25 Gbit/s Fiber Blog

I think your challenge now is that you're rowing back hard on this. 25Gbps is now symmetrical 1Gbps. Hmmm. 10Tb download would be solidly downloading for 24 hours on 1Gbps and you couldn't ever upload it at 50Mbps.

We look after a large number of installed customer networks and we back those up where requested (pretty much all of them) and at our office in Salford Quays we got a good deal from Daisy on a 2Gbps leased line but when we actually had to pay for the renewal we never actually used it all so we bought the 1Gbps circuit instead. My home connection is 1Gbps symmetrical FTTP with Upp and it's a business connection because I wanted the supplied block of fixed IP addresses for my kit.

Because our business systems are built on fairly standard hardware they do what standard hardware does and it manages really well on very tight bandwidth. So when you show a system designed to run on 80/20Mbps FTTC a symmetrical 1Gbps connection it just cracks on with it and gets the job done quicker. We buy and test equipment constantly and we have some very fast switching and routing gear but as we're not Facebook or AWS we honestly don't need it. And neither, I strongly suggest, do you.

It very much sounds to me like you have nothing better to do than waste electricity shunting data around pointlessly. Which is your hobby. But seriously dude, it's just you in your army of pointless datashifters. No other home user is moving terabytes of data on a daily basis. It's just you.

On the subject of discrete graphics cards its not the same thing at all, you need a chunky graphics card to render games at high resolutions and high framerates at high quality settings. And they sell tens of thousands of graphics cards annually because gamers use them. They get a benefit of it. Not just huddled in front of a pile of hot copper and silicon rubbing your hands and watching the Tb spin by for the hell of it.

Rainmaker said:
I'm saturating 10Gbps boxes on the daily offsite, I simply said it'd be nice to be able to bring that in house.
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How do you saturate a 10Gbps connection with a 50Mbps upload? I'm genuinely interested.
 
Caged said:
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.
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I can’t truly comment as I’ve only dealt with one order and the company in question may have placed more than one, possibly several orders with different CP’s for resilience purposes but we’ve supplied Leased Ethernet circuits of 1G/1G symmetrical to blocks of flats with upwards of 50 individual residences. Given the demand for bandwidth I’d hate to imagine any resident or tenant being limited to 20-30Mbps each and having no option at all to go elsewhere. We’ve also supplied Gig circuits to new build estates with 20-30 houses. Again, there may be other orders but I have my doubts.
 
WJA96 said:
I think your challenge now is that you're rowing back hard on this. 25Gbps is now symmetrical 1Gbps. Hmmm. 10Tb download would be solidly downloading for 24 hours on 1Gbps and you couldn't ever upload it at 50Mbps.

We look after a large number of installed customer networks and we back those up where requested (pretty much all of them) and at our office in Salford Quays we got a good deal from Daisy on a 2Gbps leased line but when we actually had to pay for the renewal we never actually used it all so we bought the 1Gbps circuit instead. My home connection is 1Gbps symmetrical FTTP with Upp and it's a business connection because I wanted the supplied block of fixed IP addresses for my kit.

Because our business systems are built on fairly standard hardware they do what standard hardware does and it manages really well on very tight bandwidth. So when you show a system designed to run on 80/20Mbps FTTC a symmetrical 1Gbps connection it just cracks on with it and gets the job done quicker. We buy and test equipment constantly and we have some very fast switching and routing gear but as we're not Facebook or AWS we honestly don't need it. And neither, I strongly suggest, do you.

It very much sounds to me like you have nothing better to do than waste electricity shunting data around pointlessly. Which is your hobby. But seriously dude, it's just you in your army of pointless datashifters. No other home user is moving terabytes of data on a daily basis. It's just you.

On the subject of discrete graphics cards its not the same thing at all, you need a chunky graphics card to render games at high resolutions and high framerates at high quality settings. And they sell tens of thousands of graphics cards annually because gamers use them. They get a benefit of it. Not just huddled in front of a pile of hot copper and silicon rubbing your hands and watching the Tb spin by for the hell of it.
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You're trying way too hard to fight me on this, for absolutely no reason other than you can't conceptualise how I might do different things to you, or the companies you install WiFi (iirc?) for. One has little to do with the other. It also keeps changing from 'can't possibly use it, it's impossible' to 'don't need to use it' to 'you're a business' to whatever else. So what?

