due out 1Q 2021. I've been told to expect NBASE-T (1G, 2.5G, 5G, 10G) on both WAN and all LAN ports + 802.11ax "Wifi 6" with at least 5Gbps of real-world IPv4 throughput with NAT and essentially wire-speed IPv6 without NAT or content inspection at a realistic price point. I'll be interested to see what they actually deliver as that would make future-looking multi-gig deployments actually meaningful. Of course, you can replace XGS-PON with 10G-EPON if that's your preference. I actually kinda prefer the IEEE versions, but most of my vendors concentrate on the ITU/Bellcore stuff in North America, so GPON/XGS-PON it is. -- Brandon Martin
So here in New Zealand 2/2Gbs & 4/4Gbs XGS-PON has just been rolled out in conjunction with the existing GPON rollout (Currently 79% of the country). CPE is definitely an issue and the most popular way of dealing with it is to use the Nokia XS-250WX-A ONT as the RGW as well. Permissions on the ONT are a little bit of an issue right now but this is being actively worked on and should be sorted in the coming few months. The ONT provides one 10GBASET and 4 gig ports as well as 4x4AC wifi. Realistically I have found using a multigig switch is very much the way to go (Mikrotik CRS312-4C+8XG-RM in my case) as then you can use 2.5GBASET and 5GBASET to clients. 2.5G seems to work fine on any ratty old cat5E you already have and USB3 dongles can be had for $25 or so. 10GBASET is real picky on cabling and I have found that 2.5G and 5G work much better if you are not doing a complete re-cable of the site. Stand alone RGW's are hard to find, I'd be interested to hear if people have found anything smaller than the Mikrotik RB4011 or CCR's as well. People are using the Unify Pro's but they really don't perform at 4gig. Obviously wifi is not going to benefit much from XGSPON, but even then having that massive upload available is very nice. The biggest issue with these speeds as an ISP is trying to train the customers that the home setup that they have spent a bunch of money on is unlikely to give them pretty 4Gb/s speed tests as there are bottlenecks all over their personal devices. Here is the result of using the Nokia ONT and the Mikrotik Switch - https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/66e1df88-7d5d-4e72-94ca-3d159d7edf53 of note, only my 10G connected Linux server does this, all the various other devices struggle to "speedtest" faster than 2-3 gig, even the high end devices. -----Original Message----- From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+tony=wicks.co.nz@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Brandon Martin Sent: Friday, 25 December 2020 4:54 pm To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: 10g residential CPE On 12/24/20 7:13 PM, Steven Karp wrote:
Copper 2.5 Gbps Multi-gig uplinks on Wifi 6 gateways are coming out in 2021 from most vendors.
I am using XGS PON in trials and have been impressed with the speed and cost.
Pretty much this. XGS-PON seems to be "here now" and the costs on both the CO and CPE side have gotten down to where it's probably worth going straight to it (skipping GPON) in new deployments unless you think you can get away with just GPON for 5+ years. I'm not sure if it's worth overlaying existing GPON deployments yet, but we're getting close, and offering "multi-gig" is, while still not very useful from a practical point of view for most customers, a potential marketing advantage. I've been only recommending GPON for new, greenfield deployments in rural situations where expected speeds are low to begin with, density is low, and there may be a desire to push the optical link budget as it is a bit better than typical XGS-PON systems. That's been the case for about a year, now. Customer facing routers are not quite there, yet. I think Asus has one, but I've seen mixed reviews. And what's out now is still limited to 2.5GBASE-T and often only on the WAN port (LAN ports are still 1000BASE-T) meaning in practice customers can't get any more than gigabit speeds to a single endpoint (not that many endpoints can keep up, anyway) for that all-important speed test. One of my router vendors has been teasing me with a "true 10Gb" router due out 1Q 2021. I've been told to expect NBASE-T (1G, 2.5G, 5G, 10G) on both WAN and all LAN ports + 802.11ax "Wifi 6" with at least 5Gbps of real-world IPv4 throughput with NAT and essentially wire-speed IPv6 without NAT or content inspection at a realistic price point. I'll be interested to see what they actually deliver as that would make future-looking multi-gig deployments actually meaningful. Of course, you can replace XGS-PON with 10G-EPON if that's your preference. I actually kinda prefer the IEEE versions, but most of my vendors concentrate on the ITU/Bellcore stuff in North America, so GPON/XGS-PON it is. -- Brandon Martin
On 12/25/20 08:04, Tony Wicks wrote:
Stand alone RGW's are hard to find, I'd be interested to hear if people have found anything smaller than the Mikrotik RB4011...
Funny, that's the very unit I recommended as well in my previous post to Brandon :-). As reasonably-priced devices that will have half decent working code go (for 10Gbps, no less), it's hard to beat the Tik. I'd still never use them in production, but for home CPE's, you bet I would. Mark.
I Have an RB4011 and while it does work very well for the price it is not really practical for the sort of people who don't reside on this list. Firstly the single 10G port means you have to connect it via a separate 10G switch and then vlan the external connection to the ONT via another switch port. Secondly the physical format is great for those of us who love the idea of a passive cooling rack mount device but not so much the stick it on a shelf masses. Thirdly the interface has way too many knobs for anyone who does not know what MPLS stands for. -----Original Message----- From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+tony=wicks.co.nz@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Mark Tinka Sent: Friday, 25 December 2020 10:56 pm To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: 10g residential CPE On 12/25/20 08:04, Tony Wicks wrote:
Stand alone RGW's are hard to find, I'd be interested to hear if people have found anything smaller than the Mikrotik RB4011...
Funny, that's the very unit I recommended as well in my previous post to Brandon :-). As reasonably-priced devices that will have half decent working code go (for 10Gbps, no less), it's hard to beat the Tik. I'd still never use them in production, but for home CPE's, you bet I would. Mark.
On 12/25/20 21:57, Tony Wicks wrote:
I Have an RB4011 and while it does work very well for the price it is not really practical for the sort of people who don't reside on this list.
Which says what about 10Gbps-in-the-home practicality?
Firstly the single 10G port means you have to connect it via a separate 10G switch and then vlan the external connection to the ONT via another switch port.
That would typically be the ISP-facing side. Not your problem.
Secondly the physical format is great for those of us who love the idea of a passive cooling rack mount device but not so much the stick it on a shelf masses.
Again, where's that 10Gbps practicality for the home?
Thirdly the interface has way too many knobs for anyone who does not know what MPLS stands for.
Winbox is not too bad. I use it everyday for my little hAP ac2. That said, for US$199, this would be a steal - for the folk that reside on this list. Mark.
On Dec 25, 2020, at 9:16 PM, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.com> wrote:
I Have an RB4011 and while it does work very well for the price it is not really practical for the sort of people who don't reside on this list. Which says what about 10Gbps-in-the-home practicality?
Mark is right, you’re wrong. 10G home service is great. Everybody I know here in Paris has it. There’s just no particularly reason to drop down to 1G, for the EUR 10/month difference. -Bill
Another way to phrase the question (which was the subject of much dispute 30 years ago) is: Which would you rather have (I'll use modern speeds): 1gb flat rate 10gb metered Where metered 10gb could cost less than 1gb when you don't use it, or about the same at ~1gb, but more if you use >1gb? It's possible this pricing model is reawakening. Back then I argued the bigger pipe / metered was preferable. Then again it was mostly non-residential. But admittedly most seemed to prefer the lower speed unmetered. They preferred the billing predicatibilty and didn't like the idea that a "power user" (in the residential context that might be "kids") could jack up the bill. I suppose that depends a lot on what the actual prices of a flat-rate 1gb vs a fully saturated 10gb. If it's $50 vs $100/mo perhaps some would say ok I'll risk the $50 overage, if it's $50 vs $500/mo maybe not. And today we have bandwidth-shaping in most any router/cpe (or could) so even with the 10gb/metered someone in the house with the password could rate-limit except when they needed it :-) -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD | 800-THE-WRLD The World: Since 1989 | A Public Information Utility | *oo*
On 12/26/20 07:32, bzs@theworld.com wrote:
Another way to phrase the question (which was the subject of much dispute 30 years ago) is:
Which would you rather have (I'll use modern speeds):
1gb flat rate
10gb metered
Where metered 10gb could cost less than 1gb when you don't use it, or about the same at ~1gb, but more if you use >1gb?
It's possible this pricing model is reawakening.
Back then I argued the bigger pipe / metered was preferable. Then again it was mostly non-residential.
But admittedly most seemed to prefer the lower speed unmetered. They preferred the billing predicatibilty and didn't like the idea that a "power user" (in the residential context that might be "kids") could jack up the bill.
I suppose that depends a lot on what the actual prices of a flat-rate 1gb vs a fully saturated 10gb. If it's $50 vs $100/mo perhaps some would say ok I'll risk the $50 overage, if it's $50 vs $500/mo maybe not.
It's all the sales & marketing people trying to find new ways to sell the same bandwidth so they can keep getting their annual bonuses. Has nothing to do with trying to move the state-of-the-art forward :-). If the price differential between 1Gbps flat and 10Gbps metered is not that great, many (not all) will prefer the higher bandwidth, especially if it comes with "plenty" of data (say 1TB/month). The customer feels like they are getting more for their money, and the provider knows there is no chance the customer will ever hit 10Gbps, meaning they don't need to roll out network, and can up profits. Today, if I switched providers, for the same amount of money I am paying now, I'd be able to get a 1Gbps service, easy. I don't do it because packet loss (or lack thereof) is more important to me than more bandwidth. The backhaul provider I use is also a customer of mine that I know knows how to run a decent network. I'd not risk potential packet loss by switching to a provider who can give me 5X the bandwidth for the same price, especially because overall performance of the home won't gain much beyond the 200Mbps I currently have. But, as they say, YMMV. Mark.
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020 00:32:49 -0500, bzs@theworld.com said:
I suppose that depends a lot on what the actual prices of a flat-rate 1gb vs a fully saturated 10gb. If it's $50 vs $100/mo perhaps some would say ok I'll risk the $50 overage, if it's $50 vs $500/mo maybe not.
And today we have bandwidth-shaping in most any router/cpe (or could) so even with the 10gb/metered someone in the house with the password could rate-limit except when they needed it :-)
Note that the vast majority of users either use the ISP-provided CPE, or something they picked up at Walmart or Best Buy. This leads to an interesting economic incentive problem. The ISP is obviously not motivated to supply kit that can do bandwidth shaping on a metered drop. Meanwhile, the providers of gear that gets sold at Walmart or Best Buy also have no motivation to add it until enough ISPs are providing metered high-speed service that "We can help prevent overage charges" becomes a viable market differentiation. Anybody got a feel for what percent of the third-party gear currently sold to consumers has sane bufferbloat support in 2020, when we've *known* that de-bufferbloated gear is a viable differentiatior if marketed right (consider the percent of families that have at least one gamer who cares)?
On 12/26/20 8:00 AM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
Anybody got a feel for what percent of the third-party gear currently sold to consumers has sane bufferbloat support in 2020, when we've *known* that de-bufferbloated gear is a viable differentiatior if marketed right (consider the percent of families that have at least one gamer who cares)?
I don't know percentages, but just trying to find cpe that support it in their specs is depressingly small. considering that they're all using linux and queuing discipline software is ages old, i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse. given all of the zoom'ing happening now you think that somebody would hit them with the clue-bat that this is a marketing opportunity. Mike
i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse.
Michael, If vendors saw a 10GbE CPE market, they would serve it. Obviously they don’t see a market. Why don’t people insisting vendors build their hobby horse see that? It’s like they’re being deliberately obtuse :) -mel via cell
On Dec 26, 2020, at 9:16 AM, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> wrote:
On 12/26/20 8:00 AM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
Anybody got a feel for what percent of the third-party gear currently sold to consumers has sane bufferbloat support in 2020, when we've *known* that de-bufferbloated gear is a viable differentiatior if marketed right (consider the percent of families that have at least one gamer who cares)?
I don't know percentages, but just trying to find cpe that support it in their specs is depressingly small. considering that they're all using linux and queuing discipline software is ages old, i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse. given all of the zoom'ing happening now you think that somebody would hit them with the clue-bat that this is a marketing opportunity.
Mike
On 12/26/20 9:50 AM, Mel Beckman wrote:
i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse. Michael,
If vendors saw a 10GbE CPE market, they would serve it. Obviously they don’t see a market. Why don’t people insisting vendors build their hobby horse see that? It’s like they’re being deliberately obtuse :)
The thing is that the pandemic has changed the game on the ground: there is an actual feature differentiator to be had. But having dealt with the Linksys folks in the past I don't put out much hope that they'll take advantage of it. The software development side was a vast black hole where time stands still. It seems the entire industry is like that. Mike
On 12/26/20 19:58, Michael Thomas wrote:
The thing is that the pandemic has changed the game on the ground: there is an actual feature differentiator to be had. But having dealt with the Linksys folks in the past I don't put out much hope that they'll take advantage of it. The software development side was a vast black hole where time stands still. It seems the entire industry is like that.
A jump from 10Mbps to 100Mbps is a differentiator. A jump from 100Mbps to 1Gbps, even though more difficult, is also a differentiator. A jump from 1Gbps to 10Gbps... yeah, as my Ugandan friend would say, "That's a hard paper". One would ask, "What happened to all the Gbps in between :-)?" Again, your issue isn't the bandwidth itself. Your issue is how people use devices, as well as the limitations of those devices themselves. You can, pretty much, forget about much of the world using a wired device, going forward. Mark.
Actually the equipment vendor's build in this sort of situation is normally directly related to the availability of affordable chipsets from the likes of Broadcom. For example the chipset in my XGSPON router is a BCM6858. No vendor is going to spend money to produce a CPE that no one will buy. Once the likes of Broadcom produce an affordable solution then all the main vendors will roll out CPE in short order.
If vendors saw a 10GbE CPE market, they would serve it. Obviously they don’t see a market. Why don’t people insisting vendors build their hobby horse see that? It’s like they’re being >deliberately obtuse :)
On 12/26/20 10:00 AM, Tony Wicks wrote:
Actually the equipment vendor's build in this sort of situation is normally directly related to the availability of affordable chipsets from the likes of Broadcom. For example the chipset in my XGSPON router is a BCM6858. No vendor is going to spend money to produce a CPE that no one will buy. Once the likes of Broadcom produce an affordable solution then all the main vendors will roll out CPE in short order.
Do they have no control of the linux kernel? This is purely OS kernel work and has nothing to do with underlying hardware. Mike
On 12/26/20 20:00, Tony Wicks wrote:
Actually the equipment vendor's build in this sort of situation is normally directly related to the availability of affordable chipsets from the likes of Broadcom. For example the chipset in my XGSPON router is a BCM6858. No vendor is going to spend money to produce a CPE that no one will buy. Once the likes of Broadcom produce an affordable solution then all the main vendors will roll out CPE in short order.
So by your logic, the chipset is the problem, otherwise, people will just keep buying more bandwidth for its own sake, even when they don't need it :-)? Mark.
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020 17:50:28 +0000, Mel Beckman said:
If vendors saw a 10GbE CPE market, they would serve it. Obviously they don’t see a market. Why don’t people insisting vendors build their hobby horse see that? It’s like they’re being deliberately obtuse :)
The number of people that want a router that does 10GbE is vastly outnumbered by the number of people that want a router that makes their Zoom sessions not suck. Admittedly, many of them don't realize they want that router, mostly because most of them don't realize it's not difficult at all to build one that does that. But that's why companies have an advertising and marketing team. :)
On 12/26/20 10:09 AM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020 17:50:28 +0000, Mel Beckman said:
If vendors saw a 10GbE CPE market, they would serve it. Obviously they don’t see a market. Why don’t people insisting vendors build their hobby horse see that? It’s like they’re being deliberately obtuse :) The number of people that want a router that does 10GbE is vastly outnumbered by the number of people that want a router that makes their Zoom sessions not suck.
Admittedly, many of them don't realize they want that router, mostly because most of them don't realize it's not difficult at all to build one that does that. But that's why companies have an advertising and marketing team. :)
The marketing writes itself: "Do you have to kick your kids of the network for company Zoom calls? You need this brand spanking new router!" I've been trying to explain to friends that are now saddled with video calls all the time what the problem is, but it's really hard to point and say "buy this router". There are a few out there that feature it, but they're about $200 which is pretty spendy. Considering that this is just a OS module, your basic $50 router should be able to support it without any problem too. Mike
We run MikroTik RB4011s for residential speeds between 1G and 10G or just supply a media converter. For residential 40G and 100G we just drop in Arista or Extreme switches. SMBs are normally just a media converter or direct fiber handoff. https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_5hacq2hnd_in There are not a lot of options for good, off the shelf 10G CPE equipment. The handful of 10G residential customers we have seem to be happy with the tik. The couple that don’t use it have rolled their own solution. Like anything, I’m sure once the major home broadband providers start to catch up with us smaller guys the vendors will catch up as well. https://www.kcfiber.com/residential Aaron
On Dec 26, 2020, at 11:53 AM, Mel Beckman <mel@beckman.org> wrote:
i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse.
Michael,
If vendors saw a 10GbE CPE market, they would serve it. Obviously they don’t see a market. Why don’t people insisting vendors build their hobby horse see that? It’s like they’re being deliberately obtuse :)
-mel via cell
On Dec 26, 2020, at 9:16 AM, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> wrote:
On 12/26/20 8:00 AM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
Anybody got a feel for what percent of the third-party gear currently sold to consumers has sane bufferbloat support in 2020, when we've *known* that de-bufferbloated gear is a viable differentiatior if marketed right (consider the percent of families that have at least one gamer who cares)?
I don't know percentages, but just trying to find cpe that support it in their specs is depressingly small. considering that they're all using linux and queuing discipline software is ages old, i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse. given all of the zoom'ing happening now you think that somebody would hit them with the clue-bat that this is a marketing opportunity.
Mike
Aaron, One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive. On Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 12:31 PM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> wrote:
We run MikroTik RB4011s for residential speeds between 1G and 10G or just supply a media converter. For residential 40G and 100G we just drop in Arista or Extreme switches. SMBs are normally just a media converter or direct fiber handoff.
https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_5hacq2hnd_in
There are not a lot of options for good, off the shelf 10G CPE equipment. The handful of 10G residential customers we have seem to be happy with the tik. The couple that don’t use it have rolled their own solution.
Like anything, I’m sure once the major home broadband providers start to catch up with us smaller guys the vendors will catch up as well.
https://www.kcfiber.com/residential
Aaron
On Dec 26, 2020, at 11:53 AM, Mel Beckman <mel@beckman.org> wrote:
i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse.
Michael,
If vendors saw a 10GbE CPE market, they would serve it. Obviously they don’t see a market. Why don’t people insisting vendors build their hobby horse see that? It’s like they’re being deliberately obtuse :)
-mel via cell
On Dec 26, 2020, at 9:16 AM, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> wrote:
On 12/26/20 8:00 AM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
Anybody got a feel for what percent of the third-party gear currently sold to
consumers has sane bufferbloat support in 2020, when we've *known* that
de-bufferbloated gear is a viable differentiatior if marketed right (consider the
percent of families that have at least one gamer who cares)?
