Starlink

[Rebeldad1]

I have not seen Starlink on the main stream advertised yet. ViaSat and HughesNet are advertising in my area.

if its Hughesnet run. It cant get any slower unless you turn it off...

 

[Gale Hawkins]

It seems like Covid-19 has hurt our fiber to the house system speed and dependability.

 

[kcflhrc]

It seems like Covid-19 has hurt our fiber to the house system speed and dependability.

Think of it as pouring gas into a funnel, there's gonna be a point where you can pour faster than the funnel will take.

 

[ponytug]

Residential fiber is shared amongst a group of customers, so when everybody is home and streaming/zooming, there is less bandwidth to go around.

Think of it as overbooking. Service is sold as "up to", not "at least", unless you are buying business/commercial service that comes with service guarantees- for ten or twenty times the price.

As one who only has access to low speed DSL, I would say be thankful for what you have, e.g. fiber, even if it is slower than it was.

There is a reason why many of the 700,000 people signed up for Starlink; we don't have access to modern broadband.

All the best,

Peter

 

[kcflhrc]

Residential fiber is shared amongst a group of customers, so when everybody is home and streaming/zooming, there is less bandwidth to go around.

Think of it as overbooking. Service is sold as "up to", not "at least", unless you are buying business/commercial service that comes with service guarantees- for ten or twenty times the price.

As one who only has access to low speed DSL, I would say be thankful for what you have, e.g. fiber, even if it is slower than it was.

There is a reason why many of the 700,000 people signed up for Starlink; we don't have access to modern broadband.

All the best,

Peter

Please explain how you know this and when you say shared what exactly do you mean? Since I do this for a living I would like to debunk some of the myths if you don't mind. I hear this kind of crap day in and day out without any justification or facts and maybe, just maybe, I could at least set the record straight here on the old Rural Farm Forum.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

Residential fiber is shared amongst a group of customers, so when everybody is home and streaming/zooming, there is less bandwidth to go around.

Think of it as overbooking. Service is sold as "up to", not "at least", unless you are buying business/commercial service that comes with service guarantees- for ten or twenty times the price.

As one who only has access to low speed DSL, I would say be thankful for what you have, e.g. fiber, even if it is slower than it was.

There is a reason why many of the 700,000 people signed up for Starlink; we don't have access to modern broadband.

All the best,

Peter

Clearly I'm one of the lucky ones living in Podunk KY with better connectivity than ones in Boston. I remember our fake DSL. Speed took a hit from all the students dumped online. There are rumors about one old man has watched back to back youtube movies mixed AGT, BGT, etc for diversity.

 

[lman]

Rural electric co-ops are getting a bunch of money to continue fiber installs. They buried fiber in my area last summer, still waiting to get hooked up.

 

[ponytug]

Please explain how you know this and when you say shared what exactly do you mean? Since I do this for a living I would like to debunk some of the myths if you don't mind. I hear this kind of crap day in and day out without any justification or facts and maybe, just maybe, I could at least set the record straight here on the old Rural Farm Forum.

I do, too. I am not sure what you felt was incorrect/misinformation. My apologies, but I will try to clarify.

AT&T is my provider at home, and I have worked with them, Comcast, and others professionally.

None of my residential internet service contracts have come with quality of service guarantees. I have been offered quality of service contracts at home only twice; once from AT&T enterprise offering fiber (symmetric up/down to the tune of $500-$2,300/mo) with guaranteed uptime and guaranteed bandwidth, and once from a commercial microwave provider (similar pricing, but with a $15,000 installation fee). Both offered rebates for downtime and performance shortcomings. My AT&T DSL contract, in contrast, uses "up to" language to define the speed, without any penalties for downtime or bandwidth shortfalls.

We just went through seven weeks of little to no DSL service. (Long story involving 50-70 year old wires, acorns, corrosion, lightning, equipment that is no longer being manufactured, and for which there are few, or no spares nationally, (at least according to AT&T) and just plain old human mistakes, as well as some folks who went above and beyond) I was given a 5% refund after dealing with the team at the office of the president for five weeks while they quarterbacked getting their local team to solve the issues. Had I been on one of my commercial contracts, I would have been rebated 100% of the cost, and had a sales representative in my office explaining why this was a one off event and what they had done to make sure it would never happen again. Been there, done that.

As a professional, you know that bandwidth is metered on a per line basis, typically at the terminal routers, and those routers in turn are aggregated via larger and higher performance switches. Each link in, and between, equipment has a bandwidth limit either by settings in the equipment, or because the actual switch/router bandwidth in the internal bus/CPU, or in the uplink(s). When you lay out the network architecture for a neighborhood, you make estimates on what customers will purchase, and what they will actually use, and make allowances for growth over the predicted lifespan of your equipment. If you shortchange an area by design, or by failure to estimate demand, then that area won't hit the throughput that it should, causing customers to experience slow response, either in the form of bandwidth limits, or increased latencies, depending on where the bottleneck is.