Going from VM 1 gig (50Mbps up) would indeed make symmetric 1Gb a dream in comparison, which is why I said it. That doesn't negate, or contradict, me also saying earlier that I would also enjoy and be able to make use of 25G if it was available. I don't know why you think it would, or why you care so much. If you're walking, a bicycle would be nice, a Micra would be nicer but a GTR would be nicer still. They're all possible to make use of.

Nobody said I upload 10TB. I said I push/pull 1TB a day a lot of the time, with bursts up to 10TB. That doesn't imply I push 10TB upstream daily, which wouldn't be possible on VM as you astutely deduced. A lot of days I pull >1TB downstream, some days it's hit 10TB. I just added another 36TB to my array, because why not? My upload is pretty much saturated constantly, with cake balancing the packets and keeping a lid on latency, so generally between 400 and 500 GB/day off the top of my head. It'd be more if I wasn't so limited - and back to my point about how I'd love a faster line.

You keep conflating 'need' with 'want' when actually this started from 'it's impossible'. Now it's not impossible it's just not something other people want. Who cares about them? I'm talking about me.

I'm a hobbyist with a lot of servers, pushing a lot of traffic, running a lot of projects. I don't 'need' a fast connection, Gibbo doesn't 'need' a Ferrari to drive to work, and you don't 'need' a current gen £500-£1k graphics card to browse the forums... But that doesn't mean those things aren't nice, or there aren't people who could make use of them if they had a mind to.

You seem to have such a bee in your bonnet that I might possibly find use for something you don't. It's not 'watching Tb spin by for the hell of it' when you're making actual use of it. Even if my hobby was watching Tb spin for no reason, so what? Who cares if I'm the one paying for it and spending the time to do it? Strange viewpoint. I simply took issue with you saying it was impossible to make use of a fast connection. Christ, even 'pkg install tor; service tor start' would use all the bandwidth you could throw at it. When I have triple digit TB storage arrays, Threadripper and other high end systems, and a proclivity for *BSD and Linux I can assure you I very much am capable of using any connection you care to give me. Whether you understand that, care about that or even agree with that makes not one jot of difference.

The whole thing started with claims that it wasn't possible to use. All I said was challenge accepted, I'd spank that hard. The GPU comparison does stand up, inasmuch as my wife can't understand why someone would want to spend hundreds on a GPU when an iGPU does the 'same job'. That's because she doesn't have interest in, or need for, rendering or gaming or anything else making use of a dedicated GPU. Likewise, most people (as correctly pointed out) wouldn't notice or care to make use of a fast connection. Some, including everyone from homelabbers to self hosters to pirates, most certainly would. Same as anything. That's a far cry from 'it's not possible to use it', which was my only point.
 
I'm more than happy with my 900 Mbps down. What I'd love is more upload. That said I wouldn't say no to 10 Gbps and I would make use of it.
 
Caged said:
If they are seed boxes then just say so and I will leave the thread
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WJA96 said:
Ah. OK. Understood.
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I've answered that question more than once already. I run multiple Tor relays (guard, middle and exit) as well as obfs4 bridges and Signal proxies. They eat all the bandwidth you throw at them. Here's one of my Gits for the BSD proxies. That's quite aside from my own personal servers.
 
I think the issue is that you have your hobby and are wanting to imply the UK is lagging behind because residential 10Gb services are tough to come by. If you're running services that eat all the bandwidth that you can throw at them then by definition you will always fill a bigger pipe, but that's sort of a problem you've made for yourself.

36TB of storage isn't cheap, neither is the ongoing energy costs involved in powering it and keeping it cool, so it seems strange that your hangup is having to pay enterprise pricing for an internet connection, when by any other measure you're running enterprise workloads at least in terms of sustained transfer.

Nobody is saying that they couldn't burst a 10Gb connection now and then when a new PS5 patch comes out, but doing 1TB a day is abnormal usage in the residential space, and you are huge outlier. If 25Gb services were available to you for £100/month and you ran a Signal proxy and Tor node you'd be doing incredibly well not to have the ISP throw you off their network.
 