I don't know percentages, but just trying to find cpe that support it in their specs is depressingly small. considering that they're all using linux and queuing discipline software is ages old, i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse. given all of the zoom'ing happening now you think that somebody would hit them with the clue-bat that this is a marketing opportunity.
Mike
On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote:
Aaron,
One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive.
<conjecturbation> For me, looks like a loss-leader to reel customers in, perhaps with some limitations, no guarantees, time/term restrictions, no CPE, no support, e.t.c., that make a "smooth" upgrade to 2Gbps or 3Gbps more sensible. My theory would be that getting customers on to the platform is the hardest step. Once they're on, pivoting them isn't difficult, particularly if you nabbed them from a competitor that was charging them some $$ for 10Mbps. Think about it, they don't offer a "Multi-Gigabit Wireless Router" with the 1Gbps service. Chances are the customers who choose this package either have a crappy device, or will likely buy a crappy device on their own. They'd never trouble the 1Gbps product, probably call KC Fiber for to complain about not getting 1Gbps, upon which KC Fiber recommend their own CPE, a more guaranteed package, e.t.c., and in comes the 2Gbps or higher, revenue-generating service. One the network side, it's just the same port, different (cheap) optic. A cheap port in use for free is better than an unused port, if the switch and fibre are already installed, and at less than 60% take-up. It's creative, I like it! </conjecturbation> Mark.
Actually our free service doesn't have limitations, has an SLA, no time/term restrictions, a CPE, support, etc. I explained the "why" in a different post so I won't go over it again. 98% of our residential customers are on the free plan. Aaron On 12/27/2020 4:38 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote:
Aaron,
One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive.
<conjecturbation>
For me, looks like a loss-leader to reel customers in, perhaps with some limitations, no guarantees, time/term restrictions, no CPE, no support, e.t.c., that make a "smooth" upgrade to 2Gbps or 3Gbps more sensible.
My theory would be that getting customers on to the platform is the hardest step. Once they're on, pivoting them isn't difficult, particularly if you nabbed them from a competitor that was charging them some $$ for 10Mbps.
Think about it, they don't offer a "Multi-Gigabit Wireless Router" with the 1Gbps service. Chances are the customers who choose this package either have a crappy device, or will likely buy a crappy device on their own. They'd never trouble the 1Gbps product, probably call KC Fiber for to complain about not getting 1Gbps, upon which KC Fiber recommend their own CPE, a more guaranteed package, e.t.c., and in comes the 2Gbps or higher, revenue-generating service.
One the network side, it's just the same port, different (cheap) optic. A cheap port in use for free is better than an unused port, if the switch and fibre are already installed, and at less than 60% take-up.
It's creative, I like it!
</conjecturbation>
Mark.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
On 12/28/20 19:11, Aaron Wendel wrote:
Actually our free service doesn't have limitations, has an SLA, no time/term restrictions, a CPE, support, etc. I explained the "why" in a different post so I won't go over it again. 98% of our residential customers are on the free plan.
Guess my conjecturbation was not shy to show up :-). Thanks for clearing up. It's great to see that you are relying on your cash-cow to be able to extend this free service to the less fortunate! That's purpose! Mark.
On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 8:48 PM Seth Mattinen <sethm@rollernet.us> wrote:
On 12/28/20 9:11 AM, Aaron Wendel wrote:
Actually our free service doesn't have limitations, has an SLA, no time/term restrictions, a CPE, support, etc.
How do SLA refunds work on free service? Do you just pay them some cash value instead of credits?
I find SLA refunds are meaningless anyway. The SLA is more about stating what level of service is expected. Then we can tell if we succeeded or failed in delivering what was expected. In the case of failure nothing can fix that other than a plan for how it can be improved going forward. Getting money back will usually not do much to fix the hardship poor service put you through. Regards, Baldur
On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote:
Aaron,
One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive.
They also ask for no monthly fee after a single payment of US$300. Considering the 2Gbps package costs US$49.95, you'd guess they'd value the 1Gbps service at, say US$27/month, give or take. So that US$300 provides a bit of coverage, perhaps 1 year, in which time they'd have likely upgraded the customer. Mark.
The $300 covers the equipment and the time to send someone out to a house to install it. If $300 is too much you can pay in 12 installments of $25. The TIK alone costs us about $250. Aaron On 12/27/2020 5:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote:
Aaron,
One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive.
They also ask for no monthly fee after a single payment of US$300.
Considering the 2Gbps package costs US$49.95, you'd guess they'd value the 1Gbps service at, say US$27/month, give or take.
So that US$300 provides a bit of coverage, perhaps 1 year, in which time they'd have likely upgraded the customer.
Mark.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
Aaron, The "Free" service doesn't cover your cost of support which is much higher for residential than any business customer. Our residential customers call at least 15x more often compared to business customers compared on a 1:1 ratio. I honestly can't fathom providing free residential service because we make enough money on the business side of things. You should be charging something, at least $20-30 per month. On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 11:15 AM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> wrote:
The $300 covers the equipment and the time to send someone out to a house to install it. If $300 is too much you can pay in 12 installments of $25.
The TIK alone costs us about $250.
Aaron
On 12/27/2020 5:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote:
Aaron,
One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive.
They also ask for no monthly fee after a single payment of US$300.
Considering the 2Gbps package costs US$49.95, you'd guess they'd value the 1Gbps service at, say US$27/month, give or take.
So that US$300 provides a bit of coverage, perhaps 1 year, in which time they'd have likely upgraded the customer.
Mark.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
-- Darin Steffl Minnesota WiFi www.mnwifi.com 507-634-WiFi Like us on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi>
Darin, Our business support and residential support is the same department. I have to pay those people to be in the office either way so it doesn't cost me any "more" to provide support for the residences. Yes, walking Grandma through getting her email can sometimes be a chore but that person is on the payroll whether he/she is helping Grandma or sitting there chatting with his/her co-worker. If we dumped all the residential customers we would still have the same cost structure we do now. Again, it's been free for the last 7 years at this point. I've never been one to really do what I "should" anyway. Aaron On 12/28/2020 11:48 AM, Darin Steffl wrote:
Aaron,
The "Free" service doesn't cover your cost of support which is much higher for residential than any business customer. Our residential customers call at least 15x more often compared to business customers compared on a 1:1 ratio.
I honestly can't fathom providing free residential service because we make enough money on the business side of things. You should be charging something, at least $20-30 per month.
On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 11:15 AM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>> wrote:
The $300 covers the equipment and the time to send someone out to a house to install it. If $300 is too much you can pay in 12 installments of $25.
The TIK alone costs us about $250.
Aaron
On 12/27/2020 5:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote: > > > On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote: > >> Aaron, >> >> One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet >> service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when >> you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive. > > They also ask for no monthly fee after a single payment of US$300. > > Considering the 2Gbps package costs US$49.95, you'd guess they'd value > the 1Gbps service at, say US$27/month, give or take. > > So that US$300 provides a bit of coverage, perhaps 1 year, in which > time they'd have likely upgraded the customer. > > Mark.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com> ================================================================
-- Darin Steffl Minnesota WiFi www.mnwifi.com <http://www.mnwifi.com/> 507-634-WiFi Like us on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi>
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
I applaud your commitment to helping your local community. Just want to point out that this is a charity because it does not scale. Nobody could build out a FTTH network and make it free as a business case. But there are plenty of people that made a network for their neighbors and provided that for free. Maybe a person had a commercial fiber to his home and thought he could just as well share it. This might be on a bigger scale but it is the same. Regards, Baldur On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 8:27 PM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> wrote:
Darin,
Our business support and residential support is the same department. I have to pay those people to be in the office either way so it doesn't cost me any "more" to provide support for the residences. Yes, walking Grandma through getting her email can sometimes be a chore but that person is on the payroll whether he/she is helping Grandma or sitting there chatting with his/her co-worker. If we dumped all the residential customers we would still have the same cost structure we do now.
Again, it's been free for the last 7 years at this point. I've never been one to really do what I "should" anyway.
Aaron
On 12/28/2020 11:48 AM, Darin Steffl wrote:
Aaron,
The "Free" service doesn't cover your cost of support which is much higher for residential than any business customer. Our residential customers call at least 15x more often compared to business customers compared on a 1:1 ratio.
I honestly can't fathom providing free residential service because we make enough money on the business side of things. You should be charging something, at least $20-30 per month.
On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 11:15 AM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>> wrote:
The $300 covers the equipment and the time to send someone out to a house to install it. If $300 is too much you can pay in 12 installments of $25.
The TIK alone costs us about $250.
Aaron
On 12/27/2020 5:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote: > > > On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote: > >> Aaron, >> >> One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet >> service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when >> you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive. > > They also ask for no monthly fee after a single payment of US$300. > > Considering the 2Gbps package costs US$49.95, you'd guess they'd value > the 1Gbps service at, say US$27/month, give or take. > > So that US$300 provides a bit of coverage, perhaps 1 year, in which > time they'd have likely upgraded the customer. > > Mark.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com> ================================================================
-- Darin Steffl Minnesota WiFi www.mnwifi.com <http://www.mnwifi.com/> 507-634-WiFi Like us on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi>
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
Darin, Surely you at least give the paying customers priority over the non-paying? It’s one thing to say “I have to write paychecks no matter what”. It’s another to say “I’ll give away my support to free customers AND degrade support for paying customers as a result.” Your tech support guy “walking Grandma through getting her email” is necessarily not accessible for the duration to paying customers. This means your staffing must be large enough to never have any queuing, or you’re giving away your paying customers' time to non-paying customers. Neither approach is scalable in a competitive business environment, because SOMEBODY is paying for all those resources, and if it’s your customers, they will buy elsewhere. Your approach only work until you run out of other people’s money. -mel On Dec 28, 2020, at 11:50 AM, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com<mailto:baldur.norddahl@gmail.com>> wrote: I applaud your commitment to helping your local community. Just want to point out that this is a charity because it does not scale. Nobody could build out a FTTH network and make it free as a business case. But there are plenty of people that made a network for their neighbors and provided that for free. Maybe a person had a commercial fiber to his home and thought he could just as well share it. This might be on a bigger scale but it is the same. Regards, Baldur On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 8:27 PM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net<mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>> wrote: Darin, Our business support and residential support is the same department. I have to pay those people to be in the office either way so it doesn't cost me any "more" to provide support for the residences. Yes, walking Grandma through getting her email can sometimes be a chore but that person is on the payroll whether he/she is helping Grandma or sitting there chatting with his/her co-worker. If we dumped all the residential customers we would still have the same cost structure we do now. Again, it's been free for the last 7 years at this point. I've never been one to really do what I "should" anyway. Aaron On 12/28/2020 11:48 AM, Darin Steffl wrote:
Aaron,
The "Free" service doesn't cover your cost of support which is much higher for residential than any business customer. Our residential customers call at least 15x more often compared to business customers compared on a 1:1 ratio.
I honestly can't fathom providing free residential service because we make enough money on the business side of things. You should be charging something, at least $20-30 per month.
On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 11:15 AM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net<mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net<mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>>> wrote:
The $300 covers the equipment and the time to send someone out to a house to install it. If $300 is too much you can pay in 12 installments of $25.
The TIK alone costs us about $250.
Aaron
On 12/27/2020 5:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote: > > > On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote: > >> Aaron, >> >> One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet >> service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when >> you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive. > > They also ask for no monthly fee after a single payment of US$300. > > Considering the 2Gbps package costs US$49.95, you'd guess they'd value > the 1Gbps service at, say US$27/month, give or take. > > So that US$300 provides a bit of coverage, perhaps 1 year, in which > time they'd have likely upgraded the customer. > > Mark.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com<http://www.wholesaleinternet.com/> <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com<http://www.wholesaleinternet.com/>> ================================================================
-- Darin Steffl Minnesota WiFi www.mnwifi.com<http://www.mnwifi.com/> <http://www.mnwifi.com/> 507-634-WiFi Like us on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi>
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com<http://www.wholesaleinternet.com/> ================================================================
On Mon, 28 Dec 2020 20:02:36 +0000, Mel Beckman said:
This means your staffing must be large enough to never have any queuing, or you’re giving away your paying customers' time to non-paying customers. Neither approach is scalable in a competitive business environment, because SOMEBODY is paying for all those resources, and if it’s your customers, they will buy elsewhere. Your approach only work until you run out of other people’s money.
I dunno. He's been doing it for 7 years, it sounds like it's sustainable in his environment.
We prioritize calls based on severity. If both Google and Grandma call and say they have a cut then we have people to service both at the same time. If Google, Century Link, Verizon, AT&T and Grandma all call then Grandma gets to wait a day. That being the case, it's not dependent on revenue. Emergency Services (911 and Police radio feeds) gets #1 priority even though they're non-paying. But yes, in extreme situations the residential customers would be delayed to service the paying customers. We do have people cross trained from other parts of our businesses so we can allocate internally in emergencies. In almost a decade though I can't think of a situation where someone had to wait for service because we didn't have the resources to service them. Aaron On 12/28/2020 2:02 PM, Mel Beckman wrote:
Darin,
Surely you at least give the paying customers priority over the non-paying? It’s one thing to say “I have to write paychecks no matter what”. It’s another to say “I’ll give away my support to free customers AND degrade support for paying customers as a result.” Your tech support guy “walking Grandma through getting her email” is necessarily not accessible for the duration to paying customers.
This means your staffing must be large enough to never have any queuing, or you’re giving away your paying customers' time to non-paying customers. Neither approach is scalable in a competitive business environment, because SOMEBODY is paying for all those resources, and if it’s your customers, they will buy elsewhere. Your approach only work until you run out of other people’s money.
-mel
On Dec 28, 2020, at 11:50 AM, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com <mailto:baldur.norddahl@gmail.com>> wrote:
I applaud your commitment to helping your local community. Just want to point out that this is a charity because it does not scale. Nobody could build out a FTTH network and make it free as a business case. But there are plenty of people that made a network for their neighbors and provided that for free. Maybe a person had a commercial fiber to his home and thought he could just as well share it. This might be on a bigger scale but it is the same.
Regards,
Baldur
On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 8:27 PM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>> wrote:
Darin,
Our business support and residential support is the same department. I have to pay those people to be in the office either way so it doesn't cost me any "more" to provide support for the residences. Yes, walking Grandma through getting her email can sometimes be a chore but that person is on the payroll whether he/she is helping Grandma or sitting there chatting with his/her co-worker. If we dumped all the residential customers we would still have the same cost structure we do now.
Again, it's been free for the last 7 years at this point. I've never been one to really do what I "should" anyway.
Aaron
On 12/28/2020 11:48 AM, Darin Steffl wrote: > Aaron, > > The "Free" service doesn't cover your cost of support which is much > higher for residential than any business customer. Our residential > customers call at least 15x more often compared to business customers > compared on a 1:1 ratio. > > I honestly can't fathom providing free residential service because we > make enough money on the business side of things. You should be > charging something, at least $20-30 per month. > > On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 11:15 AM Aaron Wendel > <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>>> wrote: > > The $300 covers the equipment and the time to send someone out to a > house to install it. If $300 is too much you can pay in 12 > installments > of $25. > > The TIK alone costs us about $250. > > Aaron > > > On 12/27/2020 5:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote: > > > > > > On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote: > > > >> Aaron, > >> > >> One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet > >> service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free > when > >> you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive. > > > > They also ask for no monthly fee after a single payment of US$300. > > > > Considering the 2Gbps package costs US$49.95, you'd guess they'd > value > > the 1Gbps service at, say US$27/month, give or take. > > > > So that US$300 provides a bit of coverage, perhaps 1 year, in which > > time they'd have likely upgraded the customer. > > > > Mark. > > -- > ================================================================ > Aaron Wendel > Chief Technical Officer > Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) > (816)550-9030 > http://www.wholesaleinternet.com <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com/> <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com/>> > ================================================================ > > > > -- > Darin Steffl > Minnesota WiFi > www.mnwifi.com <http://www.mnwifi.com/> <http://www.mnwifi.com/ <http://www.mnwifi.com/>> > 507-634-WiFi > Like us on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi>>
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com/> ================================================================
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
On 12/28/20 22:02, Mel Beckman wrote:
Darin,
Surely you at least give the paying customers priority over the non-paying? It’s one thing to say “I have to write paychecks no matter what”. It’s another to say “I’ll give away my support to free customers AND degrade support for paying customers as a result.” Your tech support guy “walking Grandma through getting her email” is necessarily not accessible for the duration to paying customers.
This means your staffing must be large enough to never have any queuing, or you’re giving away your paying customers' time to non-paying customers. Neither approach is scalable in a competitive business environment, because SOMEBODY is paying for all those resources, and if it’s your customers, they will buy elsewhere. Your approach only work until you run out of other people’s money.
It's quite fascinating to me how some folk are trying their darnedest to fit someone else's creativity into their own mold, so it's more understandable to them :-). We live in an age of curiousity, which has quickly replaced the age of expertise. If you don't know, ask... The MUA many (if not all) of us are using to read this has been obtained for free, and with ongoing support, no less. I'd like to see someone dish out cash for a commercial alternative. As are a ton of apps and services we use in our daily lives. Pretty sure someone in the infrastructure space figuring out some creativity that actually improves someone else's life with minimal burden either way is right up there with, "That's alright with us"... Mark.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Tinka" <mark.tinka@seacom.com>
The MUA many (if not all) of us are using to read this has been obtained for free, and with ongoing support, no less. I'd like to see someone dish out cash for a commercial alternative.
Zimbra? K9? ... Mutt? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274
We still build when needed. We're in the process of building to 700 new apartments so we can provide them with free service. We're actually pulling 576 strands into the basement of one building to backhaul each apartment to it's own switch port in the new hut we just deployed to service that new development. (we don't use a PON system. Everyone has a dedicated switch port.) Also, keep in mind that this isn't all we do. This is a very small part of a much bigger pie. So I agree with you. If this was it then it would make no sense. When you look at all the pieces together it makes perfect sense. Aaron On 12/28/2020 1:50 PM, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
I applaud your commitment to helping your local community. Just want to point out that this is a charity because it does not scale. Nobody could build out a FTTH network and make it free as a business case. But there are plenty of people that made a network for their neighbors and provided that for free. Maybe a person had a commercial fiber to his home and thought he could just as well share it. This might be on a bigger scale but it is the same.
Regards,
Baldur
On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 8:27 PM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>> wrote:
Darin,
Our business support and residential support is the same department. I have to pay those people to be in the office either way so it doesn't cost me any "more" to provide support for the residences. Yes, walking Grandma through getting her email can sometimes be a chore but that person is on the payroll whether he/she is helping Grandma or sitting there chatting with his/her co-worker. If we dumped all the residential customers we would still have the same cost structure we do now.
