25 Gbit/s Fiber Blog

[Rainmaker]

That's sort of what I'm getting at - when I said they can survive I mean in terms of being able to support a large enough customer base at those price points to make their business viable.

FWIW, Init7 are using a point-to-point fibre network. That's not what is being deployed widely in the UK where every major network is using GPoN. I think the only point to point deployments (ignored leased lines) are Gigaclear and B4RN, but that's only uncontended back to their cabinets.



I'm not here to be a cop but there's no chance you're pushing 10TB of data around each day without it being copyrighted content.

Like you said, you're not a cop. Or as the case may be, a money hungry copyright troll. As it happens I run half a dozen servers including a Tor relay, so it's very much legitimate traffic.

You make it sound like @WJA96 is in the minority

Not at all, but there's a difference between me being a minority (which I accept) and "it's not really happening".

 

[Caged]

To add something that isn't anecdotal to this discussion, this is the utilisation over a month of a gigabit leased line circuit at a company with 35 employees who do software development, media editing and offer managed live streaming services.

"Build it and people will find a use for it" is only valid up to a certain point, and I just don't really buy into the argument that widely deployed services topping out at 1Gbps are holding people back.

 

[sandys]

"Build it and people will find a use for it" is only valid up to a certain point, and I just don't really buy into the argument that widely deployed services topping out at 1Gbps are holding people back.

It's always valid, stop putting people of, this attitude pays my bills

The future is FTTR and many 100s of Gb, you all need it!

 

[Sinbad2000]

That's sort of what I'm getting at - when I said they can survive I mean in terms of being able to support a large enough customer base at those price points to make their business viable.

FWIW, Init7 are using a point-to-point fibre network. That's not what is being deployed widely in the UK where every major network is using GPoN. I think the only point to point deployments (ignored leased lines) are Gigaclear and B4RN, but that's only uncontended back to their cabinets.

Hyperoptic feels like active ethernet, not gpon (most packages are symmetrical etc)? Do I have it wrong?

I did enjoy their response to this blog:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1518147894309801986

 

[Caged]

I think Hyperoptic are GPON on their fibre deployments, and their installs in apartments are Cat5e cables up to each unit hanging off a switch with 1 or 2 gigabit EAD links on it. It's not a particularly impressive network.

Community Fibre are XGS-PON I think

 

[Sinbad2000]

I think Hyperoptic are GPoN on their fibre deployments, and their installs in apartments are Cat5e cables up to each unit hanging off a switch with 1 or 2 gigabit EAD links on it. It's not a particularly impressive network.

I dunno, out of all the broadband I've used here* it's by far the best.

* A couple of different ISPs over OpenReach in a couple of different locations.

 

[Caged]

It's a good service but they will quite happily put 48 subscribers onto a gigabit backhaul, and it tends to work out fine because people's usage tends to never cause a problem. Price changes on EAD mean their new network builds is done with PIA so they can have their own fibre in the ground.

Edit: Hyperoptic had some weird peering going on last time I checked, and IPv6 was all Hurricane Electric which is, um, not great.

 

[WJA96]

It's utterly pointless to you. I could easily make use of such a connection, as could loads of people I know. Most decent Usenet providers will saturate >10G then add in offsite realtime backups to a cloud storage provider (using rclone crypt obviously), half a dozen media and code servers and mirrors, Plex, and a Tor relay with a Gb or two limit, and you're well on your way before you even launch qBittorrent.

I’m sure you think you could make use of it, and maybe you have a buffered NVME array to read/write 25Gbps but the reality is that you need specialised hardware to handle those sorts of speeds. What we found with the 25 Gbps internal network is we just couldn’t fill the pipe fast enough and the 4x10GbE to 40GbE adapter we use on another switch makes much more sense because 10GbE on a PC is relatively straightforward.

I genuinely can’t see a use-case for a home user to consume 25Gbps data streams.

 

[sandys]

I genuinely can’t see a use-case for a home user to consume 25Gbps data streams.

I can sort of see where it might become a thing over time as we move to high quality streamed content and nobody owning anything for gaming, media or PC use, all these things shifting to a cloud based instance you display on your low power dumb terminal that are using fast low latency connections.

 

[WJA96]

Really? I push and pull a couple of TB a day just on VM, bursting up to 10TB/day. I'm very much limited by the line. Again, just because *you* don't see it...

10Tb at 25Gbps is about an hour if my maths is correct. You don’t need 25Gbps to move 10Tb. Fair enough you might want 25Gbps but you don’t need it.