PreCovid, residential lines were relatively quiet at night, lightly used during the day, and generally used to peak usage 4-10ish, and generally, customers could count on hitting your service speed, and then some in the early morning and during the day. 4-10, not so much. Again, the fine print on the DSL or fiber, or cable contract usually says "speeds up to". Mostly, consumers do get the speed offered, and usually then some, but not always was the point that I was trying to make. Covid has put an unprecedented load on residential internet service that (largely) wasn't designed/built for it. I'm not blaming the providers; it was not a high probability event that a large fraction of the population would be at home 24x7 almost overnight, and needing a huge uptick in bandwidth. Having a home that used to have an alarm service, and perhaps a soap opera all day went to having four or five Zoom calls concurrently. That's a sizable load. A video call can use 3.75-13.5Mbits/s, and it is the upload part of that that often causes trouble, as uploads are often a fifth or a tenth of the upload speeds in residential service. Four high resolution video calls can overwhelm even a 500/50 fiber connection.

So...I was trying to say that it is entirely possible to have fiber and be experiencing slow service, as Gale Hawkins was writing, either due to bandwidth or latencies. Nothing to do with some company being out to get anyone, just the system, and the demands on it in these times.

All the best,

Peter

 

[kcflhrc]

I do, too. I am not sure what you felt was incorrect/misinformation. My apologies, but I will try to clarify.

AT&T is my provider at home, and I have worked with them, Comcast, and others professionally.

None of my residential internet service contracts have come with quality of service guarantees. I have been offered quality of service contracts at home only twice; once from AT&T enterprise offering fiber (symmetric up/down to the tune of $500-$2,300/mo) with guaranteed uptime and guaranteed bandwidth, and once from a commercial microwave provider (similar pricing, but with a $15,000 installation fee). Both offered rebates for downtime and performance shortcomings. My AT&T DSL contract, in contrast, uses "up to" language to define the speed, without any penalties for downtime or bandwidth shortfalls.

We just went through seven weeks of little to no DSL service. (Long story involving 50-70 year old wires, acorns, corrosion, lightning, equipment that is no longer being manufactured, and for which there are few, or no spares nationally, (at least according to AT&T) and just plain old human mistakes, as well as some folks who went above and beyond) I was given a 5% refund after dealing with the team at the office of the president for five weeks while they quarterbacked getting their local team to solve the issues. Had I been on one of my commercial contracts, I would have been rebated 100% of the cost, and had a sales representative in my office explaining why this was a one off event and what they had done to make sure it would never happen again. Been there, done that.

As a professional, you know that bandwidth is metered on a per line basis, typically at the terminal routers, and those routers in turn are aggregated via larger and higher performance switches. Each link in, and between, equipment has a bandwidth limit either by settings in the equipment, or because the actual switch/router bandwidth in the internal bus/CPU, or in the uplink(s). When you lay out the network architecture for a neighborhood, you make estimates on what customers will purchase, and what they will actually use, and make allowances for growth over the predicted lifespan of your equipment. If you shortchange an area by design, or by failure to estimate demand, then that area won't hit the throughput that it should, causing customers to experience slow response, either in the form of bandwidth limits, or increased latencies, depending on where the bottleneck is.

PreCovid, residential lines were relatively quiet at night, lightly used during the day, and generally used to peak usage 4-10ish, and generally, customers could count on hitting your service speed, and then some in the early morning and during the day. 4-10, not so much. Again, the fine print on the DSL or fiber, or cable contract usually says "speeds up to". Mostly, consumers do get the speed offered, and usually then some, but not always was the point that I was trying to make. Covid has put an unprecedented load on residential internet service that (largely) wasn't designed/built for it. I'm not blaming the providers; it was not a high probability event that a large fraction of the population would be at home 24x7 almost overnight, and needing a huge uptick in bandwidth. Having a home that used to have an alarm service, and perhaps a soap opera all day went to having four or five Zoom calls concurrently. That's a sizable load. A video call can use 3.75-13.5Mbits/s, and it is the upload part of that that often causes trouble, as uploads are often a fifth or a tenth of the upload speeds in residential service. Four high resolution video calls can overwhelm even a 500/50 fiber connection.

So...I was trying to say that it is entirely possible to have fiber and be experiencing slow service, as Gale Hawkins was writing, either due to bandwidth or latencies. Nothing to do with some company being out to get anyone, just the system, and the demands on it in these times.

All the best,

Peter

You can certainly have slow speeds with fiber just as you can with any other technology. But when you said residential fiber is shared between a group of homes, in my world, doing FTTH for a living, this is just not true. You can have a bottle neck in a network anywhere. Maybe other providers do fiber differently than we do. But when I install a home on fiber it is not a shared connection in anyway. Now when you have SLA's, service level agreements with businesses, that is typically a dedicated copper or fiber circuit, in that regards, I suppose you could call it non shared? Probably not the best wording. However, with my company anyway, if you are paying for 940 mb, which is our gig service, 940 sym, up and down, I run a test with test gear that verifies that speed and I have to turn in the results through an app. It better **** sure run 940 or I'm on the phone with provisioning asking why.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

After the successful flight of the SN8 prototype yesterday it should help the rollout of Starlink mid 2022 to stay on schedule. They need to get up 1000's of more satellites and Starship I think can launch 240 at a time vs the 60 at a time currently.

SpaceX Starship SN8 explodes on landing after test flight | Science | The Guardian