Again, it's been free for the last 7 years at this point. I've never been one to really do what I "should" anyway.
Aaron
On 12/28/2020 11:48 AM, Darin Steffl wrote: > Aaron, > > The "Free" service doesn't cover your cost of support which is much > higher for residential than any business customer. Our residential > customers call at least 15x more often compared to business customers > compared on a 1:1 ratio. > > I honestly can't fathom providing free residential service because we > make enough money on the business side of things. You should be > charging something, at least $20-30 per month. > > On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 11:15 AM Aaron Wendel > <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>>> wrote: > > The $300 covers the equipment and the time to send someone out to a > house to install it. If $300 is too much you can pay in 12 > installments > of $25. > > The TIK alone costs us about $250. > > Aaron > > > On 12/27/2020 5:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote: > > > > > > On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote: > > > >> Aaron, > >> > >> One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet > >> service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free > when > >> you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive. > > > > They also ask for no monthly fee after a single payment of US$300. > > > > Considering the 2Gbps package costs US$49.95, you'd guess they'd > value > > the 1Gbps service at, say US$27/month, give or take. > > > > So that US$300 provides a bit of coverage, perhaps 1 year, in which > > time they'd have likely upgraded the customer. > > > > Mark. > > -- > ================================================================ > Aaron Wendel > Chief Technical Officer > Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) > (816)550-9030 > http://www.wholesaleinternet.com <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com> <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com>> > ================================================================ > > > > -- > Darin Steffl > Minnesota WiFi > www.mnwifi.com <http://www.mnwifi.com> <http://www.mnwifi.com/ <http://www.mnwifi.com/>> > 507-634-WiFi > Like us on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi>>
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com> ================================================================
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
On 12/28/20 22:24, Aaron Wendel wrote:
We still build when needed. We're in the process of building to 700 new apartments so we can provide them with free service. We're actually pulling 576 strands into the basement of one building to backhaul each apartment to it's own switch port in the new hut we just deployed to service that new development. (we don't use a PON system. Everyone has a dedicated switch port.) Also, keep in mind that this isn't all we do. This is a very small part of a much bigger pie. So I agree with you. If this was it then it would make no sense. When you look at all the pieces together it makes perfect sense.
* Drops mic * Mark.
We are doing a similar project in Marin county - regardless of ability to pay. If I can make it pencil, not only why not, but shouldn’t we all? Ms. Lady Benjamin PD Cannon, ASCE 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC CEO ben@6by7.net "The only fully end-to-end encrypted global telecommunications company in the world.” FCC License KJ6FJJ Sent from my iPhone via RFC1149.
On Dec 28, 2020, at 12:24 PM, Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> wrote:
We still build when needed. We're in the process of building to 700 new apartments so we can provide them with free service. We're actually pulling 576 strands into the basement of one building to backhaul each apartment to it's own switch port in the new hut we just deployed to service that new development. (we don't use a PON system. Everyone has a dedicated switch port.) Also, keep in mind that this isn't all we do. This is a very small part of a much bigger pie. So I agree with you. If this was it then it would make no sense. When you look at all the pieces together it makes perfect sense.
Aaron
On 12/28/2020 1:50 PM, Baldur Norddahl wrote: I applaud your commitment to helping your local community. Just want to point out that this is a charity because it does not scale. Nobody could build out a FTTH network and make it free as a business case. But there are plenty of people that made a network for their neighbors and provided that for free. Maybe a person had a commercial fiber to his home and thought he could just as well share it. This might be on a bigger scale but it is the same.
Regards,
Baldur
On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 8:27 PM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>> wrote:
Darin,
Our business support and residential support is the same department. I have to pay those people to be in the office either way so it doesn't cost me any "more" to provide support for the residences. Yes, walking Grandma through getting her email can sometimes be a chore but that person is on the payroll whether he/she is helping Grandma or sitting there chatting with his/her co-worker. If we dumped all the residential customers we would still have the same cost structure we do now.
Again, it's been free for the last 7 years at this point. I've never been one to really do what I "should" anyway.
Aaron
Aaron,
The "Free" service doesn't cover your cost of support which is much higher for residential than any business customer. Our residential customers call at least 15x more often compared to business customers compared on a 1:1 ratio.
I honestly can't fathom providing free residential service because we make enough money on the business side of things. You should be charging something, at least $20-30 per month.
On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 11:15 AM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>>> wrote:
The $300 covers the equipment and the time to send someone out to a house to install it. If $300 is too much you can pay in 12 installments of $25.
The TIK alone costs us about $250.
Aaron
On 12/27/2020 5:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote: > > > On 12/26/20 20:48, Darin Steffl wrote: > >> Aaron, >> >> One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet >> service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when >> you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive. > > They also ask for no monthly fee after a single payment of US$300. > > Considering the 2Gbps package costs US$49.95, you'd guess
On 12/28/2020 11:48 AM, Darin Steffl wrote: they'd
value > the 1Gbps service at, say US$27/month, give or take. > > So that US$300 provides a bit of coverage, perhaps 1 year,
in which
> time they'd have likely upgraded the customer. > > Mark.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com
<http://www.wholesaleinternet.com> <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com>>
================================================================
-- Darin Steffl Minnesota WiFi www.mnwifi.com <http://www.mnwifi.com> <http://www.mnwifi.com/ <http://www.mnwifi.com/>> 507-634-WiFi Like us on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi>>
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com <http://www.wholesaleinternet.com> ================================================================
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
On 12/28/20 19:48, Darin Steffl wrote:
Aaron,
The "Free" service doesn't cover your cost of support which is much higher for residential than any business customer. Our residential customers call at least 15x more often compared to business customers compared on a 1:1 ratio.
I honestly can't fathom providing free residential service because we make enough money on the business side of things. You should be charging something, at least $20-30 per month.
Why "should" they be doing anything? If their Metro fibre business allows them some change to prop the rest of their community up in a way that does not put them out, who are we to say they need to conform to what our "gold standard" of economics is? Mark.
On Monday, 28 December, 2020 10:48. Darin Steffl wrote:
The "Free" service doesn't cover your cost of support which is much higher for residential than any business customer. Our residential customers call at least 15x more often compared to business customers compared on a 1:1 ratio.
Are you sure that is not related to "residential services" being of a generally lower quality than business services? It has been my experience that shoddy service generates higher need for "support" than does "non-shoddy" service. In this regard, the price for "business" services should be less than "residential service" by a couple of orders of magnitude since it costs orders of magnitude more money to "support" shoddy services than non-shoddy services. -- Be decisive. Make a decision, right or wrong. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who could not make a decision.
On 12/29/20 04:41, Keith Medcalf wrote:
Are you sure that is not related to "residential services" being of a generally lower quality than business services? It has been my experience that shoddy service generates higher need for "support" than does "non-shoddy" service. In this regard, the price for "business" services should be less than "residential service" by a couple of orders of magnitude since it costs orders of magnitude more money to "support" shoddy services than non-shoddy services.
Considering that Aaron said 98% of their residential customers are on the free plan, and that they use Active-E with every 1Gbps customer getting a proper switch port, I'd hazard the bulk of their support queries to be non-techie customers needing software support (grandma, et al), or fibres being cut. It wouldn't seem like they'd be getting calls about "speed" issues, which are most annoying ones :-). Mark.
Oh they'll get plenty of support calls still, almost all about wifi issues. They'll be connected to 2.4ghz on an old device, run a speedtest and only get 30 mbps and complain they're not getting 950 mbps on their free connection. WiFi issues will always cause support calls no matter what isp. The denser the area, the more wifi interference that exists and will drive more calls. I understand wanting to offer free internet to a small number of entities and residential areas, particularly hotspots. What I don't agree with is free service for every residential home or apartment. It absolutely hurts your business to do this. It's a charity, not a business then. You say it doesn't take any additional resources to support but it absolutely does. You have way more than $300 into an install. You'll also have to hire additional staff sooner because of additional tech support calls from the res side. Again, it seems nice to be able to do this but most companies don't have idle resources sitting around to give away things for free. We have zero extra time to work for free. On Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:28 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.com> wrote:
On 12/29/20 04:41, Keith Medcalf wrote:
Are you sure that is not related to "residential services" being of a generally lower quality than business services? It has been my experience that shoddy service generates higher need for "support" than does "non-shoddy" service. In this regard, the price for "business" services should be less than "residential service" by a couple of orders of magnitude since it costs orders of magnitude more money to "support" shoddy services than non-shoddy services.
Considering that Aaron said 98% of their residential customers are on the free plan, and that they use Active-E with every 1Gbps customer getting a proper switch port, I'd hazard the bulk of their support queries to be non-techie customers needing software support (grandma, et al), or fibres being cut.
It wouldn't seem like they'd be getting calls about "speed" issues, which are most annoying ones :-).
Mark.
Again, it seems nice to be able to do this but most companies don't have idle resources sitting around to give away things for free. We have zero extra time to work for free.
We’re a tiny company and I already have a department dedicated to giving - really we do have some often highly specific embarrassments of riches as telecom companies - and honestly reading between the lines here, Big Telco has already paid for the fiber and the trucks have rolled and the guys have half a day left, the entire spool’s paid for so why tf not... It’s easy for the same activity to cost one entity 6 figures, and another, literally zero (or more realistically, some extra fuel and a switch and 48 optics etc.). Then again it can also cost us $1,000/ft to trench in some downtown metros. Ms. Lady Benjamin PD Cannon, ASCE 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC CEO ben@6by7.net "The only fully end-to-end encrypted global telecommunications company in the world.” FCC License KJ6FJJ Sent from my iPhone via RFC1149.
On Dec 29, 2020, at 5:42 AM, Darin Steffl <darin.steffl@mnwifi.com> wrote:
Oh they'll get plenty of support calls still, almost all about wifi issues. They'll be connected to 2.4ghz on an old device, run a speedtest and only get 30 mbps and complain they're not getting 950 mbps on their free connection.
WiFi issues will always cause support calls no matter what isp. The denser the area, the more wifi interference that exists and will drive more calls.
I understand wanting to offer free internet to a small number of entities and residential areas, particularly hotspots. What I don't agree with is free service for every residential home or apartment. It absolutely hurts your business to do this. It's a charity, not a business then. You say it doesn't take any additional resources to support but it absolutely does. You have way more than $300 into an install. You'll also have to hire additional staff sooner because of additional tech support calls from the res side.
On Tue, Dec 29, 2020, 1:28 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.com> wrote:
On 12/29/20 04:41, Keith Medcalf wrote:
Are you sure that is not related to "residential services" being of a generally lower quality than business services? It has been my experience that shoddy service generates higher need for "support" than does "non-shoddy" service. In this regard, the price for "business" services should be less than "residential service" by a couple of orders of magnitude since it costs orders of magnitude more money to "support" shoddy services than non-shoddy services.
Considering that Aaron said 98% of their residential customers are on the free plan, and that they use Active-E with every 1Gbps customer getting a proper switch port, I'd hazard the bulk of their support queries to be non-techie customers needing software support (grandma, et al), or fibres being cut.
It wouldn't seem like they'd be getting calls about "speed" issues, which are most annoying ones :-).
Mark.
On 12/29/20 15:42, Darin Steffl wrote:
Oh they'll get plenty of support calls still, almost all about wifi issues. They'll be connected to 2.4ghz on an old device, run a speedtest and only get 30 mbps and complain they're not getting 950 mbps on their free connection.
WiFi issues will always cause support calls no matter what isp. The denser the area, the more wifi interference that exists and will drive more calls.
I didn't say those won't come in, I meant that I don't expect them to be the majority.
Again, it seems nice to be able to do this but most companies don't have idle resources sitting around to give away things for free. We have zero extra time to work for free.
Didn't know you had joined KC Fiber. Mark.
Oh, we still get calls about speed issues. It's always wonderful when someone puts their own 10 year old Linksys WRT54G and double NATs behind our CPE then sends in a speed test wondering why they're only getting 10Mbits on their Gbit line. We get those ALL the time. :) On 12/29/2020 1:28 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 12/29/20 04:41, Keith Medcalf wrote:
Are you sure that is not related to "residential services" being of a generally lower quality than business services? It has been my experience that shoddy service generates higher need for "support" than does "non-shoddy" service. In this regard, the price for "business" services should be less than "residential service" by a couple of orders of magnitude since it costs orders of magnitude more money to "support" shoddy services than non-shoddy services.
Considering that Aaron said 98% of their residential customers are on the free plan, and that they use Active-E with every 1Gbps customer getting a proper switch port, I'd hazard the bulk of their support queries to be non-techie customers needing software support (grandma, et al), or fibres being cut.
It wouldn't seem like they'd be getting calls about "speed" issues, which are most annoying ones :-).
Mark.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
On 12/29/20 8:42 AM, Aaron Wendel wrote:
Oh, we still get calls about speed issues. It's always wonderful when someone puts their own 10 year old Linksys WRT54G and double NATs behind our CPE then sends in a speed test wondering why they're only getting 10Mbits on their Gbit line. We get those ALL the time. :)
Does your CPE not have wireless? If it's double NAT'ing it's at least a router. If it doesn't have wireless, wouldn't it be cheaper to add it so you don't get the support calls? Mike
People love throwing their own router behind whatever Internet connection they have. It almost never fails to cause a problem. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Thomas" <mike@mtcc.com> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Tuesday, December 29, 2020 10:53:39 AM Subject: Re: 10g residential CPE On 12/29/20 8:42 AM, Aaron Wendel wrote:
Oh, we still get calls about speed issues. It's always wonderful when someone puts their own 10 year old Linksys WRT54G and double NATs behind our CPE then sends in a speed test wondering why they're only getting 10Mbits on their Gbit line. We get those ALL the time. :)
Does your CPE not have wireless? If it's double NAT'ing it's at least a router. If it doesn't have wireless, wouldn't it be cheaper to add it so you don't get the support calls? Mike
On 12/29/20 9:00 AM, Mike Hammett wrote:
People love throwing their own router behind whatever Internet connection they have. It almost never fails to cause a problem.
Well *some* of us know what we're doing. And in my case, it's both because it doesn't deal with buffer bloat, but more importantly doesn't have wifi. I did get them to put it in bridge mode so it doesn't double nat. Mike
On 12/29/20 19:00, Mike Hammett wrote:
People love throwing their own router behind whatever Internet connection they have. It almost never fails to cause a problem.
I'd only do it if I could guarantee the ISP's CPE will run in Bridge mode, or if I can get access to their router to fiddle with. Router upon router is just bad news. Google's OnHub (and by extension, their new wi-fi routers) treat Bridge mode as evil. At least, it's there. Mark.
It does have wireless. That doesn't prevent people from trying to use their old equipment in addition. ("My dad's uncle's cousin's former roommate works in IT and told me I just needed to plug my old router into your new router.") On 12/29/2020 10:53 AM, Michael Thomas wrote:
On 12/29/20 8:42 AM, Aaron Wendel wrote:
Oh, we still get calls about speed issues. It's always wonderful when someone puts their own 10 year old Linksys WRT54G and double NATs behind our CPE then sends in a speed test wondering why they're only getting 10Mbits on their Gbit line. We get those ALL the time. :)
Does your CPE not have wireless? If it's double NAT'ing it's at least a router. If it doesn't have wireless, wouldn't it be cheaper to add it so you don't get the support calls?
Mike
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
On 12/29/20 10:36 AM, Aaron Wendel wrote:
It does have wireless. That doesn't prevent people from trying to use their old equipment in addition. ("My dad's uncle's cousin's former roommate works in IT and told me I just needed to plug my old router into your new router.")
Yes, but does your CPE buffer bloat avoidance? Latency is still an issue when you have a big long packet queue... Mike
On Dec 29, 2020, at 11:53 AM, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> wrote:
On 12/29/20 8:42 AM, Aaron Wendel wrote:
Oh, we still get calls about speed issues. It's always wonderful when someone puts their own 10 year old Linksys WRT54G and double NATs behind our CPE then sends in a speed test wondering why they're only getting 10Mbits on their Gbit line. We get those ALL the time. :)
Does your CPE not have wireless? If it's double NAT'ing it's at least a router. If it doesn't have wireless, wouldn't it be cheaper to add it so you don't get the support calls?
Mike
Supplying any configurable residential CPE would not necessarily be cheaper. The tracking and accounting for the hardware and qualifying said hardware, not to mention truck rolls for hardware updates, could well be more costly than fielding support calls (which would likely not decrease anyway). An intangible benefit of ‘free residential service’ is creation of good will far exceeding that received by many other ISPs. - James R. Cutler James.cutler@consultant.com GPG keys: hkps://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net
On 12/29/20 21:44, James R Cutler wrote:
Supplying any configurable residential CPE would not necessarily be cheaper. The tracking and accounting for the hardware and qualifying said hardware, not to mention truck rolls for hardware updates, could well be more costly than fielding support calls (which would likely not decrease anyway).
Probably why the free plan doesn't include a router :-). Mark.
On 12/29/20 18:42, Aaron Wendel wrote:
Oh, we still get calls about speed issues. It's always wonderful when someone puts their own 10 year old Linksys WRT54G and double NATs behind our CPE then sends in a speed test wondering why they're only getting 10Mbits on their Gbit line. We get those ALL the time. :)
I'd be keen to know if they are a large proportion of your support calls, on the whole. Mark.
Darin, We charge a $300 one time install charge to cover our costs on the 1G service (which can be paid out at $25/mo if you can't afford $300 all at once). The area we serve is mainly lower and lower-middle-class income with an 80% transient population. Seven years ago, when "digital divide" and "digital literacy" were the buzz words, we instituted our "free" 1G service in an effort to level the playing field for the population who, otherwise, can't afford internet at all, let alone at that speed. Until recently we didn't charge for residential service at any tier. Rather than putting in "income tiers", making people fill out applications for assistance, etc. we just made it free for everyone. We also provide free 100G service to the local school district as well as free service to local government, police, fire stations (Firemen (and women) had to pay for their own internet to use while they were on duty before us), library, churches and other non-profits. That's the why. The how is that we control a LOT of fiber in the metro area that is in use by a lot of very large providers that everyone's heard of. We make enough money doing that so we don't feel the need to charge the residences for a basic level of service. Aaron On 12/26/2020 12:48 PM, Darin Steffl wrote:
Aaron,
One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive.
On Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 12:31 PM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>> wrote:
We run MikroTik RB4011s for residential speeds between 1G and 10G or just supply a media converter. For residential 40G and 100G we just drop in Arista or Extreme switches. SMBs are normally just a media converter or direct fiber handoff.
https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_5hacq2hnd_in <https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_5hacq2hnd_in>
There are not a lot of options for good, off the shelf 10G CPE equipment. The handful of 10G residential customers we have seem to be happy with the tik. The couple that don’t use it have rolled their own solution.