Caged said:
I think the issue is that you have your hobby and are wanting to imply the UK is lagging behind because residential 10Gb services are tough to come by. If you're running services that eat all the bandwidth that you can throw at them then by definition you will always fill a bigger pipe, but that's sort of a problem you've made for yourself.

36TB of storage isn't cheap, neither is the ongoing energy costs involved in powering it and keeping it cool, so it seems strange that your hangup is having to pay enterprise pricing for an internet connection, when by any other measure you're running enterprise workloads at least in terms of sustained transfer.
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Mate I never said those things. I said it's a shame this country didn't keep abreast when we had chance. I said I would happily take and use a 10 or 25 gig pipe. That's it. The outcry came when posters said, variously, it's impossible to use a connection like that (and that changed to 'nobody else does' and 'you're a business' when I proved the contrary) and 'You must be breaking the law' to 'Nobody else wants to'. The goalposts just keep on moving.

My only grip about price was that, had we rolled out FTTP everywhere when we had chance decades ago, we'd be in a similar position where everyone and their dog had it, and it'd be trivial to upgrade to 10/25/40/100Gbps as needed without anyone thinking twice about it. The availability of services leaves room for innovation. The whole 'people are happy on DSL' thing is because that's all they have. If we still had dial up, we'd all still be admiring each other's Geocities, but luckily tech and Internet connections change and services available fill that available space.

Graphics cards ain't cheap, cars ain't cheap, and neither are the electricity and petrol for those. Those folks don't complain and neither am I. I'm simply reiterating that it's possible to use such a connection if you have a mind to, and I'd like one. What everyone else wants to do is their business. Everything else was just spun out of context playing gymnastics trying to prove the original point (that you can't use it).
 
For what it's worth the whole "we'd have had FTTP if it wasn't for Thatcher" thing isn't the whole story, governments since hers have always favoured a competitive marketplace over one where actual quality is being delivered, and this can be seen in how Ofcom regulate the industry today. It's not a system I'm in favour of but it's what we have.

The expensive bit has always been the last mile, and I think BT would have looked at ways of running TV services over copper wires before they started rolling trucks out to replace it. Maybe you'd have had fibre in the ground from the 90s onwards to provide TV and telephone services, making fast internet provision easier - but those areas are all ducted anyway so the costs to build out FTTP are about as low as you can go. In some areas BT deployed fibre just for telephones (TPON) and then did nothing with it, when the topology would have made GPON conversion quite simple, instead you can find stories of people in these areas not having anything better than ADSL as late as 2017. In fact their approach early on to customers on the optical network wanting broadband was to install more copper capacity - this is despite knowing at the time that optical networks were easier and cheaper to maintain and being well into the stage where internet take-up was rapidly increasing, and interactive services were all over the place.

The only real barrier to wider FTTP deployment has been that up until the last couple of years Openreach for some reason were completely unwilling to entertain the idea that fibre was the way to go, and local authorities were continuing to fund FTTC with public money up to five years ago. I'm just glad they course corrected before G.fast became more widely deployed.
 
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Rainmaker said:
My only gripe about price was that, had we rolled out FTTP everywhere when we had chance decades ago, we'd be in a similar position where everyone and their dog had it, and it'd be trivial to upgrade to 10/25/40/100Gbps as needed without anyone thinking twice about it.
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That’s not true though. If you want 1Gbps then any 1Gbps switch will handle your workload at the ISP end.

If you want a 10Gbps connection then yes, the fibre is the same but now you need a £300 switch at the ISP and someone has to pay for that. And the extra electricity to run it.

Now scale up to 25Gbps and that switch costs £1000 and the electricity usage is now substantially higher and again, it has to be paid for and maintained.

Scale up again and the costs for equipment and power get exponentially higher as the speed increases - so the 100Gbps switch is £2500 and somone has to pay for that.

It’s not just the fibre - it’s the equipment in the cabinet and the equipment at the ISP that needs to be upgraded and that’s why it costs so much.

