100 Mbps Community Fiber Network: Howto

batro writes: "The main page says it all: 'Everything slower than 10 Mbps is just a toy!' This is a nice writeup (with pictures!) of how a 100 Mbps community fiber network in northern Sweden came into being." And if over a grand in connection fees doesn't suit your locale (this took nearly complete neighborhood participation), Nurotek writes: "Check out Proxim's latest press release. They claim that they can push 100Mpbs via the 5Ghz RF band. Wonder if this will work ..."

Comments

Re:Harddrive sets the limit

[Doc Hopper]

A correction:

"Collisions" are far less of a concern on a switched, full-duplex network such as this. If you have an intelligent switch, it will queue packets for an interface, and the back-end switched fabrics of these switches generally mean zero packet loss or collisions. Your full-duplex test of transfer rates very closely simulates the transfer rate you'd receive if you had those devices plugged into a very busy but high-quality switch.

Collisions can, however, be a concern if for some reason the device at the end doesn't support full-duplex operation -- then it is possible for the switch and the device to collide with each other, but you still don't have nearly the same problems you have with traditional hubs. Additionally, it is possible that you can have line errors which force device negotiation at a lower speed, half-duplex, or simply cause random lost packets and noise on the line. This is far less likely with fiber to the home, but if the ends of the cable are not polished well you'll have lots of lost packets -- but still, generally no collisions because the switch and the end-device are not transmitting & receiving in full-duplex mode.

However, I largely agree with your point. Hard drive transfer rates are often abominable. However, the latest drives can be faster than 100Mbps. The article mentioned copying files from one hard disk to another. Write speed on hard drives is generally a small fraction of the read speed; while you may read at 18 or 19 Mbytes/sec (easily saturating a 100Mbps link), writing often only happens at 4 to 5 MBytes/sec, and on many hard drives even slower than that (one here at my house consistently comes in at 780Kbytes/sec!). Once we get writes up in the 10Mbytes/sec range for run-of-the-mill consumer hard disks, even 100Mbps connections will begin to seem quite slow...
I love switches!