Like anything, I’m sure once the major home broadband providers start to catch up with us smaller guys the vendors will catch up as well.
https://www.kcfiber.com/residential <https://www.kcfiber.com/residential>
Aaron
On Dec 26, 2020, at 11:53 AM, Mel Beckman <mel@beckman.org <mailto:mel@beckman.org>> wrote:
i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse.
Michael,
If vendors saw a 10GbE CPE market, they would serve it. Obviously they don’t see a market. Why don’t people insisting vendors build their hobby horse see that? It’s like they’re being deliberately obtuse :)
-mel via cell
On Dec 26, 2020, at 9:16 AM, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com <mailto:mike@mtcc.com>> wrote:
On 12/26/20 8:00 AM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
Anybody got a feel for what percent of the third-party gear currently sold to consumers has sane bufferbloat support in 2020, when we've *known* that de-bufferbloated gear is a viable differentiatior if marketed right (consider the percent of families that have at least one gamer who cares)?
I don't know percentages, but just trying to find cpe that support it in their specs is depressingly small. considering that they're all using linux and queuing discipline software is ages old, i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse. given all of the zoom'ing happening now you think that somebody would hit them with the clue-bat that this is a marketing opportunity.
Mike
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
A company doing what you describe is one I’d really love to work for. May that philosophy of business be richly blessed. ..Allen
On Dec 28, 2020, at 12:03, Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> wrote:
Darin,
We charge a $300 one time install charge to cover our costs on the 1G service (which can be paid out at $25/mo if you can't afford $300 all at once).
The area we serve is mainly lower and lower-middle-class income with an 80% transient population. Seven years ago, when "digital divide" and "digital literacy" were the buzz words, we instituted our "free" 1G service in an effort to level the playing field for the population who, otherwise, can't afford internet at all, let alone at that speed. Until recently we didn't charge for residential service at any tier. Rather than putting in "income tiers", making people fill out applications for assistance, etc. we just made it free for everyone. We also provide free 100G service to the local school district as well as free service to local government, police, fire stations (Firemen (and women) had to pay for their own internet to use while they were on duty before us), library, churches and other non-profits.
That's the why. The how is that we control a LOT of fiber in the metro area that is in use by a lot of very large providers that everyone's heard of. We make enough money doing that so we don't feel the need to charge the residences for a basic level of service.
Aaron
On 12/26/2020 12:48 PM, Darin Steffl wrote: Aaron,
One simple question. Why on earth would you offer free internet service? How and why? Your site show 1 Gig symmetrical for free when you should be a minimum of $65 per month to be competitive.
On Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 12:31 PM Aaron Wendel <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net <mailto:aaron@wholesaleinternet.net>> wrote:
We run MikroTik RB4011s for residential speeds between 1G and 10G or just supply a media converter. For residential 40G and 100G we just drop in Arista or Extreme switches. SMBs are normally just a media converter or direct fiber handoff.
https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_5hacq2hnd_in <https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_5hacq2hnd_in>
There are not a lot of options for good, off the shelf 10G CPE equipment. The handful of 10G residential customers we have seem to be happy with the tik. The couple that don’t use it have rolled their own solution.
Like anything, I’m sure once the major home broadband providers start to catch up with us smaller guys the vendors will catch up as well.
https://www.kcfiber.com/residential <https://www.kcfiber.com/residential>
Aaron
On Dec 26, 2020, at 11:53 AM, Mel Beckman <mel@beckman.org <mailto:mel@beckman.org>> wrote:
i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse.
Michael,
If vendors saw a 10GbE CPE market, they would serve it. Obviously they don’t see a market. Why don’t people insisting vendors build their hobby horse see that? It’s like they’re being deliberately obtuse :)
-mel via cell
On Dec 26, 2020, at 9:16 AM, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com <mailto:mike@mtcc.com>> wrote:
On 12/26/20 8:00 AM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
Anybody got a feel for what percent of the third-party gear currently sold to consumers has sane bufferbloat support in 2020, when we've *known* that de-bufferbloated gear is a viable differentiatior if marketed right (consider the percent of families that have at least one gamer who cares)?
I don't know percentages, but just trying to find cpe that support it in their specs is depressingly small. considering that they're all using linux and queuing discipline software is ages old, i really don't get what the problem is. it's like they're being deliberately obtuse. given all of the zoom'ing happening now you think that somebody would hit them with the clue-bat that this is a marketing opportunity.
Mike
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
On 12/28/20 20:47, Allen McKinley Kitchen (gmail) wrote:
A company doing what you describe is one I’d really love to work for.
May that philosophy of business be richly blessed.
Couldn't have said it better myself! Needless to say, when you work with passion and authenticity, somehow, the millions follow. You can't keep them away. Mark.
On 12/28/20 19:01, Aaron Wendel wrote:
Darin,
We charge a $300 one time install charge to cover our costs on the 1G service (which can be paid out at $25/mo if you can't afford $300 all at once).
The area we serve is mainly lower and lower-middle-class income with an 80% transient population. Seven years ago, when "digital divide" and "digital literacy" were the buzz words, we instituted our "free" 1G service in an effort to level the playing field for the population who, otherwise, can't afford internet at all, let alone at that speed. Until recently we didn't charge for residential service at any tier. Rather than putting in "income tiers", making people fill out applications for assistance, etc. we just made it free for everyone. We also provide free 100G service to the local school district as well as free service to local government, police, fire stations (Firemen (and women) had to pay for their own internet to use while they were on duty before us), library, churches and other non-profits.
That's the why. The how is that we control a LOT of fiber in the metro area that is in use by a lot of very large providers that everyone's heard of. We make enough money doing that so we don't feel the need to charge the residences for a basic level of service.
I love it! Well done, and really creative! Mark.
On 12/26/20 20:30, Aaron Wendel wrote:
We run MikroTik RB4011s for residential speeds between 1G and 10G or just supply a media converter. For residential 40G and 100G we just drop in Arista or Extreme switches. SMBs are normally just a media converter or direct fiber handoff.
https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_5hacq2hnd_in <https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_5hacq2hnd_in>
There are not a lot of options for good, off the shelf 10G CPE equipment. The handful of 10G residential customers we have seem to be happy with the tik. The couple that don’t use it have rolled their own solution.
Like anything, I’m sure once the major home broadband providers start to catch up with us smaller guys the vendors will catch up as well.
I like the Tik for a home CPE because it will keep getting updates for as long as you have it. That is unlike typical home CPE that need to be swapped out every year to pick up a new feature. It does not surprise me, one bit, that the Tik is just about the only half-decent 10Gbps-capable CPE out there that won't break the bank. The fact that you can get software updates for it every few weeks/months makes it a lot more compelling than your usual CPE suspects. Mark.
On 12/26/20 20:30, Aaron Wendel wrote:
https://www.kcfiber.com/residential <https://www.kcfiber.com/residential>
Curious, any chance you took over Google's fibre project :-)? Mark.
No. Google still operates their plant in the KC area. Aaron On 12/27/2020 4:06 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 12/26/20 20:30, Aaron Wendel wrote:
https://www.kcfiber.com/residential <https://www.kcfiber.com/residential>
Curious, any chance you took over Google's fibre project :-)?
Mark.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
On 12/25/20 05:53, Brandon Martin wrote:
One of my router vendors has been teasing me with a "true 10Gb" router due out 1Q 2021. I've been told to expect NBASE-T (1G, 2.5G, 5G, 10G) on both WAN and all LAN ports + 802.11ax "Wifi 6" with at least 5Gbps of real-world IPv4 throughput with NAT and essentially wire-speed IPv6 without NAT or content inspection at a realistic price point. I'll be interested to see what they actually deliver as that would make future-looking multi-gig deployments actually meaningful.
For the home, if you're looking at shipping 10Gbps-based CPE's for under US$200, I can't think of anything other than the Tik: https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_rm They claim: - 2.6Gbps forwarding for 64-byte packets. - 7.8Gbps forwarding for 512-byte packets. - 9.7Gbps forwarding for 1,518-byte packets. Mark.
On 12/25/20 4:52 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
For the home, if you're looking at shipping 10Gbps-based CPE's for under US$200, I can't think of anything other than the Tik:
That has 1 10g port. How can that be a 10g CPE?
They claim:
- 2.6Gbps forwarding for 64-byte packets. - 7.8Gbps forwarding for 512-byte packets. - 9.7Gbps forwarding for 1,518-byte packets.
so, not 10g :) Add in some services and I bet it goes down from there. The bigger question in all this if you're doing 10g to the residential user, what are they going to use for their home router/NAT device? Even 60 ghz wifi routers top out at like 5 gbit/s, and NAT at this speed means a powerful CPU. 10g to the home is a great idea to think about, it's just not terribly practical for most customers unless they want to drop 1-2k on routing gear and nics. This is always changing, but it's going to be a few years until we reach the right performance and price point. -- Bryan Fields 727-409-1194 - Voice http://bryanfields.net
Just because nobody is mentioning it - you can always build a pfSense/VyOS/Vyatta box in whatever form factor you’d prefer. Even can run within a VM if you really want to. Regards, Cory On Fri, Dec 25, 2020 at 11:45 AM, Bryan Fields <Bryan@bryanfields.net> wrote:
On 12/25/20 4:52 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
For the home, if you're looking at shipping 10Gbps-based CPE's for under US$200, I can't think of anything other than the Tik:
That has 1 10g port. How can that be a 10g CPE?
They claim:
- 2.6Gbps forwarding for 64-byte packets. - 7.8Gbps forwarding for 512-byte packets. - 9.7Gbps forwarding for 1,518-byte packets.
so, not 10g :)
Add in some services and I bet it goes down from there.
The bigger question in all this if you're doing 10g to the residential user, what are they going to use for their home router/NAT device? Even 60 ghz wifi routers top out at like 5 gbit/s, and NAT at this speed means a powerful CPU.
10g to the home is a great idea to think about, it's just not terribly practical for most customers unless they want to drop 1-2k on routing gear and nics. This is always changing, but it's going to be a few years until we reach the right performance and price point.
-- Bryan Fields
727-409-1194 - Voice http://bryanfields.net
On Fri, Dec 25, 2020 at 12:07 Cory Sell via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> wrote:
Just because nobody is mentioning it - you can always build a pfSense/VyOS/Vyatta box in whatever form factor you’d prefer. Even can run within a VM if you really want to.
For a CPE, openwrt would also work well. It runs well on a PC-type platform. -- -- Hunter Fuller (they) Router Jockey VBH Annex B-5 +1 256 824 5331 Office of Information Technology The University of Alabama in Huntsville Network Engineering
On 12/25/20 1:03 PM, Cory Sell wrote:
Just because nobody is mentioning it - you can always build a pfSense/VyOS/Vyatta box in whatever form factor you’d prefer. Even can run within a VM if you really want to.
My point was the gear is not there yet for the non-technical people. Anyone can roll their own router for cheap, but that's a science experiment. It's akin to a WISP in 1998 running karlnet on a pc with wi-lan cards. Sure you can do it, but there's no one to support it. -- Bryan Fields 727-409-1194 - Voice http://bryanfields.net
On 12/25/20 20:18, Bryan Fields wrote:
My point was the gear is not there yet for the non-technical people.
And that is saying much... Most TV's, the PS4, the Apple TV, e.t.c., still run at 100Mbps max., offering plenty of 4K services. There clearly is no legitimate use-case for Joe and Jane at their home re: 10Gbps. Mark.
On 12/25/20 19:45, Bryan Fields wrote:
That has 1 10g port. How can that be a 10g CPE?
Realistically, what are you going to be running at 1.01Gbps inside your home at any given point? Yes, this may or may not be a rhetorical question.
so, not 10g :)
Show me a single production-level 10Gbps port that runs at 10Gbps :-).
Add in some services and I bet it goes down from there.
Yes, those are just plain old IP routing numbers. Add IPSec and QoS, the numbers fall to between 20% - 40% of that.
The bigger question in all this if you're doing 10g to the residential user, what are they going to use for their home router/NAT device? Even 60 ghz wifi routers top out at like 5 gbit/s, and NAT at this speed means a powerful CPU.
10g to the home is a great idea to think about, it's just not terribly practical for most customers unless they want to drop 1-2k on routing gear and nics. This is always changing, but it's going to be a few years until we reach the right performance and price point.
Well, the initial question is what is going to drive that kind of capacity in a home setting? Unless you are providing some kind of service at some kind of scale, I just don't see homes blowing through 10Gbps, never mind 1Gbps. I just bumped my FTTH service up from 100Mbps to 200Mbps, and aside from faster Youtube uploads for my DJ sets, I'm struggling to fill it :-). I have a mate up the road who just paid for a 1Gbps FTTH service because it was the same price as a 100Mbps one. He generally lives between 900Kbps and 20Mbps. Gigabit-level FTTH services for the home, I feel, have always been about marketing ploys from providers, because they know there is no practical way users can ever hit those figures from their homes. But because users want to "feel good" and "brag" about their Gigabit home connectivity, they'll pay for it. Heck, if I were a consumer ISP, I'd do it too :-). Mark.
* mark.tinka@seacom.com (Mark Tinka) [Fri 25 Dec 2020, 19:11 CET]:
I have a mate up the road who just paid for a 1Gbps FTTH service because it was the same price as a 100Mbps one. He generally lives between 900Kbps and 20Mbps.
Gigabit-level FTTH services for the home, I feel, have always been about marketing ploys from providers, because they know there is no practical way users can ever hit those figures from their homes. [...]
Gigabit speeds are about bursting. Foreground activities like gaming, making online reservations, streaming won't take more than that, but anything faster is really nice to have when you're waiting for the odd software download to finish. (You may have noticed that they've been increasing in size this year.) -- Niels.
On 12/25/20 11:34 AM, Niels Bakker wrote:
* mark.tinka@seacom.com (Mark Tinka) [Fri 25 Dec 2020, 19:11 CET]:
I have a mate up the road who just paid for a 1Gbps FTTH service because it was the same price as a 100Mbps one. He generally lives between 900Kbps and 20Mbps.
Gigabit-level FTTH services for the home, I feel, have always been about marketing ploys from providers, because they know there is no practical way users can ever hit those figures from their homes. [...]
Gigabit speeds are about bursting. Foreground activities like gaming, making online reservations, streaming won't take more than that, but anything faster is really nice to have when you're waiting for the odd software download to finish. (You may have noticed that they've been increasing in size this year.)
Wouldn't cpe that implements proper queuing disciplines be a lot simpler and cheaper? I got bit by that once when a friend was downloading a game and it. I flashed a router with openwrt and fiddled with their queuing nobs and everything was golden. Mark is probably right though: it's just marketing. Who would have believed that bandwidth would just become a marketing ploy. Mike
* mike@mtcc.com (Michael Thomas) [Fri 25 Dec 2020, 21:18 CET]:
On 12/25/20 11:34 AM, Niels Bakker wrote:
Gigabit speeds are about bursting. Foreground activities like gaming, making online reservations, streaming won't take more than that, but anything faster is really nice to have when you're waiting for the odd software download to finish. (You may have noticed that they've been increasing in size this year.)
Wouldn't cpe that implements proper queuing disciplines be a lot simpler and cheaper? I got bit by that once when a friend was downloading a game and it. I flashed a router with openwrt and fiddled with their queuing nobs and everything was golden.
Let's take an example from earlier this year when Activision shipped a 180GB update to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare when they introduced the War Zone BR game mode update. Download times:- 180GB at 100 Mbps: 4 hours 180GB at 1000 Mbps: 23 minutes How will proper queuing disciplines possibly help here? -- Niels.
On 12/25/20 1:22 PM, Niels Bakker wrote:
Wouldn't cpe that implements proper queuing disciplines be a lot simpler and cheaper? I got bit by that once when a friend was downloading a game and it. I flashed a router with openwrt and fiddled with their queuing nobs and everything was golden.
Let's take an example from earlier this year when Activision shipped a 180GB update to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare when they introduced the War Zone BR game mode update.
Download times:-
180GB at 100 Mbps: 4 hours 180GB at 1000 Mbps: 23 minutes
How will proper queuing disciplines possibly help here?
The queuing disciplines allow you to not completely hog the bandwidth so that other people can use the net too. Tail drop seems to rule the roost to this day with CPE so it must be a real joy when you're downloading them. Mike
Niels, CoD is just a game. Doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things if you have to wait a day to play it, unless you’re willing to pay 2x more for 10x speed. Then you’re entitled to the higher speed — occasionally. As George Carlin said about video games, “Just what we need: a generation of idiots with good eye-hand coordination. “ :) -mel via cell
On Dec 25, 2020, at 1:24 PM, Niels Bakker <niels=nanog@bakker.net> wrote:
* mike@mtcc.com (Michael Thomas) [Fri 25 Dec 2020, 21:18 CET]:
On 12/25/20 11:34 AM, Niels Bakker wrote: Gigabit speeds are about bursting. Foreground activities like gaming, making online reservations, streaming won't take more than that, but anything faster is really nice to have when you're waiting for the odd software download to finish. (You may have noticed that they've been increasing in size this year.)
Wouldn't cpe that implements proper queuing disciplines be a lot simpler and cheaper? I got bit by that once when a friend was downloading a game and it. I flashed a router with openwrt and fiddled with their queuing nobs and everything was golden.
Let's take an example from earlier this year when Activision shipped a 180GB update to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare when they introduced the War Zone BR game mode update.
Download times:-
180GB at 100 Mbps: 4 hours 180GB at 1000 Mbps: 23 minutes
How will proper queuing disciplines possibly help here?
-- Niels.
On 12/25/20 23:22, Niels Bakker wrote:
Download times:-
180GB at 100 Mbps: 4 hours 180GB at 1000 Mbps: 23 minutes
For a number of reasons, highly unlikely your console will pull at 1Gbps, but yes, it would certainly pull quicker than 100Mbps :-). I'd just get my 4hrs of sleep, but then again, I'm not a gamer :-). Mark.
* mark.tinka@seacom.com (Mark Tinka) [Sat 26 Dec 2020, 06:48 CET]:
On 12/25/20 23:22, Niels Bakker wrote:
Download times:- 180GB at 100 Mbps: 4 hours 180GB at 1000 Mbps: 23 minutes
For a number of reasons, highly unlikely your console will pull at 1Gbps, but yes, it would certainly pull quicker than 100Mbps :-).
Why wouldn't it go even faster, assuming it got fitted out with a faster network controller than what they shipped with? The storage system in the PS5 as sold can transfer at 5 GB/sec and the APUs have the regular set of crypto acceleration instructions. https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/5/21551165/sony-ps5-playstation-5-no-m2-ssd... https://www.tweaktown.com/news/71340/understanding-the-ps5s-ssd-deep-dive-in... -- Niels.
