Chattanooga's Municipal Network Doubles Down On Fiber Speeds

tetrahedrassface writes "The first city in the U.S. to offer a screaming fast fiber network has now announced customers will get a free 60% boost in speed. If you had the 30 MB/sec service you now will get 50. Mid-range customers get a doubling for free, while the high end consumers of fiber get an average 250% boost. The fiber network recently passed 40,000 members and judging from a test of my business, we are currently over 300 MB/sec." What's the fastest service actually available where you live, and what does it cost?

Comments

What do you do with this speed?

[ugen]

On an end-user end - what exactly do you do with these speeds? I have fairly ho-hum Comcast running at about 15mbit/s. Frankly, I am not sure what to use that speed for. Web page opening speed is now governed by remote server processing capacity, files download instantly, movies stream (and in any case my movie consumption capacity is limited by low information to noise ratio :) ). What else? Am I missing something people really do with this?

Re:What do you do with this speed?

[Kookus]

I just don't get why memory manufacturers are making such large capacity modules. Why would anyone ever need more than 64kb of memory?

I don't get why people make short-sighted statements about why an existing limitation isn't a problem,

People don't build sites, or applications, or services very often that have requirements that exceed things like memory, or network speed. If they do, they learn real fast that people call their product a piece of crap.

If network speeds were fast enough, then there'd be a way for us to store all of our information in "the cloud", and not have to worry about things like backups, or virus scanning on a at home basis. We could write operating systems that were designed to be run centrally, just like the good old mainframe era and dumb terminals. Then we wouldn't have as many grandma's out there running windows 95 in the year 2010.

Hell, you could ask the browser makers if they like the sounds of that! (Not the windows 95 crap, but the operating system in a cloud, aka web browser with apps).

Seriously. Everyone with a desk job (or student) doesn't need to drive into work. Get some good video conferencing solutions, a huge pipe to your office files, a cheap-as-dirt dumb terminal in your living room (or home-office), and now you actually have a fighting chance at staving off unimportant things like global warming (less gas for travel).

No need for schools to pay for buses, more money for teachers. Unfortunately, probably a lot less teachers). More stay-at-home professionals, everyone get's to gain an extra hour of their life back per day (less travel). An extra hour means later wake-up times, which would probably have a better impact than daylight savings time.

So what could people do with a fatter pipe? Oh, man, I don't know. Let's go back to 64kb of main memory. Or how about something a little easier to think of, let's go back to pre-cellphone times. Everyone doesn't need a cell phone. What can people not do with their existing land-lines?

I'd rather think on the order of, if it's not infinite/instant, it's not good enough. Once you get there, then you can question why anyone would need anything more.

What I have available is...

[carlhaagen]

...an ethernet socket in my apartment. The maximum I can subscribe to is 1000/100 - yes, that's gigabit ethernet down - for 70 EUR/month. What I'm currently buying via the same socket is 25/10 mbit/s, which costs me about 24 EUR/month, which is just over $30. I get this through this building being connected to my municipal city network in which multiple operators can do business. This method is getting very common here in Sweden.

Bandwidth is great

[Meeni]

Latency is better.

I have comcast, I can download at some 20Mbit/s, for around $65/mo. Its expensive but if it worked properly, I'd be happy. But...

Latency is catastrophic. On benchmarks it's great, on anything real it sucks. Actually, that's the story of that Comcast subscription. It does everything useless fast, but anything useful feels crippled. Skype? Unusable. Netflix? Never in HD. Youtube? Choppy. ssh? horrible latency. Web pages? super fast, but who cares?

Re:Bandwidth is great

[girlintraining]

Web pages? super fast, but who cares?

Comcast employs a rather complex quality of service system that isn't configured like any QoS system you've seen before. Essentially, it's designed to act fast for the casual user who rarely does anything but look at Facebook.

Many people have tried to research the system and find a pattern, but it varies by region and tier of service. There are some things that have been routinely found, however. Services like hulu (aka XFinity), Speedtest.net, and several others receive the highest priority. TCP/IP Traffic on port 80 and 443 get a bump, but only for the first 5MB of transfer per connection. Host-based filtering can pre-empt this however, like youtube.com, netflix.com, etc.; They receive no priority. UDP traffic receives a lower priority than TCP. Services like Skype and other services that compete directly with comcast get lumped into the lowest QoS tier -- any other connection on your line will max out, starving these out. It's the same story with SSL connections on any port other than 80 or 443.

There is also active interference with certain connection types; Trying to upload a torrent to a tracker (not seeding, actually creating a new torrent) results in a deluge of fakes reset packets. When a torrent completes and switches to seeding, the incoming connection count and amount of bandwidth drop instantly and significantly. This is due to their "sandvine" software being installed at their border routers. They also transparently proxy HTTP in some locations -- on popular sites like Facebook, data is cached and even after it's updated and live on the internet, anyone accessing it through plain HTTP will get a cached copy. It appears to be based only on the top 100 or so websites, though anecdotally, some people have reported other sites seem to get cached as well. Windows updates also get cached, which was only noticed when Microsoft deployed XP service pack 1, and then re-released it as 1a due to a serious bug -- the buggy version continued to propagate for almost a day after the update was posted onto comcast customers' systems.

In addition to all of this, comcast has massive buffers on all your IP traffic -- the classic case of buffer bloat. If you're using more than about 25% of your rated capacity, you're going to start seeing latency, and there are clear thresholds if you do TCP "pings" (rather than ICMP) with full payload packets (typically MTU = 1500). And then there's the clamping they do based purely on capacity used -- which is based both on the amount of traffic on your local segment AND the total rated speed for your tier of service, with the magic numbers being the "top 10%" for the former, and more than 75% for the latter. I put the previous in quotations because many report that throttling appears persistent, rather than transient, and may be based on billing cycle, despite customer services' assurances to the contrary. This is another one of those "region-specific" throttling problems.

As you can see, there's a reason the FCC chose Comcast first on the list of ISPs to try to enforce network neutrality on: They are by far the worst offender.

Upgrade to fiber

[AliasMarlowe]

you know that 15 Mbit down on a cable connection is not the rate at which you upload right? upload speeds are typically 1 Mbit, 2 if you pay extra.

So true. We have a 100/100 Mbps symmetric link on fiber at home. It's also uncapped, etc. Apparently a couple of km from here, there is a 200Mbps or 350Mbps service available, but not where we live.

What do we use it for? Well, there are generally two adults and two teenagers at home, and the need for bandwidth adds up. Downloading an ISO does happen occasionally (reaching speeds up to 60Mbps from sites within Finland, dropping to 5Mbps from overseas), but mostly it's just web surfing and viewing youtube or vimeo.

We also have a web server at home, which delivers - according to its stats package - 15-30 GByte per month, and mostly serves pictures and videos of the kids and adults performing in the local dance school and in the local riding school. Although the average bandwidth is not huge, we get two or three videos being viewed simultaneously just after the server is updated for some new event, and the videos typically require 2Mbps to 4Mbps for streaming.

The alternative for us would be a 40/10 Mbps link, which would be quite inadequate.

1Gb/s in Ukraine for $18/month with 75 TV channels

[OneMadMuppet]

...though real-world benchmarks give me ~800Mb/s both ways. It's also native IPv6, so I don't need my tunnel anymore. Internet is dirt cheap here, you can get 30MB/s for about $3/month with TV and phone.