As for how it scales have you seen a 25Gbps switch or worse yet a 100Gbps switch? They’re very fast computers in and of themselves and the power draw is immense compared to a normal switch - 80-130W - and the heat generated is huge. From memory our 25Gbps switch was £800 and the Mikrotik 100Gbps switch we have on order is £2500 - if we all had 25GbE at home the ISPs would need massive heating and cooling to cope.

It’s just totally unnecessary for the vast majority of the population. Most people are utterly satisfied with their 80/20Mbps FTTC connection.

 

[WJA96]

I can sort of see where it might become a thing over time as we move to high quality streamed content and nobody owning anything for gaming, media or PC use, all these things shifting to a cloud based instance you display on your low power dumb terminal that are using fast low latency connections.

Streaming 4K video uses less than 20Mbps I think so you’d need a huge jump in quality to need multi-gig FTTP. We put systems in for people who play games at 4K at high frame rates and we usually don’t see an issue on 300Mbps connections.

The fibres are the least of it really - you’d need to support thousands of connections at these speeds and while that hardware may exist, it’s not going to be cost-effective for a consumer ISP in the foreseeable future.

 

[Quartz]

I’ve recently got 1Gbps symmetrical at home and other than being able to download stuff from my NAS as fast as whatever remote network I’m plugged into will allow it, even 1Gbps is a bit pointless because only truly massive web businesses have the capacity to let a single user have 1Gbps download bandwidth to themselves.

Both my brother and IU have gigabit internet and I'm looking into having servers that back up to each other.

I push and pull a couple of TB a day just on VM, bursting up to 10TB/day.

What do you do that uses such bandwidth?

 

[Rainmaker]

10Tb at 25Gbps is about an hour if my maths is correct. You don’t need 25Gbps to move 10Tb. Fair enough you might want 25Gbps but you don’t need it.

I didn't say need, I said it'd be nice and I could use it. I answered someone else saying there was no use at all for it.

As for how it scales have you seen a 25Gbps switch or worse yet a 100Gbps switch? They’re very fast computers in and of themselves and the power draw is immense compared to a normal switch - 80-130W - and the heat generated is huge. From memory our 25Gbps switch was £800 and the Mikrotik 100Gbps switch we have on order is £2500 - if we all had 25GbE at home the ISPs would need massive heating and cooling to cope.

Most people on here are gamers. I'm a homelabber with essentially a home data centre. A 100W switch is nothing to me lol.

It’s just totally unnecessary for the vast majority of the population. Most people are utterly satisfied with their 80/20Mbps FTTC connection.

Again, never said any different. Just, as I said, £1,000 dedicated GPUs are also totally unnecessary for the vast majority of the population. Doesn't mean having the option isn't nice.

Streaming 4K video uses less than 20Mbps I think so you’d need a huge jump in quality to need multi-gig FTTP. We put systems in for people who play games at 4K at high frame rates and we usually don’t see an issue on 300Mbps connections.

The fibres are the least of it really - you’d need to support thousands of connections at these speeds and while that hardware may exist, it’s not going to be cost-effective for a consumer ISP in the foreseeable future.

Gaming is an extremely low bandwidth application. One of the lowest. Gaming cares about latency not bandwidth per se. Again you're talking about consuming content/downstream, I'm talking about distributing it/upstream.

 

[WJA96]

I was clearly being somewhat fatuous, but it's not true to say it's limited in availability per se. I mean, maybe init7 specifically but not good fibre infrastructure generally. In a similar way that you can or can't get VM or BT FTTP or whatever over here, in Sweden and Norway you can (or can't) get 10Gb fttp for about £20 a month, or in Romania 1 or 10Gbps are £10-20 per month, and it's the same in many parts of the world. It's not the pricing I'm taking issue with, it's the peculiarly British (and certainly OcUK) attitude that our creaking infrastructure is fine, and that because that individual can't see their own use case for better Internet, others either shouldn't have it or should empty their wallets for what is - ultimately - a very cheap product.

Many people think dedicated GPUs are pointless - the If our country had blown fibre when we had the chance, we'd be on par with the many countries where fast symmetric Internet is a given. We blow billions of pounds on nonsense in this country every year, it's a shame we're still so behind on what is a modern necessity.

While you can undoubtedly get these deals in these countries, the UK is significantly better overall and £20/month in Romania is a lot of money.

