What also amazing is that there's no extra charge for increasing speeds. That would be unheard of in the US, where artificial segmentation is the norm.
The extra charge is in installation fee, but yeah, for 800 USD the cost of 25Gbps transmitter is negligible over letting go of a client needing more than 10Gbps, and ready to pay for it.
Note, it's not a PON, but real symmetric, point-to-point connection.
I once had 250mbps over 1000BaseLX, and it was way more expensive than 500mbps GePON coming after it.
I'd take YOUR deal in a heartbeat. I pay $110/month for 75Mbps down / 10Mbps up and 300GB data. They also constantly harass me with upsells and raise prices 10% per year.
Dang, that's rough. I'll fully admit I got super lucky. My ISP is MetroNet and you wouldn't necessarily think Lexington, KY would have fiber at all or if they did that it would be a good deal but thankfully MetroNet serves my area and has great prices. I wish they were in OH as well so I could move my parents over to them, they are stuck on Spectrum.
That’s great news! Still waiting on Columbus/Dublin but I’ll keep an eye out. Last I checked I don’t think they had anything in OH so this is progress.
I'm also near Dayton. I should just buckle down and get their service. I don't really want to be behind CGNAT and the $10 / mo fee for a static public IP address seems steep. My friends who are using the service like it, though.
I haven’t encountered any issues with CGNAT, nor has my son, who plays way more Xbox than he should. I use Tailscale when I need to access something at home while out and about, and have considered using cloudflare tunnels for hosting from home.
Any gpon is cheaper than any docsis. HFC not only requires laying cables, the equipment is also expensive and it needs more power, so you have to pay for that too.
If you’re in the US, you can try out T-Mobile ISP. I get 300 down/ 20 up pretty consistently and no throttle. Ping sucks but can’t complain at $50 a month.
I second this, it's 5G, just plug in and go. The cheapest wired Internet I could get here in downtown Chicago on my block was $70,000+ installation, then $800 / month. I was spending $400 / month on my cell phone bill just for data before I switched to T-Mobile Home Internet.
They do in places.. just some city blocks are black holes. I don't know why. The blocks on every side of me have standard DSL and cable connections. I had multiple teams from Comcast, AT&T etc etc out here for surveys. Comcast initially stated it would cost me $68,000 to run a cable from the next block. Then they said that must be an error and sent another survey team out who came back and said yes, it was an error, the real cost would be $71,000.
I currently live in Kazakhstan (Aktobe) and I pay 6000 KZT ($14) for 200 Mb/s symmetrical over fiber, no setup cost. I could get 500 Mb/s for 8000 KZT, but don't really feel any need for it.
It always puzzled me why internet in the US is so expensive. I heard the argument that the sheer size of the US makes the infrastructure expensive, but Kazakhstan is even "bigger" per capita, and not exactly known for being an "advanced economy", yet here we are...
I wouldn't, 13€/mo for unlimited 1Gbps down, 60M up, static IP and have never been bothered by these limits, especially for the cost (wouldn't hurt to have a higher upload speed since I host some stuff but that has not been a problem yet).
While yes, the bandwidth is certainly enough and comparable to fast (but not fastest) consumer-grade storage these days (2-3 GB/s), I'd be more concerned with latency issues as NVMe tends to have latency on the order of microseconds (so ~1/1000th that of a very low single-digit internet latency).
Probably better video calls for one thing. If more bandwidth is available then you don't need to do as much work copmressing & decompressing the signal on each end
If you're uploading streaming video directly to consumers, without an intermediary cache (e.g. YouTube), your upload needs can essentially reach infinity. It's just a question of how many people are trying to view the stream, at what level of quality, at the same time. If you need an intermediary cache, you're more likely to be censored by the intermediary or the political jurisdiction in which the intermediary is found.
Yes, 25Gb/s is just enough to begin hosting your own high quality video content to a small community of people and handle mild spikes in traffic. This is probably the first point that there is enough bandwidth to satisfy that need for the majority of people.
>CHF 64.75/month with annual billing (CHF 777.-/year)
CHF 64.75 = ~$70USD. But why does 1 / 10 / 25Gbps all cost the same?
I am wondering if there are any cheap Swiss Cloud Storage that one could make use of the upload and download speed. You really could have an external HDD in a DataCenter.