On 12/26/20 15:45, Niels Bakker wrote:
Why wouldn't it go even faster, assuming it got fitted out with a faster network controller than what they shipped with? The storage system in the PS5 as sold can transfer at 5 GB/sec and the APUs have the regular set of crypto acceleration instructions. https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/5/21551165/sony-ps5-playstation-5-no-m2-ssd...
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/71340/understanding-the-ps5s-ssd-deep-dive-in...
No one argued that Sony could build a half-decent console. Wired via Ethernet, that's unlikely to be the bottleneck. Mark.
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Mark Tinka wrote:
No one argued that Sony could build a half-decent console. Wired via Ethernet, that's unlikely to be the bottleneck.
Considering my PC often saturates my 1000/1000 Internet access when downloading, I don't see why the 1GE NIC on PS5 wouldn't be the bottleneck if it's sitting on higher speed Internet access. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On 12/26/20 16:38, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
Considering my PC often saturates my 1000/1000 Internet access when downloading, I don't see why the 1GE NIC on PS5 wouldn't be the bottleneck if it's sitting on higher speed Internet access.
My experience with customers who've bought 1Gbps FTTH service is that on a good day, they may see 500Mbps. On average, they'll live somewhere between 180Mbps - 350Mbps, with a random spot-check. It's alright for providers who offer this to let their NOC's handle the problem, because most users are connected to the Internet wirelessly, using devices that do not require more than a couple of Mbps of bandwidth at a time. Wired devices such as gaming consoles won't tell you anything more than how long it will take a download to complete. So you are not probably going to work out whether the PS5 is running at 1Gbps or 230Mbps, as long as your psyche is happy with the service you are buying from your provider. Mark.
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Mark Tinka wrote:
My experience with customers who've bought 1Gbps FTTH service is that on a good day, they may see 500Mbps. On average, they'll live somewhere between 180Mbps - 350Mbps, with a random spot-check. It's alright for providers who offer this to let their NOC's handle the problem, because most users are connected to the Internet wirelessly, using devices that do not require more than a couple of Mbps of bandwidth at a time.
Wired devices such as gaming consoles won't tell you anything more than how long it will take a download to complete. So you are not probably going to work out whether the PS5 is running at 1Gbps or 230Mbps, as long as your psyche is happy with the service you are buying from your provider.
Steam and Microsoft will say download speed. I regularily see 100MB/s or more. Perhaps there are some issues at other parts of the network that limits their speeds? I'm in Stockholm, Sweden, with plenty of local CDNs located just 1-3ms away from me. Here the "truth" is that if you game, you need to have a wired connection to your gaming computer. All gamers "know" this. I don't have experience with PS5 and perhaps what you're saying is true for that customer base. I'd say it's not true for Xbox or Steam customers as they see speed prominently displayed on the screen. https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/troubleshooting/troubleshoot-... "Go to My games & apps > Manage > Queue and note the download speed shown on the game or app that’s being installed. " -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
lør. 26. dec. 2020 16.35 skrev Mikael Abrahamsson via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org
:
Perhaps there are some issues at other parts of the network that limits their speeds? I'm in Stockholm, Sweden, with plenty of local CDNs located just 1-3ms away from me.
That is why. The RTT to the source can not be larger than the minimum buffer size in the transport path. Otherwise the speed will start decreasing. Since a lot of ISP equipment only has tiny buffers you will generally be unable to get great downloads from sources far away. The other option is huge buffers which gives you better speed but with buffer bloat issues. Regards
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
That is why. The RTT to the source can not be larger than the minimum buffer size in the transport path. Otherwise the speed will start decreasing.
This is no longer correct. There has been lots of TCP innovation since this was true. Please stop repeating it. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Sat, Dec 26, 2020 at 5:41 PM Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se> wrote:
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
That is why. The RTT to the source can not be larger than the minimum buffer size in the transport path. Otherwise the speed will start decreasing.
This is no longer correct. There has been lots of TCP innovation since this was true.
Please stop repeating it.
It is true there have been TCP improvements but you can very easily verify for yourself that it is very hard to get anywhere near 1 Gbps of actual transfer speed to destinations just 10 ms away. Try the nlnog ring network like this: gigabit@gigabit01:~$ iperf -c netnod01.ring.nlnog.net ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to netnod01.ring.nlnog.net, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 185.24.168.23 port 50632 connected with 185.42.136.5 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 452 MBytes 379 Mbits/sec And that is a direct peer of ours. In general you will have trouble with any server that has a NIC > 1G. If you find a server that has a 1G NIC this happens instead: gigabit@gigabit01:~$ iperf -c bahnhof01.ring.nlnog.net ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to bahnhof01.ring.nlnog.net, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 185.24.168.23 port 56412 connected with 195.178.185.171 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.08 GBytes 930 Mbits/sec Why? Because the 1G NIC server naturally will pace the traffic at maximum 1G and therefore not fill any buffers in the transfer path. The 10G servers on the other hand WILL fill the buffers and experience packet loss. Regards, Baldur
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
It is true there have been TCP improvements but you can very easily verify for yourself that it is very hard to get anywhere near 1 Gbps of actual transfer speed to destinations just 10 ms away. Try the nlnog ring network like this:
gigabit@gigabit01:~$ iperf -c netnod01.ring.nlnog.net ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to netnod01.ring.nlnog.net, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 185.24.168.23 port 50632 connected with 185.42.136.5 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 452 MBytes 379 Mbits/sec
Why would you just use 85KB of TCP window size? That's not the problem of buffering (or lack thereof) along the path, that just not enough TCP window size for long-RTT high speed transfers. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
lør. 26. dec. 2020 18.55 skrev Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>:
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
It is true there have been TCP improvements but you can very easily verify for yourself that it is very hard to get anywhere near 1 Gbps of actual transfer speed to destinations just 10 ms away. Try the nlnog ring network like this:
gigabit@gigabit01:~$ iperf -c netnod01.ring.nlnog.net ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to netnod01.ring.nlnog.net, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 185.24.168.23 port 50632 connected with 185.42.136.5 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 452 MBytes 379 Mbits/sec
Why would you just use 85KB of TCP window size?
That's not the problem of buffering (or lack thereof) along the path, that just not enough TCP window size for long-RTT high speed transfers.
That is just the starting window size. Also it is the default and I am not going to tune the connection because no such tuning will occur when you do your next far away download and wonder why it is so slow. If you do the math you will realise that 379 Mbps at 10 ms is impossible with 85 K window. I demonstrated that it is about buffers by showing the same download from a server that paces the traffic indeed gets the full 930 Mbps with exactly the same settings, including starting window size, and the same path (Copenhagen to Stockholm). Regards Baldur
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
I demonstrated that it is about buffers by showing the same download from a server that paces the traffic indeed gets the full 930 Mbps with exactly the same settings, including starting window size, and the same path (Copenhagen to Stockholm).
You demonstrated that it's about which TCP algorithm they use, probably. They all respond very differently to increase in RTT vs loss. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.03852.pdf Generally the Internet doesn't need more buffers, it needs less. If you have only FIFO available, configure it to tail-drop at 10ms or so, to help your customers with what they really care about, interactive performance. I debloat my 1000/1000 with bidir 900/900 FQ_CODEL to avoid my downloads affecting my interactive performance. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Sat, Dec 26, 2020 at 7:28 PM Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se> wrote:
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
I demonstrated that it is about buffers by showing the same download from a server that paces the traffic indeed gets the full 930 Mbps with exactly the same settings, including starting window size, and the same path (Copenhagen to Stockholm).
You demonstrated that it's about which TCP algorithm they use, probably.
All (virtual) machines used in the experiment are the same. Those are NLNOG RING network managed machines all running the exact same Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS. If you have access to NLNOG RING or equivalent you should try the experiment for yourself. You will find that as latency increases TCP speeds goes down and it can not be explained by congestion. And you will find that some servers have this effect much less than others and that those servers usually have 1G network speed. The effect is the same no matter what time of day you try it (ie. it is not congestion related). Before you panic I will say I am not trying to advocate that we need more buffers. We need smart buffers. Buffer bloat is bad but no buffers is also bad. Your home made debloat solution will probably not be able to recover the missing TCP performance that I am describing here. But if you could have FQ Codel in the ISP switch that would probably do a lot. Or we could have TCP with pacing and that will be widely deployed around the same time as IPv6. Regards Baldur
I wouldn't rely on these numbers too much, your testing methodology is flawed. People don't expect RING nodes to be used as speedtest servers and so they are usually not connected to high speed networks. Using a classical speedtest.net (Web or CLI) application would make much more sense, given the servers are actually connected to high speed Internet and are tuned to achieve such speeds - which is much more akin to how the most bandwidth demanding stuff (streaming, game downloads, system updates from CDNs) behaves. It's certainly possible to get 1G+ over >10ms RTT connections single stream - the buffers are certainly not THAT small for it to be a problem - not to mention game distribution platforms do usually open multiple connections to maximise the bandwidth utilisation. Re 85KB: that's just the initial window size, which will grow given tcp window scaling is enabled (default on modern Linux). Filip On 26 December 2020 19:14:13 CET, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> wrote:
lør. 26. dec. 2020 18.55 skrev Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>:
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
It is true there have been TCP improvements but you can very easily verify for yourself that it is very hard to get anywhere near 1 Gbps of actual transfer speed to destinations just 10 ms away. Try the nlnog ring network like this:
gigabit@gigabit01:~$ iperf -c netnod01.ring.nlnog.net ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to netnod01.ring.nlnog.net, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 185.24.168.23 port 50632 connected with 185.42.136.5 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 452 MBytes 379 Mbits/sec
Why would you just use 85KB of TCP window size?
That's not the problem of buffering (or lack thereof) along the path, that just not enough TCP window size for long-RTT high speed transfers.
That is just the starting window size. Also it is the default and I am not going to tune the connection because no such tuning will occur when you do your next far away download and wonder why it is so slow.
If you do the math you will realise that 379 Mbps at 10 ms is impossible with 85 K window.
I demonstrated that it is about buffers by showing the same download from a server that paces the traffic indeed gets the full 930 Mbps with exactly the same settings, including starting window size, and the same path (Copenhagen to Stockholm).
Regards
Baldur
-- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
It was not meant to be a test as such, just a demonstration. Netnod to Bahnhof is full speed and the third server is mine, so all three servers can deliver at least 1G. Finding a speedtest.net server at least 1000 km away that will show full speed at 1G is hard. Namely because most such servers have at least 10G NIC and that is not an advantage. It is possible to get 1G at 10 ms, I did demonstrate that myself with the test to Bahnhof. It is also possible to be limited at 30%. As the test to Netnod shows. lør. 26. dec. 2020 20.10 skrev Filip Hruska <fhr@fhrnet.eu>:
I wouldn't rely on these numbers too much, your testing methodology is flawed. People don't expect RING nodes to be used as speedtest servers and so they are usually not connected to high speed networks.
Using a classical speedtest.net (Web or CLI) application would make much more sense, given the servers are actually connected to high speed Internet and are tuned to achieve such speeds - which is much more akin to how the most bandwidth demanding stuff (streaming, game downloads, system updates from CDNs) behaves.
It's certainly possible to get 1G+ over >10ms RTT connections single stream - the buffers are certainly not THAT small for it to be a problem - not to mention game distribution platforms do usually open multiple connections to maximise the bandwidth utilisation.
Re 85KB: that's just the initial window size, which will grow given tcp window scaling is enabled (default on modern Linux).
Filip
On 26 December 2020 19:14:13 CET, Baldur Norddahl < baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> wrote:
lør. 26. dec. 2020 18.55 skrev Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>:
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
It is true there have been TCP improvements but you can very easily verify for yourself that it is very hard to get anywhere near 1 Gbps of actual transfer speed to destinations just 10 ms away. Try the nlnog ring network like this:
gigabit@gigabit01:~$ iperf -c netnod01.ring.nlnog.net ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to netnod01.ring.nlnog.net, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 185.24.168.23 port 50632 connected with 185.42.136.5 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 452 MBytes 379 Mbits/sec
Why would you just use 85KB of TCP window size?
That's not the problem of buffering (or lack thereof) along the path, that just not enough TCP window size for long-RTT high speed transfers.
That is just the starting window size. Also it is the default and I am not going to tune the connection because no such tuning will occur when you do your next far away download and wonder why it is so slow.
If you do the math you will realise that 379 Mbps at 10 ms is impossible with 85 K window.
I demonstrated that it is about buffers by showing the same download from a server that paces the traffic indeed gets the full 930 Mbps with exactly the same settings, including starting window size, and the same path (Copenhagen to Stockholm).
Regards
Baldur
-- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
The thing is that the pandemic has changed the game on the ground: there is an actual feature differentiator to be had. But having dealt with the Linksys folks in the past I don't put out much hope that they'll take advantage of it. The software development side was a vast black hole where time stands still. It seems the entire industry is like that. Michael, Even 100 Mbps Internet is fine for Zoom, as long as the uplink speed is at least 10 Mbps. The average zoom session requires 2 Mbps up and down, and even for the lavish six-screen executive sessions, 6 Mbps is plenty good. So arguing that 10 GbE is necessary because “pandemic has changed the game on the ground” is silly. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204003179-System-requirements-for-... So, sorry, 10 GbE is a hobbyists fantasy, not a marketable product. If hobbyists want 10GbE, let them pay for it like the rest of us, and let them play CoD from inside freezing data center :) -mel On Dec 26, 2020, at 11:12 AM, Filip Hruska <fhr@fhrnet.eu> wrote: I wouldn't rely on these numbers too much, your testing methodology is flawed. People don't expect RING nodes to be used as speedtest servers and so they are usually not connected to high speed networks. Using a classical speedtest.net (Web or CLI) application would make much more sense, given the servers are actually connected to high speed Internet and are tuned to achieve such speeds - which is much more akin to how the most bandwidth demanding stuff (streaming, game downloads, system updates from CDNs) behaves. It's certainly possible to get 1G+ over >10ms RTT connections single stream - the buffers are certainly not THAT small for it to be a problem - not to mention game distribution platforms do usually open multiple connections to maximise the bandwidth utilisation. Re 85KB: that's just the initial window size, which will grow given tcp window scaling is enabled (default on modern Linux). Filip On 26 December 2020 19:14:13 CET, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> wrote: lør. 26. dec. 2020 18.55 skrev Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se<mailto:swmike@swm.pp.se>>: On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
It is true there have been TCP improvements but you can very easily verify for yourself that it is very hard to get anywhere near 1 Gbps of actual transfer speed to destinations just 10 ms away. Try the nlnog ring network like this:
gigabit@gigabit01:~$ iperf -c netnod01.ring.nlnog.net<http://netnod01.ring.nlnog.net> ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to netnod01.ring.nlnog.net<http://netnod01.ring.nlnog.net>, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 3] local 185.24.168.23 port 50632 connected with 185.42.136.5 port 5001 [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth [ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 452 MBytes 379 Mbits/sec
Why would you just use 85KB of TCP window size? That's not the problem of buffering (or lack thereof) along the path, that just not enough TCP window size for long-RTT high speed transfers. That is just the starting window size. Also it is the default and I am not going to tune the connection because no such tuning will occur when you do your next far away download and wonder why it is so slow. If you do the math you will realise that 379 Mbps at 10 ms is impossible with 85 K window. I demonstrated that it is about buffers by showing the same download from a server that paces the traffic indeed gets the full 930 Mbps with exactly the same settings, including starting window size, and the same path (Copenhagen to Stockholm). Regards Baldur -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
On 12/26/20 11:49 AM, Mel Beckman wrote:
The thing is that the pandemic has changed the game on the ground: there is an actual feature differentiator to be had. But having dealt with the Linksys folks in the past I don't put out much hope that they'll take advantage of it. The software development side was a vast black hole where time stands still. It seems the entire industry is like that.
Michael,
Even 100 Mbps Internet is fine for Zoom, as long as the uplink speed is at least 10 Mbps. The average zoom session requires 2 Mbps up and down, and even for the lavish six-screen executive sessions, 6 Mbps is plenty good. So arguing that 10 GbE is necessary because “pandemic has changed the game on the ground” is silly.
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204003179-System-requirements-for-... <https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204003179-System-requirements-for-Zoom-Rooms#h_b48c2bfd-7da0-4290-aae8-784270d3ab3f>
So, sorry, 10 GbE is a hobbyists fantasy, not a marketable product. If hobbyists want 10GbE, let them pay for it like the rest of us, and let them play CoD from inside freezing data center :)
I'm not saying anything about 10G, other than my initial query as to whether any residence could possibly need that much bandwidth. But buffer bloat is a problem with a lot of us still stuck on DSL with no prospect of anything better. It's not the bandwidth per se, it is how the bandwidth is consumed at home. Better queuing disciplines than tail drop with a gigantic queue could help zoom meetings a lot where bandwidth is more constrained. And regardless of bandwidth, huge queues are not good for real time traffic for anything. You'd think that gamers would be acutely aware of this and create a market for routers that cater to their hunger for less latency. Mike
On 12/26/20 17:55, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
Since a lot of ISP equipment only has tiny buffers you will generally be unable to get great downloads from sources far away.
This is true for any application, in general. 500ms vs. 1ms for download efficiency will always show you what they are made of, regardless of how ridiculous the buffers are. The solution has always been to get content as close to the eyeballs as possible. The positive side-effect with this, also, is that downloads complete sooner, freeing up the line quicker. Mark.
On 12/26/20 17:35, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
Perhaps there are some issues at other parts of the network that limits their speeds? I'm in Stockholm, Sweden, with plenty of local CDNs located just 1-3ms away from me.
The Swedish model (Stokab) is one to envy. If only other gubbermints had the political will to copy this. But alas.
Here the "truth" is that if you game, you need to have a wired connection to your gaming computer. All gamers "know" this.
I don't have experience with PS5 and perhaps what you're saying is true for that customer base. I'd say it's not true for Xbox or Steam customers as they see speed prominently displayed on the screen.
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/games-apps/troubleshooting/troubleshoot-...
"Go to My games & apps > Manage > Queue and note the download speed shown on the game or app that’s being installed. "
Very handy. Never owned an Xbox, so didn't know this. That said, as popular as gaming is, I'm not sure it represents the global FTTH demographic. Also, for day-to-day gaming, I believe the worry will mostly be about latency and packet loss, than raw throughput. Raw throughput will be key when you're downloading new games or updating old ones, and chances are this will happen less frequently than just regular playing. Mark.
On Dec 26, 2020, at 10:35 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> wrote:
Here the "truth" is that if you game, you need to have a wired connection to your gaming computer. All gamers "know" this.
My sons switch is hard wired, he gets considerable advantage (apparently) due to using the USB adapter vs wifi when playing online. - Jared
On 12/25/20 21:34, Niels Bakker wrote:
Gigabit speeds are about bursting. Foreground activities like gaming, making online reservations, streaming won't take more than that, but anything faster is really nice to have when you're waiting for the odd software download to finish. (You may have noticed that they've been increasing in size this year.)
Agreed, but how many "Gigabit" speeds are sufficient for bursting. The level of burst is congruent with the the amount of generation all of your devices require at the same time. Then you hit the device limits itself, e.g., wi-fi on the device, wi-fi on the AP, routing on the home gateway, whatever actual backbone the provider has, e.t.c. Then the fact that not all the devices in the home are going to be generating burst data at the same time, or even on the same day. That iOS update may ship to your phone on Monday, but the kids will only get it the following Saturday, for some reason or other. Mark.
On Fri, Dec 25, 2020 at 11:46 Bryan Fields <Bryan@bryanfields.net> wrote:
On 12/25/20 4:52 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
For the home, if you're looking at shipping 10Gbps-based CPE's for under US$200, I can't think of anything other than the Tik:
That has 1 10g port. How can that be a 10g CPE?
It would meet some customers’ needs because multiple people could use 1G of service at a time. I think it is interesting to distinguish “>1G CPE” from “true 10G CPE” and I suspect many / most customers are looking for the former. -- -- Hunter Fuller (they) Router Jockey VBH Annex B-5 +1 256 824 5331 Office of Information Technology The University of Alabama in Huntsville Network Engineering
On 12/25/20 20:10, Hunter Fuller via NANOG wrote:
It would meet some customers’ needs because multiple people could use 1G of service at a time. I think it is interesting to distinguish “>1G CPE” from “true 10G CPE” and I suspect many / most customers are looking for the former.
Large upstream capacity has always been about aggregation of the downstream. The 100Gbps or 400Gbps backbones we deploy, as operators, are not symmetrical with what our customers buy. Mark.
On 12/25/20 11:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 12/25/20 20:10, Hunter Fuller via NANOG wrote:
It would meet some customers’ needs because multiple people could use 1G of service at a time. I think it is interesting to distinguish “>1G CPE” from “true 10G CPE” and I suspect many / most customers are looking for the former.
Large upstream capacity has always been about aggregation of the downstream.
Can I ask a really dumb question? Consider it an xmas present. I know this sounds like "nobody needs more than 640k", but how can household possibly need a gig let alone 10g? I'm still on 25mbs DSL, have cut the cord so all tv, etc is over the net. If I really cared and wanted 4k I could probably upgrade to a 50mbs service and be fine. Admittedly it's just the two of us here, but throw in a couple of kids and I still don't see how ~100mbs isn't sufficient let alone 1 or 10G. Am I missing something really stupid? Mike
I saturate my 1G connection most during game downloads, file downloads/uploads, full backup uploads, etc. I also self-host a lot of services for personal use and having that peak speed is really nice when you need it. It also had no traffic limit per month which is my biggest complaint about the lower tier services and also a huge complaint I have with regards to the direction that residential services are moving towards. On Fri, Dec 25, 2020 at 1:27 PM, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> wrote:
On 12/25/20 11:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 12/25/20 20:10, Hunter Fuller via NANOG wrote:
It would meet some customers’ needs because multiple people could use 1G of service at a time. I think it is interesting to distinguish “>1G CPE” from “true 10G CPE” and I suspect many / most customers are looking for the former.
Large upstream capacity has always been about aggregation of the downstream.
Can I ask a really dumb question? Consider it an xmas present. I know this sounds like "nobody needs more than 640k", but how can household possibly need a gig let alone 10g? I'm still on 25mbs DSL, have cut the cord so all tv, etc is over the net. If I really cared and wanted 4k I could probably upgrade to a 50mbs service and be fine. Admittedly it's just the two of us here, but throw in a couple of kids and I still don't see how ~100mbs isn't sufficient let alone 1 or 10G. Am I missing something really stupid?
Mike
On 12/25/20 11:39 AM, Cory Sell wrote:
I saturate my 1G connection most during game downloads, file downloads/uploads, full backup uploads, etc.
I also self-host a lot of services for personal use and having that peak speed is really nice when you need it. It also had no traffic limit per month which is my biggest complaint about the lower tier services and also a huge complaint I have with regards to the direction that residential services are moving towards.
Obviously for downloads it's nice, but how often is that happening? A time or two a month max? It seems sort of strange the providers would build out infrastructure for such a niche activity. Mike
On 12/25/20 21:45, Michael Thomas wrote:
Obviously for downloads it's nice, but how often is that happening? A time or two a month max? It seems sort of strange the providers would build out infrastructure for such a niche activity.
Haha, that's the trick; they don't. Because the logic is similar to yours - how often will customers be pushing that much traffic, and if at all, for how long? Most providers will sell 1Gbps without doing anything different to the infrastructure, because they know most customers probably have no clue about the difference between 2.4GHz, 5GHz, 802.11a, b, g, n, ac and ax, Cat-5, 5e and 6, range extenders, boosters, the works. If it were me, I'd do the same, as a 1Gbps consumer provider :-). Heck, it's free money. Mark.
Once upon a time, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> said:
On 12/25/20 11:39 AM, Cory Sell wrote:
I saturate my 1G connection most during game downloads, file downloads/uploads, full backup uploads, etc.
I also self-host a lot of services for personal use and having that peak speed is really nice when you need it. It also had no traffic limit per month which is my biggest complaint about the lower tier services and also a huge complaint I have with regards to the direction that residential services are moving towards.
Obviously for downloads it's nice, but how often is that happening? A time or two a month max? It seems sort of strange the providers would build out infrastructure for such a niche activity.
With an Xbox Game Pass subscription, there are a ton of games available for play at no additional cost (with some games being added and removed monthly). My group of Xbox friends will regularly look at the list and say "let's try this one" - it might be a few gig or a 60GB or more download (I've got a few games over 100GB). We might play it for 10 minutes, decide it isn't to our liking, delete it, and try another game. I think the highest Xbox download rate I've seen is around 350Mbps (with a wired gig link to the Xbox) on my gig home service. The other aspect of it is that we're doing these downloads while continuing to play other games and chat (both things sensitive to latency). Some have family/roommates in the home, so they may be streaming audio and/or video at the same time. Do we fill up a gigabit? No, probably not... but we'd notice if we had a lot less. Bandwidth is like disk space - you think "I'll never use all of this", and then the availability changes behavior. Having ability to do more means your behavior changes to utilize more. We don't NEED high speed Internet to download games - we could leave the download running overnight for example - but being able to download big games in minutes means we get to try more games, finding new things to like. -- Chris Adams <cma@cmadams.net>
On 12/25/20 12:40 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
The other aspect of it is that we're doing these downloads while continuing to play other games and chat (both things sensitive to latency). Some have family/roommates in the home, so they may be streaming audio and/or video at the same time. Do we fill up a gigabit? No, probably not... but we'd notice if we had a lot less.
But using the right queuing disciplines it a lot cheaper than the brute force and ignorance of just upping the bandwidth, right? It seems really surprising after almost a decade of discovery of bufferbloat that most CPE are still doing tail drops. Mike
Once upon a time, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> said:
On 12/25/20 12:40 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
The other aspect of it is that we're doing these downloads while continuing to play other games and chat (both things sensitive to latency). Some have family/roommates in the home, so they may be streaming audio and/or video at the same time. Do we fill up a gigabit? No, probably not... but we'd notice if we had a lot less.
But using the right queuing disciplines it a lot cheaper than the brute force and ignorance of just upping the bandwidth, right?
Queueing doesn't get me my next game in time to play it tonight. I've always seen general queueing as a work-around for "not enough bandwidth and can't add more"... but when more is available, why not just use more? -- Chris Adams <cma@cmadams.net>
On 12/25/20 12:53 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> said:
On 12/25/20 12:40 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
The other aspect of it is that we're doing these downloads while continuing to play other games and chat (both things sensitive to latency). Some have family/roommates in the home, so they may be streaming audio and/or video at the same time. Do we fill up a gigabit? No, probably not... but we'd notice if we had a lot less. But using the right queuing disciplines it a lot cheaper than the brute force and ignorance of just upping the bandwidth, right? Queueing doesn't get me my next game in time to play it tonight. I've always seen general queueing as a work-around for "not enough bandwidth and can't add more"... but when more is available, why not just use more?
I'm fine with "free stuff". But it seems we've hit saturation on a number of front like camera and screen pixels, ghz of cpu, TB's of disk, Gb's of netio for residential stuff. My provider on the other (Volcano Internet) doesn't seem to have got this memo though. They are building out fiber and the rate sheet is the same as for DSL. I mean, wtf? Why would I want the probable expense of getting it from the curb (assumedly) to my home if it's for the same price? Even if it's ftth at their expense, it seems rather pointless. I mean, i understand the arm's race, but now it seems to be an arms race for its own sake. Mike
In article <dc462f3d-2b2c-f294-d4d3-f28cf083fcf8@mtcc.com> you write:
I'm fine with "free stuff". But it seems we've hit saturation on a number of front like camera and screen pixels, ghz of cpu, TB's of disk, Gb's of netio for residential stuff.
My provider on the other (Volcano Internet) doesn't seem to have got this memo though. They are building out fiber and the rate sheet is the same as for DSL. I mean, wtf?
How fast is your DSL? It looks like your provider's DSL tops out at 50/5, which I suspect is not available everywhere, while fiber starts at 25/25 and goes to 100/100. I rather like the 100/100 symmetrical bandwidth on my fiber. I can assure you that 100/100 feels noticably faster than 25/5 even though nothing here would use even 25Mb sustained. R's, John
On 12/25/20 1:25 PM, John Levine wrote:
In article <dc462f3d-2b2c-f294-d4d3-f28cf083fcf8@mtcc.com> you write:
I'm fine with "free stuff". But it seems we've hit saturation on a number of front like camera and screen pixels, ghz of cpu, TB's of disk, Gb's of netio for residential stuff.
My provider on the other (Volcano Internet) doesn't seem to have got this memo though. They are building out fiber and the rate sheet is the same as for DSL. I mean, wtf? How fast is your DSL? It looks like your provider's DSL tops out at 50/5, which I suspect is not available everywhere, while fiber starts at 25/25 and goes to 100/100.
I rather like the 100/100 symmetrical bandwidth on my fiber. I can assure you that 100/100 feels noticably faster than 25/5 even though nothing here would use even 25Mb sustained.
They max out at 50, which i might be able to get since I think the pedestal is about 1/2 mile away. When I was with Sonic they have that Fusion product but I think I could only get 50 because I was about 9000' from the CO in SF. I'd definitely appreciate symmetric, or at least better in upstream. Obviously zoom and all of that has made a lie of us not needing upstream. It would make cloud based "filesystems" more feasible too. But the larger point is why bother going to all of that effort if you're just going roll it out with low bandwidth? I mean, 100Mbps isn't even competitive with cable these days. But they're a somewhat crazy amalgam. They have POTS everywhere, cable tv everywhere, cable IP in some areas and DSL in others. I wish I knew somebody there to talk to this about because it's really odd. Mike
In article <3b0bc95b-c741-7561-1692-75fac74d5883@mtcc.com> you write:
I'd definitely appreciate symmetric, or at least better in upstream. Obviously zoom and all of that has made a lie of us not needing upstream. It would make cloud based "filesystems" more feasible too.
But the larger point is why bother going to all of that effort if you're just going roll it out with low bandwidth? I mean, 100Mbps isn't even competitive with cable these days. But they're a somewhat crazy amalgam. They have POTS everywhere, cable tv everywhere, cable IP in some areas and DSL in others. I wish I knew somebody there to talk to this about because it's really odd.
I agree it is odd to make 100/100 the top speed. The fiber service I have from my local non-Bell telco offers 100/100, 500/500, and 1000/1000. FiOS where you can get it goes to 940/880. The obvious guess is that their upstream bandwidth is underprovisioned, or maybe they figure 100/100 is all they need to compete in that particular market. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
On 12/25/20 2:32 PM, John Levine wrote:
In article <3b0bc95b-c741-7561-1692-75fac74d5883@mtcc.com> you write:
I'd definitely appreciate symmetric, or at least better in upstream. Obviously zoom and all of that has made a lie of us not needing upstream. It would make cloud based "filesystems" more feasible too.
But the larger point is why bother going to all of that effort if you're just going roll it out with low bandwidth? I mean, 100Mbps isn't even competitive with cable these days. But they're a somewhat crazy amalgam. They have POTS everywhere, cable tv everywhere, cable IP in some areas and DSL in others. I wish I knew somebody there to talk to this about because it's really odd. I agree it is odd to make 100/100 the top speed. The fiber service I have from my local non-Bell telco offers 100/100, 500/500, and 1000/1000. FiOS where you can get it goes to 940/880.
The obvious guess is that their upstream bandwidth is underprovisioned, or maybe they figure 100/100 is all they need to compete in that particular market.
What's weirder is that it's most likely not going to allow them to retire their copper plant since they are a phone company and i'm fairly certain that regulations won't allow them to say "get a battery for this phone dongle". Given PG&E's antics, this is no small thing. I assume it would allow them to retire their cable plant eventually, but then they become yet another over the top provider without adding much if any value. But they are an odd and very old family run company, so who knows what's going on in the C-Suite. Mike
In article <5f11bc55-e3d1-006d-c4c4-0703ff63cf89@mtcc.com> you write:
The obvious guess is that their upstream bandwidth is underprovisioned, or maybe they figure 100/100 is all they need to compete in that particular market.
What's weirder is that it's most likely not going to allow them to retire their copper plant since they are a phone company and i'm fairly certain that regulations won't allow them to say "get a battery for this phone dongle"....
I realize the rules in NY may be different, but my telco supplied fiber modem, which is about the size of a pack of cards, comes with a much larger 12V UPS with a substantial battery. I looked at the specs for the modem and the UPS and it appears that the battery is good for about four days. They sure seem ready to take down the oopper. The installer was sad when I told him to leave my six-pair copper cable alone even though nothing is using it now.
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
They sure seem ready to take down the oopper. The installer was sad when I told him to leave my six-pair copper cable alone even though nothing is using it now.
Sure; ILECs would *love* to deprovision their copper end networks. But that's not necessarily a great idea, societally; always-on dialtone (or, at least, dialtone with a much higher reliability than VoN) can be pretty important. My LECs in Florida seem to manage five 9s pretty handily at the station set; betting FiOS isn't managing that. They *tried* to get permission to do this in NYC after Sandy, and someone (NYPUC?) told them to pound sand; if the customer had copper, you *had* to give it back to them; you could not force them to voice-over-FiOS. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274
In article <653758700.2275.1608968920711.JavaMail.zimbra@baylink.com>, Jay R. Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
They sure seem ready to take down the oopper. The installer was sad when I told him to leave my six-pair copper cable alone even though nothing is using it now.
Sure; ILECs would *love* to deprovision their copper end networks.
But that's not necessarily a great idea, societally; always-on dialtone (or, at least, dialtone with a much higher reliability than VoN) can be pretty important. My LECs in Florida seem to manage five 9s pretty handily at the station set; betting FiOS isn't managing that. ...
My telco is a family run rural LEC with some quaint ideas. I asked the installer who replaces the backup battery when it wears out. "We do, of course." He seemed to think it was a silly question, was surprised when I told him Verizon felt otherwise. In the 25 years since I've lived here the power has never been out as long as a day so I think a four day battery will give me pretty good reliability. I know my fiber is a straight shot to the CO since I'm only four blocks away but as far as I can tell, unlike the HFC cable plant next to it on the poles, their fiber system doesn't use any powered repeaters. -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
On 12/26/20 12:44 PM, John Levine wrote:
In the 25 years since I've lived here the power has never been out as long as a day so I think a four day battery will give me pretty good reliability. I know my fiber is a straight shot to the CO since I'm only four blocks away but as far as I can tell, unlike the HFC cable plant next to it on the poles, their fiber system doesn't use any powered repeaters.
Here in California the new reality is that multi-day outages are now common. The first few planned outages were 3-4 days, so that would be on the edge, especially if it's for gabby granny on the phone for hours.This all depends on the weather, and for snow related outages they can go on for days. We have a generator because of this, but everybody getting a generator in the middle of the Berkeley Hills would be something of its own horror show, but it will probably come down to that. Mike
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020 12:58:42 -0800, Michael Thomas said:
can go on for days. We have a generator because of this, but everybody getting a generator in the middle of the Berkeley Hills would be something of its own horror show, but it will probably come down to that.
Egads. Especially if a lot of those generators are just bought at Home Depot and hooked up to the house wiring without a proper cutover switch for the mains.
On 12/26/20 1:13 PM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
On Sat, 26 Dec 2020 12:58:42 -0800, Michael Thomas said:
can go on for days. We have a generator because of this, but everybody getting a generator in the middle of the Berkeley Hills would be something of its own horror show, but it will probably come down to that. Egads.
Especially if a lot of those generators are just bought at Home Depot and hooked up to the house wiring without a proper cutover switch for the mains.
Yeah, it burned somebody's house to a crisp here last year around here. It certainly makes the case why leaving professionals in charge of power issues is the better idea. although with pg&e it's a tough call, my telco not so much. Mike
On 12/26/20 23:57, Michael Thomas wrote:
Yeah, it burned somebody's house to a crisp here last year around here. It certainly makes the case why leaving professionals in charge of power issues is the better idea. although with pg&e it's a tough call, my telco not so much.
I considered a generator at some point, for home back up. In the end, and for various reasons, I settled on renewables. I'm just not sure where all that Li-Ion will go after 15 - 20 years of use, though... One European manufacturer (the one whose battery I bought) says that as of now, they can only recycle 20% of each battery they sell. To me, that sounds like just the metal case enclosure, and the plastic facia. Ah well, maybe disposal tech. for Li-Ion storage will have improved by 2040. Mark.
On 12/27/20 2:26 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 12/26/20 23:57, Michael Thomas wrote:
Yeah, it burned somebody's house to a crisp here last year around here. It certainly makes the case why leaving professionals in charge of power issues is the better idea. although with pg&e it's a tough call, my telco not so much.
I considered a generator at some point, for home back up.
In the end, and for various reasons, I settled on renewables.
I'm just not sure where all that Li-Ion will go after 15 - 20 years of use, though...
One European manufacturer (the one whose battery I bought) says that as of now, they can only recycle 20% of each battery they sell. To me, that sounds like just the metal case enclosure, and the plastic facia.
Ah well, maybe disposal tech. for Li-Ion storage will have improved by 2040.
We have both, and are going to get a battery. But the battery would probably only be good for about a day which is not enough, especially with these planned shutoffs because they have to inspect their wire plant in daylight. There has to be a better technical solution for this beyond just burying the wires. A properly trained AI could probably figure out what's naught and nice. Mike
søn. 27. dec. 2020 17.14 skrev Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com>:
We have both, and are going to get a battery. But the battery would probably only be good for about a day which is not enough, especially with these planned shutoffs because they have to inspect their wire plant in daylight. There has to be a better technical solution for this beyond just burying the wires. A properly trained AI could probably figure out what's naught and nice.
Here in the civilised world we bury the wires ;-)
On 12/27/20 18:57, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
Here in the civilised world we bury the wires ;-)
I'm certain every country has a combination of both... one of those more than the other in some places, but a combo nonetheless. Ultimately, it's most unlikely that any utility company is going to serve the growing needs of the world, as a going concern. If there is a chance you can self-produce, to some extent, that'd be worth looking into. Mark.
On Sun, 27 Dec 2020 17:57:17 +0100, Baldur Norddahl said:
Here in the civilised world we bury the wires ;-)
Even the long-haul 765kv and up connections across the power grid? In the US, they're out on towers for a reason - you can fly along them in a helicopter and easily spot parts of cable that are degrading and need repair because they glow brighter on an infrared scope... (Plus, as Hurricane Sandy taught Manhattan, buried wires have their own rather nasty failure modes....)
On 12/27/20 10:00 AM, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
On Sun, 27 Dec 2020 17:57:17 +0100, Baldur Norddahl said:
Here in the civilised world we bury the wires ;-) Even the long-haul 765kv and up connections across the power grid?
In the US, they're out on towers for a reason - you can fly along them in a helicopter and easily spot parts of cable that are degrading and need repair because they glow brighter on an infrared scope...
(Plus, as Hurricane Sandy taught Manhattan, buried wires have their own rather nasty failure modes....)
Right and here in California, it was precisely those lines that incinerated Paradise. The problem with PG&E is that they couldn't be bothered to maintain anything since it got in the way of cushy estaff salaries and investor dividends. The tower that caused Paradise was a century old. Mike
----- On Dec 27, 2020, at 10:06 AM, Michael Thomas mike@mtcc.com wrote: Hi,
Right and here in California, it was precisely those lines that incinerated Paradise.
And for those lurkers outside of CA, or even the U.S., the small town named "Paradise" was completely wiped off the map a few years ago due to horrific wildfires. The smoke was so bad that here in the Bay Area we were wearing N95 masks because of it. The masks I bought back then were useful again when the pandemic started. Netflix has a documentary on it, "Fire In Paradise". Gives me the chills every time I watch it. Thanks, Sabri
søn. 27. dec. 2020 19.00 skrev Valdis Klētnieks <valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu>:
On Sun, 27 Dec 2020 17:57:17 +0100, Baldur Norddahl said:
Here in the civilised world we bury the wires ;-)
Even the long-haul 765kv and up connections across the power grid?
In the US, they're out on towers for a reason - you can fly along them in a helicopter and easily spot parts of cable that are degrading and need repair because they glow brighter on an infrared scope...
(Plus, as Hurricane Sandy taught Manhattan, buried wires have their own rather nasty failure modes....)
All of the 400V and 10 kV is buried. That means no wires along streets, anywhere. The long haul transmission network consists mostly of 150 kV and 400 kV lines. That has been partly buried, especially near and in cities. There was a project to have it all buried but was abandoned halfway due to cost. But then it is all fully redundant, so they will just power it down if it needs maintenance. My company is digging for FTTH and in the few cases we need to cross one of these bad guys, they will shut it for us while we are working. Nobody looses power of course. The 10 kV network is redundant too. We managed to hit those a few times. That will cause a power interruption for 10 to 20 minutes until they reroute the power. I believe mostly for safety, they need to be sure that the damaged line will not become energized again. Regards Baldur
On 12/27/20 10:26 AM, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
All of the 400V and 10 kV is buried. That means no wires along streets, anywhere.
The long haul transmission network consists mostly of 150 kV and 400 kV lines. That has been partly buried, especially near and in cities. There was a project to have it all buried but was abandoned halfway due to cost.
But then it is all fully redundant, so they will just power it down if it needs maintenance. My company is digging for FTTH and in the few cases we need to cross one of these bad guys, they will shut it for us while we are working. Nobody looses power of course.
The 10 kV network is redundant too. We managed to hit those a few times. That will cause a power interruption for 10 to 20 minutes until they reroute the power. I believe mostly for safety, they need to be sure that the damaged line will not become energized again.
It's hard to build in redundancy when the entirety of lower Manhattan was under water though. Dealing with that must have been a hellacious job. Mike
On 12/27/20 18:14, Michael Thomas wrote:
We have both, and are going to get a battery. But the battery would probably only be good for about a day which is not enough, especially with these planned shutoffs because they have to inspect their wire plant in daylight.
If you can add some solar panels to that, you would be in a better position to prolong the battery's utility. I'd say dump the generator, and invest that money in solar panels, rather. Batteries are way more costly than panels, and if you can have both, you're going to be better off in the long run. Mark.
On 12/27/20 9:38 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 12/27/20 18:14, Michael Thomas wrote:
We have both, and are going to get a battery. But the battery would probably only be good for about a day which is not enough, especially with these planned shutoffs because they have to inspect their wire plant in daylight.
If you can add some solar panels to that, you would be in a better position to prolong the battery's utility.
I'd say dump the generator, and invest that money in solar panels, rather. Batteries are way more costly than panels, and if you can have both, you're going to be better off in the long run.
We can't get enough solar panels on the roof to charge a battery big enough to handle a multi-day outage, and the battery as quoted is only charged from the panels, not from the mains. It's easy enough to get a transfer switch though for the battery subpanel to hook the generator up to. If I really wanted to get fancy, I could supply the generator from our house propane tank, but it's not that hard to just use the normal 5 gallon type tanks. Mike, it's sunday so i guess it's ok to be off topic :)
On 12/27/20 19:49, Michael Thomas wrote:
We can't get enough solar panels on the roof to charge a battery big enough to handle a multi-day outage, and the battery as quoted is only charged from the panels, not from the mains. It's easy enough to get a transfer switch though for the battery subpanel to hook the generator up to. If I really wanted to get fancy, I could supply the generator from our house propane tank, but it's not that hard to just use the normal 5 gallon type tanks.
Fair enough. Naturally, if you're looking at multi-day outages, then you'll likely reduce your load quite substantially for the period, allowing you to keep the battery running until the following morning when the sun comes up. But yes, in your situation, a multi-day outage would not be that different from an off-grid self-generation scenario; in which case, a generator is necessary to recharge batteries, particularly on cloudy days. Mark.
On: Sunday, 27 December, 2020 03:26, Mark Tinka wrote:
In the end, and for various reasons, I settled on renewables.
Me too. On top of that, diesel and gasoline are pretty reliable. Though some people may argue about "renewables" the fact is that it is all a matter of time-frame. Solar power, for example, is not renewable. Once it is all used up, it will not "renew" itself -- and this "using up" process is quite independent of our usage of it, as it happens. The time to depletion may be somewhat long, but it still has a time to depletion. Oil and Gas, however, is a "renewable" resource and as a mere physical and chemical process it is occurring at this very moment. The "greenies" simply have bad colloquial language usage. This is probably as a result of a failure to understand even rudimentary physics and chemistry and operating on miniscule time-scales. On the other hand, the aliens could be quite pissed when they return to retrieve their fuel stash and discover that we have used it all. -- Be decisive. Make a decision, right or wrong. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who could not make a decision.
On 12/27/20 21:56, Keith Medcalf wrote:
Me too. On top of that, diesel and gasoline are pretty reliable. Though some people may argue about "renewables" the fact is that it is all a matter of time-frame. Solar power, for example, is not renewable. Once it is all used up, it will not "renew" itself -- and this "using up" process is quite independent of our usage of it, as it happens. The time to depletion may be somewhat long, but it still has a time to depletion. Oil and Gas, however, is a "renewable" resource and as a mere physical and chemical process it is occurring at this very moment.
Well, the sun can't be "used up". You just have to wait 12hrs - 15hrs before you can see it again :-). Seriously, though, solar != storage. You can have solar (power) without storage. It's not very useful when you have a grid outage, or on days with low irradiation, but for what it's worth, it will do its thing. Renewables is not about lasting forever, but about lasting for as long as they can with minimal impact to the environment. Economically and/or physically. Having spent some time on this, for me, it's about comfort, and quality of life. If you look at renewables as pure cost-benefit analysis (to the Economics majors, that's RoI), you'll be sorely disappointed. Mark.
On Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 12:28 PM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.com> wrote:
On 12/27/20 21:56, Keith Medcalf wrote:
Me too. On top of that, diesel and gasoline are pretty reliable. Though some people may argue about "renewables" the fact is that it is all a matter of time-frame. Solar power, for example, is not renewable. Once it is all used up, it will not "renew" itself -- and this "using up" process is quite independent of our usage of it, as it happens. The time to depletion may be somewhat long, but it still has a time to depletion. Oil and Gas, however, is a "renewable" resource and as a mere physical and chemical process it is occurring at this very moment.
Well, the sun can't be "used up". You just have to wait 12hrs - 15hrs before you can see it again :-).
Mark, I think you may have misunderstood Keith's comment about it being "all a matter of time-frame." He's right--when the sun consumes all the hydrogen in the hydrogen-to-helium fusion process and begins to expand into a red dwarf, that's it; there's no going backwards, no putting the genie back into the bottle, no "renewing" the sun. It's purely a one-way trip. Now, as far as humans go, we're far more likely to be extinct due to other reasons before we come anywhere near to that point. But as far as the physics goes, the conversion of biomatter into petrochemicals in the ground is more "renewable" than the conversion of hydrogen into helium in the sun. It's just that we're far more likely to hit the near-term shortage crunch of petrochemicals in the ground than we are the longer-term exhaustion of hydrogen in the core of the sun. ;) Matt
On 12/28/20 4:06 PM, Matthew Petach wrote:
I think you may have misunderstood Keith's comment about it being "all a matter of time-frame."
He's right--when the sun consumes all the hydrogen in the hydrogen-to-helium fusion process and begins to expand into a red dwarf, that's it; there's no going backwards, no putting the genie back into the bottle, no "renewing" the sun. It's purely a one-way trip.
Now, as far as humans go, we're far more likely to be extinct due to other reasons before we come anywhere near to that point.
But as far as the physics goes, the conversion of biomatter into petrochemicals in the ground is more "renewable" than the conversion of hydrogen into helium in the sun.
It's just that we're far more likely to hit the near-term shortage crunch of petrochemicals in the ground than we are the longer-term exhaustion of hydrogen in the core of the sun. ;)
2020: Hawking Radiation, take me away. Mike
* mpetach@netflight.com (Matthew Petach) [Tue 29 Dec 2020, 01:08 CET]:
But as far as the physics goes, the conversion of biomatter into petrochemicals in the ground is more "renewable" than the conversion of hydrogen into helium in the sun.
It's not. Where did Mr Metcalf think the energy comes from that is necessary for that process? You know, the energy that we can now extract by burning it? -- Niels. -- "It's amazing what people will do to get their name on the internet, which is odd, because all you really need is a Blogspot account." -- roy edroso, alicublog.blogspot.com
On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 4:26 PM Niels Bakker <niels=nanog@bakker.net> wrote:
* mpetach@netflight.com (Matthew Petach) [Tue 29 Dec 2020, 01:08 CET]:
But as far as the physics goes, the conversion of biomatter into petrochemicals in the ground is more "renewable" than the conversion of hydrogen into helium in the sun.
It's not. Where did Mr Metcalf think the energy comes from that is necessary for that process? You know, the energy that we can now extract by burning it?
The same place that provides the energy that gets water back to the top of the mountains to make hydroelectric energy "renewable". The same place that provides the energy that heats air masses to different temperatures around the planet, creating wind currents that move wind turbines to generate "renewable" electricity. It's just that water and wind energy cycles work on shorter time cycles; those cycles are measured in months and weeks, not in millenia the way the absorption of solar energy by plants and then eventual breakdown into petrochemicals underground takes. We have short-term renewables, like wind and hydro; we have longer-term renewables like oil and coal that take longer than the course of human history to renew; and then we have a completely consumable resource called the sun which powers all the rest, but is itself on a one-way trip to eventual extinction, albeit on a much longer time scale. I'm a huge fan of solar power, of wind power, and pumped hydro energy storage. But from a long enough time horizon, it all depends on a single, non-renewable energy source--the sun. We just have the luxury of punting that concern a few billion years down the road. ;) Coming back slightly more on topic--multiple diverse power sources are always good to have, but I'm mindful of the fried rodent incident at Forsythe Hall from the mid-90s. BARRnet and SUNet were both impacted when the datacenter there was taken completely offline from a power perspective, in spite of having two different off-campus power providers, plus a local cogeneration plant and a generator out in the parking lot. One rodent in the heart of the transfer switch made all the different power feeds completely moot. From a "single point of failure" perspective, the transfer switch tends to be the weakest link in the chain. Has anyone developed a distributed transfer switch, split into different locations in a building, fed at different entry points, that can withstand one portion of the transfer system being knocked out? Thanks! Matt (yes, Earth *is* a single point of failure...for now)
On 12/29/20 02:06, Matthew Petach wrote:
Mark,
I think you may have misunderstood Keith's comment about it being "all a matter of time-frame."
He's right--when the sun consumes all the hydrogen in the hydrogen-to-helium fusion process and begins to expand into a red dwarf, that's it; there's no going backwards, no putting the genie back into the bottle, no "renewing" the sun. It's purely a one-way trip.
Now, as far as humans go, we're far more likely to be extinct due to other reasons before we come anywhere near to that point.
But as far as the physics goes, the conversion of biomatter into petrochemicals in the ground is more "renewable" than the conversion of hydrogen into helium in the sun.
It's just that we're far more likely to hit the near-term shortage crunch of petrochemicals in the ground than we are the longer-term exhaustion of hydrogen in the core of the sun. ;)
You're right - I misunderstood Keith's comment about that. I try to keep it real :-). Mark.
On 12/27/20 5:26 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
I'm just not sure where all that Li-Ion will go after 15 - 20 years of use, though...
One European manufacturer (the one whose battery I bought) says that as of now, they can only recycle 20% of each battery they sell. To me, that sounds like just the metal case enclosure, and the plastic facia.
Ah well, maybe disposal tech. for Li-Ion storage will have improved by 2040.
Interestingly, the Lithium content is the, in theory, valuable part of it. There's not actually much Li in a typical Li-Ion rechargeable battery (much less than a Li metal primary cell), but my understanding is that it's enough to have people interested considering that we're already basically consuming the world's Lithium supply just about as fast as we can economically mine and refine it. However, that may account for the apparently low recyleable content of a given battery. By mass and volume, it's mostly electrodes, which are common metals, and paper separator which is worthless. I would imagine that, as "dead" Li-Ion cells become more available and demand presumably continues to rise (absent a better battery tech), folks will get more serious about recycling the electrolyte. -- Brandon Martin
On 12/28/20 05:29, Brandon Martin wrote:
Interestingly, the Lithium content is the, in theory, valuable part of it. There's not actually much Li in a typical Li-Ion rechargeable battery (much less than a Li metal primary cell), but my understanding is that it's enough to have people interested considering that we're already basically consuming the world's Lithium supply just about as fast as we can economically mine and refine it. However, that may account for the apparently low recyleable content of a given battery. By mass and volume, it's mostly electrodes, which are common metals, and paper separator which is worthless.
I would imagine that, as "dead" Li-Ion cells become more available and demand presumably continues to rise (absent a better battery tech), folks will get more serious about recycling the electrolyte.
A lot of the development of Li-Ion batteries has gone into cost reduction. Very little of that has been spent on recyclablity. The lack of regulation around this hasn't helped either. However, there are a number of initiatives afoot that may see this improve in the next decade. Moreover, the theory is that the nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium available in spent batteries is not unlike highly-enriched ore. If these metals can be recycled at scale, it lowers the environmental impact (less need to mine natural ores), as well reduce the cost of the new batteries. It's one area to watch. For the moment, Li-Ion batteries are not terribly clean from a recyclability standpoint. But as renewable storage goes, it's the least of all evils that has great potential to be cleaner from ongoing development. Mark.
It’s not just the lithium load in the environment that is of concern. As early as 2018 the US EPA had collected data on the incidence of so-called “hot fires” caused by lithium batteries in the waste stream. So far, nobody has been killed. But it’s only a matter of time before someone is, given that there are no thermal protection measures built into the cells themselves, only into a functioning product. But the industry has dismissed self-extinguishing batteries as too impactful on weight/performance ratio. https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2018-03/documents/timpane_epa_li_... -mel beckman On Dec 27, 2020, at 10:23 PM, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.com> wrote: On 12/28/20 05:29, Brandon Martin wrote: Interestingly, the Lithium content is the, in theory, valuable part of it. There's not actually much Li in a typical Li-Ion rechargeable battery (much less than a Li metal primary cell), but my understanding is that it's enough to have people interested considering that we're already basically consuming the world's Lithium supply just about as fast as we can economically mine and refine it. However, that may account for the apparently low recyleable content of a given battery. By mass and volume, it's mostly electrodes, which are common metals, and paper separator which is worthless. I would imagine that, as "dead" Li-Ion cells become more available and demand presumably continues to rise (absent a better battery tech), folks will get more serious about recycling the electrolyte. A lot of the development of Li-Ion batteries has gone into cost reduction. Very little of that has been spent on recyclablity. The lack of regulation around this hasn't helped either. However, there are a number of initiatives afoot that may see this improve in the next decade. Moreover, the theory is that the nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium available in spent batteries is not unlike highly-enriched ore. If these metals can be recycled at scale, it lowers the environmental impact (less need to mine natural ores), as well reduce the cost of the new batteries. It's one area to watch. For the moment, Li-Ion batteries are not terribly clean from a recyclability standpoint. But as renewable storage goes, it's the least of all evils that has great potential to be cleaner from ongoing development. Mark.
On 12/28/20 16:57, Mel Beckman wrote:
It’s not just the lithium load in the environment that is of concern. As early as 2018 the US EPA had collected data on the incidence of so-called “hot fires” caused by lithium batteries in the waste stream. So far, nobody has been killed. But it’s only a matter of time before someone is, given that there are no thermal protection measures built into the cells themselves, only into a functioning product. But the industry has dismissed self-extinguishing batteries as too impactful on weight/performance ratio.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2018-03/documents/timpane_epa_li_... <https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2018-03/documents/timpane_epa_li_slides312_ll_1.pdf>
Certainly, poor handling as part of disposal of spent Li-Ion batteries is likely not well appreciated. Worse when you are dealing with stationery storage like residential, commercial and utility applications. It's a terrible idea to handle Li-Ion battery disposal without expertise, understanding and training. The fact is that for the pervasiveness and proliferation of Li-Ion technology, its safety is not a very well understood in many respects, with physical handling being, perhaps, the least appreciated. Mark.
On 12/26/20 22:58, Michael Thomas wrote:
Here in California the new reality is that multi-day outages are now common. The first few planned outages were 3-4 days, so that would be on the edge, especially if it's for gabby granny on the phone for hours.This all depends on the weather, and for snow related outages they can go on for days. We have a generator because of this, but everybody getting a generator in the middle of the Berkeley Hills would be something of its own horror show, but it will probably come down to that.