I work all over the world and outside of Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong, Fast FTTP type internet connections are rare and expensive.

Even in Switzerland, outside the big cities yiu are reliant on local communities pulling fibre themselves. People in the UK can do that too, but they generally choose not to because the service supplied by Openreach is generally more than good enough.

 

[Rainmaker]

What do you do that uses such bandwidth?

As I said earlier, I run half a dozen or more servers including everything self hosted (cloud storage, photos, PIM, chat, email, ftp, web, Bitwarden/Vaultwarden, Plex. *arr, sab etc), plus mirror sync to offsite storage (rclone sync using crypt to pCloud), plus Signal proxy, a Tor relay (a big user), and some other miscellaneous bits syncing between my various FreeBSD and OpenBSD boxes around the world.

Edit: I find it quite interesting how resistant people are to the idea someone just might want to be able to use a faster Internet connection. Imagine if I started posting about how unnecessary a 3070Ti was when you can use a browser fine with an iGPU (and the vast majority of the population manage just fine with that) and consoles exist for games. Justify why you would even want to run games and waste hundreds of watts of electricity on a gamin rig when a RPi with Chromium would do just the same job.

 

[WJA96]

As I said earlier, I run half a dozen or more servers including everything self hosted (cloud storage, photos, PIM, chat, email, ftp, web, Bitwarden/Vaultwarden, Plex. *arr, sab etc), plus mirror sync to offsite storage (rclone sync using crypt to pCloud), plus Signal proxy, a Tor relay (a big user), and some other miscellaneous bits syncing between my various FreeBSD and OpenBSD boxes around the world.

So you’re basically running a business?

 

[Rainmaker]

So you’re basically running a business?

No, I'm running my own Internet services from home, for myself. On my Internet connection. Things it was designed for. Businesses sell things and want an SLA. I find it amazing you can't comprehend how someone might want to use their IP connection to run IP protocols other than HTTP over it, just because that's not something you do personally? That's how you're coming across anyway.

 

[WJA96]

Both my brother and IU have gigabit internet and I'm looking into having servers that back up to each other.

We back up more than 250 customer sites (sequential backups) and it actually takes very little time once you’ve done it the first time.

 

[WJA96]

No, I'm running my own Internet services from home, for myself. On my Internet connection. Things it was designed for. Businesses sell things and want an SLA. I find it amazing you can't comprehend how someone might want to use their IP connection to run IP protocols other than HTTP over it, just because that's not something you do personally? That's how you're coming across anyway.

And you’re not coming across any better. I make huge use of the internet and we have more than 250 supported UniFi networks across the UK and a couple in Europe and we dropped out old 2Gbps connection because we simply never used it.

I cannot imagine any legitimate reason to move 10Tb of data on a daily basis as a hobby. Our entire database with backups and NAS is only 65Tb and that’s for over 1000 users at 254 sites. I’m very happy to be educated as to what you do that shifts 10Tb of data. It’s just a staggering amount of data. Most users (even on these hobbyist forums) probably don’t have 10Tb of storage on their systems at home.

 

[Rainmaker]

And you’re not coming across any better. I make huge use of the internet and we have more than 250 supported UniFi networks across the UK and a couple in Europe and we dropped out old 2Gbps connection because we simply never used it.

For pushing documents around offices at work, or as your primary home connection for your 'everything'?

I cannot imagine any legitimate reason to move 10Tb of data on a daily basis as a hobby. Our entire database with backups and NAS is only 65Tb and that’s for over 1000 users at 254 sites. I’m very happy to be educated as to what you do that shifts 10Tb of data. It’s just a staggering amount of data. Most users (even on these hobbyist forums) probably don’t have 10Tb of storage on their systems at home.

I said 1TB with bursts to 10TB. It doesn't matter how much, the fact is it'd all flow much more nicely with even a symmetric 1Gb pipe than my current asymmetric 1G/50M one. Having 10G would be awesome, and I'd definitely find use for 25 if I had the chance, aggregated across all my servers (and the extra ones I could then run) plus six users (family) plus all the other stuff such a connection would allow.

We're back to your 'most users' argument. This forum is a gaming forum predominantly - sign up at STH or L1 and check again. 'Most users' don't have a dedicated GPU but you keep ignoring that. It doesn't matter whether you can imagine it or not, you're not deciding what bandwidth my network can support or would benefit from. I'm saturating 10Gbps boxes on the daily offsite, I simply said it'd be nice to be able to bring that in house.