Interwebs outside the UK

ThatsWhatSheSaid said:
Once the 10GbE NICs arrive, I'll be upgrading my pfSense box with them, as well as the other PCs... it's a dual-core intel Mini ITX unit I built in a fanless streacom case years ago with a small SSD... it's still overkill for home use, even when it gets 10GbE. Then the ZyXel will go into bridge mode.
Click to expand...

I'm fairly sure you won't get anywhere near 10Gb with PFSense.

Also not sure why you "need" to get 10Gb to every device - far better to "share" the connection out to each device at 1Gb or less and prevent any possible contention e.g. in the rare case that you actually find something to download at 10Gbps.


Sadly the entire project appears to be a "look at me" e-peen post, much like the rest of your post history (£200k watch and apparently a preordered Aston Martin Valkyrie)
 
Armageus said:
I'm fairly sure you won't get anywhere near 10Gb with PFSense.

Also not sure why you "need" to get 10Gb to every device - far better to "share" the connection out to each device at 1Gb or less and prevent any possible contention e.g. in the rare case that you actually find something to download at 10Gbps.
Click to expand...
You think pfs won't do it? I haven't tried it on more than 1Gbit yet. Any recommendations please?

Contention won't prove much of an issue, there are only 2 people in the house most of the time & I'm the only heavy user.

Only servers/storage and primary PC need 10Gbit.
 
ThatsWhatSheSaid said:
You think pfs won't do it? I haven't tried it on more than 1Gbit yet.
Click to expand...

I run an older dual xeon pfsense at work with 2x 10Gb cards, whilst I've seen greater than gigabit throughput which is adequate for our needs, PFSense themselves state that it is extremely difficult to reach 10Gb whilst doing anything meaningful with it (hence why they released another router product TNSR).

To have any real chance, you'd arguably need a high ipc/clock speed CPU to overcome some of the single threaded limitation of PFSense, as well as decent 10Gb cards that have working drivers that support all the different hardware offloading aspects (which most from memory don't).
 
As Armageus says, forgot pfSense for 10Gb. You shouldn't have any such issues with OpenWrt, VyOS or IPFire (i.e. Linux based). I've spoken to fellow homelabbers who've done 10Gb on OPNSense as well, but haven't confirmed with my own testing.
 
The likes of YouFibre in the UK will give you a residential quote for a 10Gb connection if you call them. Their coverage isn’t that great atm however.
 
Caged said:
I'd be surprised if Opnsense could do 10Gb where pfSense can't, as my understanding of the limitations were related to doing the packet processing in kernel space which is a limitation common to both BSD-based distros.

In terms of 10Gb ISPs, add the below to the list:
Click to expand...

As far as I understand it, the primary limitation is in pf processing packets fast enough. It's multi-threaded in FreeBSD (and thus both of the *senses), but still chokes out around 10 gig. Linux doesn't have this issue and will do 10Gb no sweat.
 
Armageus said:
I run an older dual xeon pfsense at work with 2x 10Gb cards, whilst I've seen greater than gigabit throughput which is adequate for our needs, PFSense themselves state that it is extremely difficult to reach 10Gb whilst doing anything meaningful with it (hence why they released another router product TNSR).

To have any real chance, you'd arguably need a high ipc/clock speed CPU to overcome some of the single threaded limitation of PFSense, as well as decent 10Gb cards that have working drivers that support all the different hardware offloading aspects (which most from memory don't).
Click to expand...
Terminal_Boy said:
To summarise, you can get a mahoosive bitpipe for mucho wonga in the U.K. and Switzerland if you’re in a city, but you’re SOL in rural France.
Click to expand...

Thanks for those tips, saved me a bunch of hassle :)

The NICs should arrive later this week or next & I'll report back.
 
Ayahuasca said:
The likes of YouFibre in the UK will give you a residential quote for a 10Gb connection if you call them. Their coverage isn’t that great atm however.
Click to expand...

Nice. Gigaclear were trialling 5Gb around Oxford for quite a while. I don’t know how that went.

My frustrations with the UK connectivity were more centred around the practical monopolisation of BT and their unwillingness to deploy real infrastructure until they were forced. The UK had some of the worst broadband speeds in the developed world for a long time. Then there is the multi-year false advertisement of “fiber” connections which were really FTTC.

There are some locations in central London where you can still only get adsl.
 
Armageus said:
Sadly the entire project appears to be a "look at me" e-peen post, much like the rest of your post history (£200k watch and apparently a preordered Aston Martin Valkyrie)
Click to expand...
Got to make up for the lack of something :cry:
 
Rainmaker said:
As far as I understand it, the primary limitation is in pf processing packets fast enough. It's multi-threaded in FreeBSD (and thus both of the *senses), but still chokes out around 10 gig. Linux doesn't have this issue and will do 10Gb no sweat.
Click to expand...

Interesting... there were a few places that claimed to have done some testing with pfs & 10g & even recommended specific cards that were good for it.

I'm waiting on a couple of Chelsio cards to arrive... 1 dual port 10gbe & 1 dual port sfp+... they seem well-rated as compatible/ideal. Worst case, I can repurpose them in other scenarios.
 
ThatsWhatSheSaid said:
*most of Switzerland… if the house doesn’t already have fiber, you can ask them to pull one. It’s only a handful of remote mountain villages that don’t have access yet.
Click to expand...

But that’s not the whole story. I asked Swiss Telekom and the reason they have three identically priced 10Gb, 300Mbps and 100Mbps packages is that they can’t support 10Gb everywhere. So yes, they might well be able to put a fibre into a mountain village but they don’t have the upstream bandwidth to give everyone 10Gb. Clearly you’re not getting 10Gb, you’re getting 5Gb. So on paper Switzerland might look amazing, but the reality is it’s probably BEHIND the UK in which homes can get actually get a 1Gb connection.