I have 1gbps. I had to get a decent router. Cheap home routers can't handle it even when they outright claim they can. You also want something better than cat5 for home wiring. Lastly spinning hard drives wont keep up on sustained reads/writes you need an SSD.
The above is things you should do when you have 1gbps in order to actually get those speeds. I know people will argue citing 640k being enough for everyone and have some edge case that needs this but.... 25gbps is overkill.
Mikrotik makes some very capable routers. The Rb4011 is incredibly powerful and very low power, and has an SFP+ port, so you can use a sfp+ to rj45 if needed, or straight modem -> sfp+ connection, to get faster than 1 gig speeds.
It has a steep learning curve though, albeit it's extremely rewarding and powerful once you gwr over that curve. It should handle routing 1 gig with zero issues, and is under $200. You can do bonding, vlans, esoteric ip rules, and tons of "misc" functionality.
Do not go with ubiquiti, their hardware is very poor and their UI is very buggy and simply poorly designed, it's focused on people who know a bit above an average person about networking, which I suspect is not the case for most people here.
I have that router, and it can do up to about 2.5Gb/s with actual routing. I have it on a 10GBe direct connect to my "main" 4 port switch, but that just means it can take in multiple unrouted LAN segments.
Once you start doing much esoteric the speed slows down, if you get off the fast path it can be pretty intense (thought they do sell bigger ones that can route more packets).
Agreed, it's nice to have the number right there and they don't make claims beyond what it actually can do (and arguably, when you're up at 10GB+ your router and your switch shouldn't be the same hardware anymore).
I switched to running FreeBSD on a commodity OnLogic/Logic Supply fanless PC from Ebay and I love it. I use Mikrotik for L2 stuff but doing L3 on your own is quite nice.
I ended up getting a ridiculous looking Archer gx90 which is still a home router but not a cheap home router.
The main thing is that the CPU in it is 1.5ghz quad core. Before that I had a Linksys with a 800mhz a single core that literally couldn't route traffic fast enough.
Running opnsense on it, and it’s doing fine and saturates the line when I’m maxing out downloads. For comparison, the isp (Verizon) router was consistently around 100Mb/s less than this one.
Mikrotik is probably the better general choice for consumer-ish pricing. Personally I would recommend something like a CRS326-24G-2S+RM (which is a switch but running RouterOS) or similar scaled to your needs.
Router has had no problem pushing 1Gb and the switch is rated for something like 44 Gb. Has enough of a firewall and other built in services, plus POE for home devices and SFP+ ports so in the event you need a faster link. Average current draw is < 5 W and it's quiet.
Although nearly any modern mini-PC running Opnsense or VyOS or whatever linux/bsd can trivially do gigabit routing as well. 25 Gb would be a bit harder of an ask :)
> You also want something better than cat5 for home wiring.
For 25Gbps? Or are you meaning for the 1gbps you have? If the former, of course, but otherwise Cat5e can handle 10GbE if you have good connections and the loop length isn’t too long.
My home is a mix of topologies, but everything that is twisted pair copper that was pre-existing is Cat5e and has no trouble fully saturating 10gbps (30-40ft average loop length). I have cheap RG6 handling 2.5Gbps where I didn’t have an existing cable run and didn’t want to run new cable and it can fully max out the connection too based on iperf testing. In my basement, I also have fiber (for >2 meter spans) and twinax (for 1-2 meter spans) in 10Gbps and 40Gbps too.
Yes, for sure. 99% of the time, based on personal experience, the person either doesn’t realize the difference or is just incorrectly using the term Cat5 to mean Cat5e. It’s pretty rare you’ll find the former even in older homes (again, my experience based on living in the US). This is why I intentionally used the term Cat5e in my reply. Cat5 was deprecated by Cat5e back 20+ years ago, long before the average US home began getting wired with Ethernet. Further, many (majority?) of Cat5 cables older than 10 years old actually meet the 5e requirements, just weren’t certified specifically.
> Cat5 struggles with 1gbps.
Like with my original point, that depends on the length and the quality of the connections. Inaccurate blanket statements mislead or worse, so I encourage you to avoid it.
The differences, while minimal, do make a big difference in certain environments. Long cable lengths (>70m) is the obvious one that might apply in a home environment theoretically. The more common case where it makes a difference is in very high density cable trays or other places where you have a lot of potential interference, which generally doesn’t apply as much in a home.
P.S. - a lot of your recent comments are showing as dead, might want to email HN mods and see what’s up.
Heh, had the same difficulties. It’s funny how slow home equipment is when compared to 25gbit/s internet. I’m waiting for my 10 gibt/s to be enabled by init7, but even that took me multiple weeks to research to find a reasonably sized router that can do 10g/s. And even that is a bit of an overkill, I’m getting it simply because it’s free if you have 1g/s already.
"I know people will argue citing 640k being enough for everyone and have some edge case that needs this but.... 25gbps is overkill."
There is actually a semi-reasonable case for there being a limit on useful bandwidth for most purposes. Exact numbers are hard to come by for many reasons both obvious and subtle but around 25gpbs you're getting to the point that with reasonable compression you can saturate a human's entire sensorium with retina-quality video, full audio, touch, proprioception, etc.
While there are use cases that exceed that, like running a search across the entire locally-stored output of the Large Hadron Collider, you're certainly getting to the point where the applications are getting more and more specialist relative to the average person sitting in their home, no matter how exotic the the requirements. I mean we're literally talking about having enough data bandwidth to stream your next-next-next-next-gen VR system a holodeck-like experience for you.
I would expect such a service to ban hosting services on the "private" plan, or have strict conditions on what is considered acceptable use. However I see nothing of that sort in their contracts with the exception of this line in their Contractual Conditions.
"3. Fair Use Policy
The Internet subscriptions for private customers are intended for normal personal use. Init7
reserves the right to temporarily or permanently restrict or discontinue the provision of
services for connections whose data volume exceeds 0.5 petabyte (500 terabytes) in a
period of 4 weeks, or to take another suitable measure."
You can build some serious infrastructure on 500T/4weeks on a 25Gbps line, service uptime withstanding. They also provide optional /29 subnets with the private plan so it looks like it's intended for more than just personal browsing.
There's big competition esp. in the Zurich area. I don't understand all historical peculiarities behind this, but it has something to do with monopolistic position of Swisscom - their old national telecom company.
As a part of de-monopolization they made it lease links to any willing ISP (bit-stream access?), so many ISPs arose, and they have relatively "cheap" and advanced offerings: 1Gb/s, 10Gb/s, 25Gb/s, fixed IPs, IPv6 etc.
This bitstream access is now extended to pretty much anyone who installs FTTH. E.g. one can have it installed by a city or cantonal electrical company or TV provider, but still be able to buy IP access from pretty much anyone through some form of open market - https://litexchange.ch/
Unbundling (the copper lines) and open fiber deployments are different things.
Many municipalities still haven't gotten fiber deployments from the local utilities, and in practice you can be stuck on Swisscom's fiber. It's not too bad since several ISPs are also able to use it: for instance Sunrise before (I'm not sure they still allow it), but also Init7 (their Hybrid7 offering). However an ISP like Salt uses only open fiber, at least for now.
Salt and Sunrise had signed an agreement to push for extensive open fiber deployments by 2027. But then the deal blew up when Sunrise got acquired by UPC, since they'd rather use the existing DOCSIS infrastructure in the less dense areas.
Swisscom was going to push its own deployment as well (even though G.fast is not bad) and Salt was now interested in chipping in, but soon after the Comco has stopped Swisscom from using P2MP which is a big setback in its strategy to cover sub-urban areas. I understand the decision to enforce P2P deployments and give smaller ISPs a fair chance but it's definitely going to hinder the speed of new deployments. I believe we're rich enough, and we should mandate (and fund) open deployments in all these sub-urban municipalities that won't do it on their own.
> but soon after the Comco has stopped Swisscom from using P2MP which is a big setback
Yup, I'm using some 3rd party ISP. I have from them 1Gb/s (ODC - optical direct link), and the first hop is their IP.
And also 10Gb/s via Swisscom's XGS-PON. Here the first 2-3 hops are located within Swisscom's net (except the immediate gateway). I guess init7 complained about it - i.e. paying more for using Swisscom's L3 net, instead of leasing fiber?