I know someone who will sell you a Powerwall :-), not that I'd recommend it... Mark.
On 12/26/20 00:32, John Levine wrote:
I agree it is odd to make 100/100 the top speed. The fiber service I have from my local non-Bell telco offers 100/100, 500/500, and 1000/1000. FiOS where you can get it goes to 940/880.
The obvious guess is that their upstream bandwidth is underprovisioned, or maybe they figure 100/100 is all they need to compete in that particular market.
GPON upstream capacity is not symmetrical to the downstream. Above a certain threshold, providers will sell less upload than download, depending on how many customers are provisioned on a given OLT. XG-PON is symmetrical, but not as widely deployed. Providers that deliver services over Active-E do not care. Mark.
On Dec 25, 2020, at 5:32 PM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
I agree it is odd to make 100/100 the top speed. The fiber service I have from my local non-Bell telco offers 100/100, 500/500, and 1000/1000. FiOS where you can get it goes to 940/880.
The obvious guess is that their upstream bandwidth is underprovisioned, or maybe they figure 100/100 is all they need to compete in that particular market.
My TV (wired) pulls at higher bitrates when doing the initial fetches of the buffering. Not unusual to see it pulling more than 150Mb/s at the start of a (non-4K) show. I think the extent that end-users are impacted by these slower speeds while buffering is under appreciated in the experience. At $dayjob many servers are 10G or 100G so the limiting factor is most likely the CPE or ISP. I was hearing last night about someone with a device that didn’t appear to be hitting the line-rate but was dropping 0.5% of packets when running at 3Gb/s until they upgraded to one of the major networking vendors we all know here. In my small FTTH network the slowest link is at the customer home and all the devices are hardware ASIC forwarded vs offload as you find in some of the low/mid-tier devices (eg: Tik/UBNT). Many streaming things do 8 second waits between chunks, so if you’re pulling a video stream at 6Mb/s you really are pulling 6*8 (lets say 50) then idle for 7 seconds. If you’re on a 25Mb/s service or even a 50Mb/s service it won’t work the way you expect if there’s any other activity. - Jared
On 12/25/20 23:04, Michael Thomas wrote:
I mean, i understand the arm's race, but now it seems to be an arms race for its own sake.
It is, because it is hard to be different when all you know is to sell bandwidth. The next level of differentiation is being a fibre provider, and selling large amounts of bandwidth for less, and less, and less. It's a total lack of creativity in the infrastructure space, where the only goal is to maintain customers on the books. One of the mobile operators in South Africa, just last week, launched new data bundles for customers below a certain age. I mean, how many ways can you slice the selling of data because you can't be creative in other ways? Mark.
*nods* That leave delivering a better quality product to the rest of us. Ya know, peered well with whatever other networks may exist. :-) ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Tinka" <mark.tinka@seacom.com> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Friday, December 25, 2020 11:44:00 PM Subject: Re: [External] Re: 10g residential CPE On 12/25/20 23:04, Michael Thomas wrote:
I mean, i understand the arm's race, but now it seems to be an arms race for its own sake.
It is, because it is hard to be different when all you know is to sell bandwidth. The next level of differentiation is being a fibre provider, and selling large amounts of bandwidth for less, and less, and less. It's a total lack of creativity in the infrastructure space, where the only goal is to maintain customers on the books. One of the mobile operators in South Africa, just last week, launched new data bundles for customers below a certain age. I mean, how many ways can you slice the selling of data because you can't be creative in other ways? Mark.
Are there 1G home routers that can do fq_codel in hardware versus the general purpose CPU on the device? The only devices that I have that will do a full 1G with it have active cooling fans. It seems manufacturers need to meet that goal before we ask for 10G CPEs. ~Jared On Sat, Dec 26, 2020 at 3:39 PM Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:
*nods* That leave delivering a better quality product to the rest of us.
Ya know, peered well with whatever other networks may exist. :-)
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange> <https://twitter.com/mdwestix> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg> ------------------------------ *From: *"Mark Tinka" <mark.tinka@seacom.com> *To: *nanog@nanog.org *Sent: *Friday, December 25, 2020 11:44:00 PM
*Subject: *Re: [External] Re: 10g residential CPE
On 12/25/20 23:04, Michael Thomas wrote:
I mean, i understand the arm's race, but now it seems to be an arms race for its own sake.
It is, because it is hard to be different when all you know is to sell bandwidth.
The next level of differentiation is being a fibre provider, and selling large amounts of bandwidth for less, and less, and less.
It's a total lack of creativity in the infrastructure space, where the only goal is to maintain customers on the books.
One of the mobile operators in South Africa, just last week, launched new data bundles for customers below a certain age. I mean, how many ways can you slice the selling of data because you can't be creative in other ways?
Mark.
On Fri, 25 Dec 2020, Chris Adams wrote:
Queueing doesn't get me my next game in time to play it tonight. I've always seen general queueing as a work-around for "not enough bandwidth and can't add more"... but when more is available, why not just use more?
I de-bloat my 1000/1000 with FQ_CODEL. It's worthwhile because even 1000/1000 can see RTT spikes of tens of milliseconds otherwise. Bandwidth doesn't solve queuing and queuing doesn't solve bandwidth. They're both needed. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
fre. 25. dec. 2020 21.49 skrev Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com>:
On 12/25/20 12:40 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
The other aspect of it is that we're doing these downloads while continuing to play other games and chat (both things sensitive to latency). Some have family/roommates in the home, so they may be streaming audio and/or video at the same time. Do we fill up a gigabit? No, probably not... but we'd notice if we had a lot less.
But using the right queuing disciplines it a lot cheaper than the brute force and ignorance of just upping the bandwidth, right?
It seems really surprising after almost a decade of discovery of bufferbloat that most CPE are still doing tail drops.
Mike
For download that queue discipline needs to be implemented at the ISP end. It is just a week or so since I asked what other operators were doing with that and I got very few replies. So maybe we can assume the answer is not much. I also learned that the big iron providers J and C only implements tail drop and WRED. That's it. It is not sufficient to provide good service, so the only option is to throw more bandwidth at the problem. If the operator wants to keep bufferbloat low you will not be able to utilise your 1 Gbps to that speed when downloading from distant servers. But with the same bufferbloat measured in milliseconds you will still have a 10x bigger buffer and thus 10x bigger bandwidth delay product. That translates to 10x the speed. That speed might just be 100 Mbps on your 1000 Mbps connection. But it would have been just 10 Mbps on a 100 Mbps... Regards Baldur
If the operator wants to keep bufferbloat low you will not be able to utilise your 1 Gbps to that speed when downloading from distant servers. But with the same bufferbloat measured in milliseconds you will still have a 10x bigger buffer and thus 10x bigger bandwidth delay product. That translates to 10x the speed.
I should think that the speed were limited to some fraction of the speed of light being either the speed of signal propagation in copper or of photon travel in glass, and completely unrelated to bufferbloat or anything of that ilk. 1 Gps is a measure of volume, not of speed. The speed is constant. -- Be decisive. Make a decision, right or wrong. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who could not make a decision.
On 12/25/20 22:49, Michael Thomas wrote:
But using the right queuing disciplines it a lot cheaper than the brute force and ignorance of just upping the bandwidth, right?
Consumer ISP's have realized that they can make money selling Gigabit services, because the ones who really know how to harness it are few & far between. Mark.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Tinka" <mark.tinka@seacom.com>
On 12/25/20 22:49, Michael Thomas wrote:
But using the right queuing disciplines it a lot cheaper than the brute force and ignorance of just upping the bandwidth, right?
Consumer ISP's have realized that they can make money selling Gigabit services, because the ones who really know how to harness it are few & far between.
By which you mean that they can safely afford to bandwidth-surf again because the average usage is so much lower than the peak? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274
On 12/26/20 09:44, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
By which you mean that they can safely afford to bandwidth-surf again because the average usage is so much lower than the peak?
Unless you are providing some kind of service from your home, yes. Mark.
On 12/25/20 22:40, Chris Adams wrote:
Bandwidth is like disk space - you think "I'll never use all of this", and then the availability changes behavior. Having ability to do more means your behavior changes to utilize more. We don't NEED high speed Internet to download games - we could leave the download running overnight for example - but being able to download big games in minutes means we get to try more games, finding new things to like.
I don't disagree with this - having more bandwidth means everyone in the house can do what they want without impacting the other. And that probably makes sense for 500Mbps - 1Gbps of service to the house, which is why there are plenty of CPE and ISP services to solve for that today. 10Gbps, on the other hand, is a real problem to justify... you are more likely to hit device limits than fill up 10Gbps for a basic home. Mark.
On 12/25/20 21:39, Cory Sell via NANOG wrote:
I saturate my 1G connection most during game downloads, file downloads/uploads, full backup uploads, etc.
Same here, but how often does this happen? I upload my videos to Youtube once a week, if not less, at the most. The kids, more regularly, but the 100Mbps I had before could cope. So what the 200Mbps gets me now is half the time, which isn't saying much.
I also self-host a lot of services for personal use and having that peak speed is really nice when you need it.
Nothing wrong with that, but if you had 500Mbps on a given Sunday, would you life be half as bad?
It also had no traffic limit per month which is my biggest complaint about the lower tier services and also a huge complaint I have with regards to the direction that residential services are moving towards.
Marketing at play :-). Mark.
As a power user who now has 4Gb/s FDX at home I can definitively say as an end user you really can’t tell much of different from my previous 1G/0.5Gbs GPON in normal use. However there are a couple of areas that I have noticed a difference – 1. Upstream. On GPON I had 500Mb/s upstream and this is intelligently oversubscribed by the OLT. Large uploads like cloud storage would consume the entire upstream for the duration. While things still worked fine for the duration of the uploads this does have a small affect on other normal operations during this time. With the XGSPON upstream is so large that nothing can fill it no matter what you do. 2. 1G downstream was certainly enough for everything in the house, but with the 4Gbs the bottlenecks are now the hard drives or local LAN connections. It is quite possible for those 2-400Gig Steam downloads to max a 1gig link off the local caches. So in summary the 1G/0.5G GPON is certainly good enough for any home application, but a 2G/2G or higher link means no one user can practically do anything that will affect other users in the house, yes not necessary but it sure is nice. I really think 2.5GBASET in the house is a sweet spot, it is easily/cheaply retrofitted into any workstation with a free USB3 port and run’s on any existing cat5. From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+tony=wicks.co.nz@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Michael Thomas Sent: Saturday, 26 December 2020 8:28 am To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: [External] Re: 10g residential CPE Can I ask a really dumb question? Consider it an xmas present. I know this sounds like "nobody needs more than 640k", but how can household possibly need a gig let alone 10g? I'm still on 25mbs DSL, have cut the cord so all tv, etc is over the net. If I really cared and wanted 4k I could probably upgrade to a 50mbs service and be fine. Admittedly it's just the two of us here, but throw in a couple of kids and I still don't see how ~100mbs isn't sufficient let alone 1 or 10G. Am I missing something really stupid? Mike
Ego. Ignorance. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Thomas" <mike@mtcc.com> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Friday, December 25, 2020 1:27:39 PM Subject: Re: [External] Re: 10g residential CPE On 12/25/20 11:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote: On 12/25/20 20:10, Hunter Fuller via NANOG wrote: <blockquote> It would meet some customers’ needs because multiple people could use 1G of service at a time. I think it is interesting to distinguish “>1G CPE” from “true 10G CPE” and I suspect many / most customers are looking for the former. Large upstream capacity has always been about aggregation of the downstream. </blockquote> Can I ask a really dumb question? Consider it an xmas present. I know this sounds like "nobody needs more than 640k", but how can household possibly need a gig let alone 10g? I'm still on 25mbs DSL, have cut the cord so all tv, etc is over the net. If I really cared and wanted 4k I could probably upgrade to a 50mbs service and be fine. Admittedly it's just the two of us here, but throw in a couple of kids and I still don't see how ~100mbs isn't sufficient let alone 1 or 10G. Am I missing something really stupid? Mike
Some WISPs I know moved customers from 20 megabit/s wireless to 500 megabit fiber. Total usage in that subdivision changed about 5%. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Thomas" <mike@mtcc.com> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Friday, December 25, 2020 1:27:39 PM Subject: Re: [External] Re: 10g residential CPE On 12/25/20 11:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote: On 12/25/20 20:10, Hunter Fuller via NANOG wrote: <blockquote> It would meet some customers’ needs because multiple people could use 1G of service at a time. I think it is interesting to distinguish “>1G CPE” from “true 10G CPE” and I suspect many / most customers are looking for the former. Large upstream capacity has always been about aggregation of the downstream. </blockquote> Can I ask a really dumb question? Consider it an xmas present. I know this sounds like "nobody needs more than 640k", but how can household possibly need a gig let alone 10g? I'm still on 25mbs DSL, have cut the cord so all tv, etc is over the net. If I really cared and wanted 4k I could probably upgrade to a 50mbs service and be fine. Admittedly it's just the two of us here, but throw in a couple of kids and I still don't see how ~100mbs isn't sufficient let alone 1 or 10G. Am I missing something really stupid? Mike
Use a router with FQ_CODEL and be amazed at how much you can get onto a pipe without any perceptible difference in the experience. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Thomas" <mike@mtcc.com> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Friday, December 25, 2020 1:27:39 PM Subject: Re: [External] Re: 10g residential CPE On 12/25/20 11:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote: On 12/25/20 20:10, Hunter Fuller via NANOG wrote: <blockquote> It would meet some customers’ needs because multiple people could use 1G of service at a time. I think it is interesting to distinguish “>1G CPE” from “true 10G CPE” and I suspect many / most customers are looking for the former. Large upstream capacity has always been about aggregation of the downstream. </blockquote> Can I ask a really dumb question? Consider it an xmas present. I know this sounds like "nobody needs more than 640k", but how can household possibly need a gig let alone 10g? I'm still on 25mbs DSL, have cut the cord so all tv, etc is over the net. If I really cared and wanted 4k I could probably upgrade to a 50mbs service and be fine. Admittedly it's just the two of us here, but throw in a couple of kids and I still don't see how ~100mbs isn't sufficient let alone 1 or 10G. Am I missing something really stupid? Mike
On 12/26/20 3:28 PM, Mike Hammett wrote:
Use a router with FQ_CODEL and be amazed at how much you can get onto a pipe without any perceptible difference in the experience.
I did that, after a meltdown and yes it made a huge difference. I don't understand why CPE don't implement it by default. Mike
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL><https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb><https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions><https://twitter.com/ICSIL> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix><https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange><https://twitter.com/mdwestix> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp><https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *From: *"Michael Thomas" <mike@mtcc.com> *To: *nanog@nanog.org *Sent: *Friday, December 25, 2020 1:27:39 PM *Subject: *Re: [External] Re: 10g residential CPE
On 12/25/20 11:04 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 12/25/20 20:10, Hunter Fuller via NANOG wrote:
It would meet some customers’ needs because multiple people could use 1G of service at a time. I think it is interesting to distinguish “>1G CPE” from “true 10G CPE” and I suspect many / most customers are looking for the former.
Large upstream capacity has always been about aggregation of the downstream.
Can I ask a really dumb question? Consider it an xmas present. I know this sounds like "nobody needs more than 640k", but how can household possibly need a gig let alone 10g? I'm still on 25mbs DSL, have cut the cord so all tv, etc is over the net. If I really cared and wanted 4k I could probably upgrade to a 50mbs service and be fine. Admittedly it's just the two of us here, but throw in a couple of kids and I still don't see how ~100mbs isn't sufficient let alone 1 or 10G. Am I missing something really stupid?
Mike
On Dec 25, 2020, at 12:48 PM, Bryan Fields <Bryan@bryanfields.net> wrote:
10g to the home is a great idea to think about, it's just not terribly practical for most customers unless they want to drop 1-2k on routing gear and nics. This is always changing, but it's going to be a few years until we reach the right performance and price point.
Think more using your PON network to also serve commercial customers so you don't need high end CPE to hit 1-5Gbps or WDM setups.
On 12/25/20 20:21, Jared Mauch wrote:
Think more using your PON network to also serve commercial customers so you don't need high end CPE to hit 1-5Gbps or WDM setups. .
This already happens today, because sales folk want to close deals. Whether PON actually works for an Enterprise customer is not their problem. Mark.
On Dec 25, 2020, at 09:45 , Bryan Fields <Bryan@bryanfields.net> wrote:
On 12/25/20 4:52 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
For the home, if you're looking at shipping 10Gbps-based CPE's for under US$200, I can't think of anything other than the Tik:
That has 1 10g port. How can that be a 10g CPE?
They claim:
- 2.6Gbps forwarding for 64-byte packets. - 7.8Gbps forwarding for 512-byte packets. - 9.7Gbps forwarding for 1,518-byte packets.
so, not 10g :)
Add in some services and I bet it goes down from there.
The bigger question in all this if you're doing 10g to the residential user, what are they going to use for their home router/NAT device? Even 60 ghz wifi routers top out at like 5 gbit/s, and NAT at this speed means a powerful CPU.
Sounds like a great reason not to do NAT… If you run IPv6, who needs NAT? For the rest, there are relatively cheap 2x10G+rest 1G switches coming available and there’s this weirdness with 2G/5G RJ ports now appearing to try and eke out additional wifi performance over cat5e I guess. Owen
On Thu, 24 Dec 2020, Ben Cannon wrote:
Anyone else doing it? Do you like your gear?
Haven't tested it myself, but the 10GE residential provider here in Sweden is using some kind of Huawei HGW that typically is used for XGPON but has had its WAN MAC swapped out for 10GBASE-LR use. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Fri, 25 Dec 2020, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Thu, 24 Dec 2020, Ben Cannon wrote:
Anyone else doing it? Do you like your gear?
Haven't tested it myself, but the 10GE residential provider here in Sweden is using some kind of Huawei HGW that typically is used for XGPON but has had its WAN MAC swapped out for 10GBASE-LR use.
https://www.sweclockers.com/nyhet/26446-bahnhof-och-huawei-slapper-10-gbit-r... You can run it through google translate. Do note that this "news" is from October 2018. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
participants (32)
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Aaron Wendel -
Allen McKinley Kitchen (gmail) -
Baldur Norddahl -
Ben Cannon -
Bill Woodcock -
Brandon Martin -
Bryan Fields -
bzs＠theworld.com -
Chris Adams -
Cory Sell -
Darin Steffl -
Filip Hruska -
Hunter Fuller -
James R Cutler -
Jared Geiger -
Jared Mauch -
Jay R. Ashworth -
John Levine -
Keith Medcalf -
Mark Tinka -
Matthew Petach -
Mel Beckman -
Michael Thomas -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
Mike Hammett -
Niels Bakker -
Owen DeLong -
Sabri Berisha -
Seth Mattinen -
Steven Karp -
Tony Wicks -
Valdis Klētnieks