And we haven’t really touched in the other end of the connection. Your ‘hobby’ is doubtless great fun distributing whatever material you are distributing but don’t kid yourself that most of the people downloading your doubtless very legal material are running fast connections.
 
I wish half of our customers had those sort of speeds, they end up trying to upload 100s of TB of pre-deduped data to aws/azure, and struggle to keep up on a 1Gbps line.
 
WJA96 said:
Scale up again and the costs for equipment and power get exponentially higher as the speed increases - so the 100Gbps switch is £2500 and somone has to pay for that.

It’s not just the fibre - it’s the equipment in the cabinet and the equipment at the ISP that needs to be upgraded and that’s why it costs so much.
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Undoubtedly, and we pay anyway. Sorry, but 2.5k for a switch is literally nothing to an ISP or enterprise. Any half decent unit from Juniper, Cisco et al. will see them pay closer to ten times that per unit, in orders sized by the pallet load. The CPE and head end equipment for a single segment are a blip in the ocean.

And we haven’t really touched in the other end of the connection. Your ‘hobby’ is doubtless great fun distributing whatever material you are distributing but don’t kid yourself that most of the people downloading your doubtless very legal material are running fast connections.
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You seem awfully concerned with the content of my traffic. Which, for the fourth(?) time is legal. Yes, most people don't have fast connections, but that's a far cry from where this discussion started - 'It's not possible to utilise a line that fast'. That's what I disagreed with.
 
It would be interesting to see what happened in the UK if there was a point-to-point fibre network to each house and providers could run whatever service they wanted over it. I've no idea what Init7 pay for access to the fibre and the colo space, but the switches alone are £14k, a BiDi optic is another £70 for the generic stuff that Cisco won't want to help you with.

I think you might get a couple of startups trying something but I'd be surprised if you could build a sustainable business model out of it.
 
Rainmaker said:
Undoubtedly, and we pay anyway. Sorry, but 2.5k for a switch is literally nothing to an ISP or enterprise. Any half decent unit from Juniper, Cisco et al. will see them pay closer to ten times that per unit, in orders sized by the pallet load. The CPE and head end equipment for a single segment are a blip in the ocean.
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We've just recently purchased a 25GbE switch for $6k and spent another $6k on 18 SFPs. We get those at cost price though, so I'd expect retail cost to be around $15-20k.
 
Semple said:
We've just recently purchased a 25GbE switch for $6k and spent another $6k on 18 SFPs. We get those at cost price though, so I'd expect retail cost to be around $15-20k.
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All of our higher speed switching kit is Mikrotik, so quite reasonably priced in comparison to most. And still no way any ISP is going to pay that sort of money per port and charge £45/month for it.
 
Rainmaker said:
Undoubtedly, and we pay anyway. Sorry, but 2.5k for a switch is literally nothing to an ISP or enterprise. Any half decent unit from Juniper, Cisco et al. will see them pay closer to ten times that per unit, in orders sized by the pallet load. The CPE and head end equipment for a single segment are a blip in the ocean.



You seem awfully concerned with the content of my traffic. Which, for the fourth(?) time is legal. Yes, most people don't have fast connections, but that's a far cry from where this discussion started - 'It's not possible to utilise a line that fast'. That's what I disagreed with.
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I think we established that with a 25Gbps connection you’d only need to be inline for a few minutes a day, an hour if yiu went ‘burst’.

Yiu could spend the rest of the day actually using your computers for something useful rather than just shunting data around for the sake of copying it loads of times. And I’ve never asked what the content was, but you never say and you’ve still never really explained you can saturate a 10Gbps remote connection with a 50 Mbps upload speed.
 
!bluetonic! said:
As I sit here with my 80 Mb/s connection and it seems like my neighbours were against Gigaclear's connectivity, I dream of the day of this:

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2022-04-23-fiber7-25gbit-upgrade/

This came up in my Google News feed so I'd thought I'd share.
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And I thought my 8GB/s connection was fast. On the bright side fibre already runs into my house so as soon as my ISP offers faster I can get it straight away the only restriction on faster speeds is the modem and the backend ISP hardware, the Nokia modem I currently use supports up to 10GB/s
 
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