Chattanooga's Municipal Network Doubles Down On Fiber Speeds 165
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?
What I have available is... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What do you do with this speed? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Upgrade to fiber (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Bandwidth is great (Score:5, Informative)
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.