Abd you can’t say you didn’t have a pop at the UK, because that’s the whole premise of your opening post. You didn’t say “the rest of Europe”. You said the UK.
 
ThatsWhatSheSaid said:
Nice. Gigaclear were trialling 5Gb around Oxford for quite a while. I don’t know how that went.

My frustrations with the UK connectivity were more centred around the practical monopolisation of BT and their unwillingness to deploy real infrastructure until they were forced. The UK had some of the worst broadband speeds in the developed world for a long time. Then there is the multi-year false advertisement of “fiber” connections which were really FTTC.

There are some locations in central London where you can still only get adsl.
Click to expand...

I can sympathise with people feeling let down, but BT weren't stopping anybody else from building a network. We got five years of Sky and TalkTalk going into whatever newspapers would host them and crying about how BT weren't building them a fibre network that they could rent out for a regulated price. Vodafone to their credit actually partnered with CityFibre who then went and got on with the difficult job of putting the cables into the ground.

If people want to view access to fibre broadband services as a public good then it has to be a public project - simply getting upset that BT weren't being altruistic isn't going to cut it, as they have no obligations to the country as a whole, just their customers and share holders. There have been some legislative tweaks and the result of that is an FTTP build that is enabling 30-40k premises each month.

Regarding central London only having ADSL - the majority of the time this is nothing to do with Openreach. Councils have objected to the FTTC cabinets, and actually in the heart of the city there isn't the space for them on the pavements. FTTP build is hampered by wayleaves and it's sometimes impossible to get into buildings. We work closely with G.Network and there have been multiple occasions where a building is ready to be connected to a service and the landlord makes it unviable due to the fees they want to charge for building access - I'm talking requesting five figure payments to grant permission to have their building connected to a gigabit broadband network at no cost to themselves.
 
mid_gen said:
It's a nonsense really.

I've got the 900mb FTTP service and the limiting factor is the other services, by a long shot. I don't think I've even got close to 50% utilisation in the real world, outside of speedtests.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I got 1Gbps Hyperoptic installed a couple of weeks ago and the only two things I see full speeds on are Steam and Speedtest. Epic Games Store downloads are 50MB/sec at best, Game Pass downloads on the Xbox App are anywhere between 35-50MB/sec, the PS5 doesn't show a download speed but I'd estimate around the same as EGS.

Hard to complain when I was on a 31Mbps FTTC connection before this though. :D
 
It's a bit fatuous to say there's no use for fast connections just because *you* have no need for one. Plenty of things will utilise >1Gb if you happen to require it, and especially useful is the symmetric upstream. You can be serving content at 1Gb or backing up to off-prem storage as though it was on the LAN, while downloading files at multi-gig speeds. I don't need it and it doesn't exist are not the same thing.

ThatsWhatSheSaid said:
Interesting... there were a few places that claimed to have done some testing with pfs & 10g & even recommended specific cards that were good for it.

I'm waiting on a couple of Chelsio cards to arrive... 1 dual port 10gbe & 1 dual port sfp+... they seem well-rated as compatible/ideal. Worst case, I can repurpose them in other scenarios.
Click to expand...

Let us know how you get on with your testing please, I'd be interested. I wouldn't touch pfSense with someone else's bargepole but either way the results will be worth seeing. Especially interested to see how it would fare with NAT + routing + AQM + firewalling while running simultaneous traffic (eg flent rrul, iperf3, netperf).
 
WJA96 said:
But that’s not the whole story. I asked Swiss Telekom and the reason they have three identically priced 10Gb, 300Mbps and 100Mbps packages is that they can’t support 10Gb everywhere. So yes, they might well be able to put a fibre into a mountain village but they don’t have the upstream bandwidth to give everyone 10Gb. Clearly you’re not getting 10Gb, you’re getting 5Gb. So on paper Switzerland might look amazing, but the reality is it’s probably BEHIND the UK in which homes can get actually get a 1Gb connection.

Abd you can’t say you didn’t have a pop at the UK, because that’s the whole premise of your opening post. You didn’t say “the rest of Europe”. You said the UK.
Click to expand...

More incorrect assumptions and mis-interpretations... it seems you didn't actually speak with Swisscom, either... how strange to claim it.
 
Caged said:
I can sympathise with people feeling let down, but BT weren't stopping anybody else from building a network. We got five years of Sky and TalkTalk going into whatever newspapers would host them and crying about how BT weren't building them a fibre network that they could rent out for a regulated price. Vodafone to their credit actually partnered with CityFibre who then went and got on with the difficult job of putting the cables into the ground.

If people want to view access to fibre broadband services as a public good then it has to be a public project - simply getting upset that BT weren't being altruistic isn't going to cut it, as they have no obligations to the country as a whole, just their customers and share holders. There have been some legislative tweaks and the result of that is an FTTP build that is enabling 30-40k premises each month.

Regarding central London only having ADSL - the majority of the time this is nothing to do with Openreach. Councils have objected to the FTTC cabinets, and actually in the heart of the city there isn't the space for them on the pavements. FTTP build is hampered by wayleaves and it's sometimes impossible to get into buildings. We work closely with G.Network and there have been multiple occasions where a building is ready to be connected to a service and the landlord makes it unviable due to the fees they want to charge for building access - I'm talking requesting five figure payments to grant permission to have their building connected to a gigabit broadband network at no cost to themselves.
Click to expand...

All fair points & yes, I think things such as these should be public projects.
Hopefully landlords like that will die off soon enough... at least they'll lose clients in time if they restrict key infrastructure in such ways.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom