> On Dec 25, 2020, at 5:32 PM, John Levine <jo...@iecc.com> wrote:
>
> I agree it is odd to make 100/100 the top speed. The fiber service I
> have from my local non-Bell telco offers 100/100, 500/500, and
> 1000/1000. FiOS where you can get it goes to 940/880.
>
> The obvious guess is that their upstream bandwidth is
> underprovisioned, or maybe they figure 100/100 is all they need to
> compete in that particular market.
My TV (wired) pulls at higher bitrates when doing the initial fetches of the
buffering. Not unusual to see it pulling more than 150Mb/s at the start of a
(non-4K) show.
I think the extent that end-users are impacted by these slower speeds while
buffering is under appreciated in the experience.
At $dayjob many servers are 10G or 100G so the limiting factor is most likely
the CPE or ISP. I was hearing last night about someone with a device that
didn’t appear to be hitting the line-rate but was dropping 0.5% of packets when
running at 3Gb/s until they upgraded to one of the major networking vendors we
all know here.
In my small FTTH network the slowest link is at the customer home and all the
devices are hardware ASIC forwarded vs offload as you find in some of the
low/mid-tier devices (eg: Tik/UBNT).
Many streaming things do 8 second waits between chunks, so if you’re pulling a
video stream at 6Mb/s you really are pulling 6*8 (lets say 50) then idle for 7
seconds. If you’re on a 25Mb/s service or even a 50Mb/s service it won’t work
the way you expect if there’s any other activity.
- Jared