> I understand the decision to enforce P2P deployments and give smaller ISPs a fair chance but it's definitely going to hinder the speed of new deployments.
Why would P2P slow down deployment?
You have the same exact amount of cables in a P2P and a P2MP topology, the only difference is the amount of fiber in the cables. There is a (small) cost savings, but that's about it.
You're absolutely right but in practice, P2MP allowed Swisscom to connect new apartment buildings in suburban municipalities that otherwise don't have FTTH generally available.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but I believe P2P topologies would be inefficient (i.e. too expensive) for sparsely connected areas. Conversely, the kind of hardware needed to operate XGS-PON is prohibitively expensive to small ISPs, and they're all deploying P2P topologies, and only that.
The cost of fiber is so low it doesn't make much difference between P2P or P2MP, be it urban or rural. All the real cost is in having somewhere to put the fiber.
XGS-PON isn't that expensive. You can buy disaggregated XGS-PON modules in a SPF+ form factor for $1500. CPEs are $120 each.
I don't really get why Swisscom wouldn't be able to deploy P2P in low or medium density areas if they wanted to.
I pay more for my current provider (not Swiss), but they support customer-provided modems and allows hosting within reason. Really depends on the type of user you are and what you value - I run my own servers etc. and prefer this service but someone else may prefer a plug-and-play approach with everything managed by the ISP.
While you could use it for hosting a business, I wouldn't recommend doing so without some business plan that offers SLA.
I might be incredibly unlucky but I had two major multi day downtimes with Init7 (neither their fault).
If you depend on your internet as part of your business, make sure you have a plan for when it might fall out.
On that note, I'm hosting my own personal fileserver over that connection and the public IPv4 address has not changed once in the two years I've been using them so far ^^
They moved installing infra in my "commune" from December 2021 to mid-2022, and when asked on twitter, they told me it's a). supply chain problems, the time for router/optics delivery increased by a couple of months b). they want to lower pressure on their employees who need to install new infra during night
I'm already using Mikrotik CCR-2004 with 10Gb/s + 1Gb/s links, it has 2x28Gbps ports, so it should be fine when init7 comes here.
Though, with CCR-2004 I'm seeing about 50% CPU usage with 8Gbps up or down, which means I won't be able to use full 25Gb/s with it, most likely 20Gb/s max. And no, there's no specific reason for me to have it - it's just the price is sort-a the same as local 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s offerings.
The reason this is available for this price in every house in the city of Zürich is because of a law that passed requiring every house to have fiber. The infrastructure is operated by the power and phone company and any service provider can use this fiber.
I hope the whole of Switzerland will do something similar because there are still a lot of places without good internet and fiber is quite future proof.
Home office out of a mountain cabin would be cool...
It's not just the city of Zürich, Adliswil has it too, at the very least.
I believe Init7 leases fibre from Swisscom in other locations. My understanding is that federal law requires Swisscom to give access to its infrastructure to other companies for a fair price.
Moreover almost all local power companies (e.g. ewz in Zurich) have laid fiber cables and lease them to ISPs. Most of them don’t even sell internet access directly, therefore they don’t have the same conflict of interest that Swisscom has.
I'm glad init7 went to the government to complain about the new "fiber" Swisscom decided to deploy in some places that would make it impossible for competitors to provide full service.
I am also glad the government saw that it was an anti-competitive move and blocked it.
To give an example - OS2 single-mode fiber is the standard fiber for contemporary datacenter deployments and I assume also for last-mile deployments. It's super cheap (less than 20cpf for indoor cable, whereas cat7 copper is closer to 60cpf), has an insane range (a standard $25 fiber PHY can operate with a cable from 0m-10km), and has an insane bandwidth limit (it's currently used for everything from 1gbps to 400gbps).
If you're wiring a home today, I would 100% use OS2 over CatN unless you also need PoE.
If you're wiring a home - wouldn't lay-people want it to look nice? Are these made with any way to hide them in walls, exposing a usable port (even if RJ-45?)
Or if not - how should one think about deploying all this in a new home?
If I were wiring a home, I'd probably run some multimode fiber alongside CAT6 or maybe even 2 shielded CAT6 to support a secondary LAN like for surveillance cameras.
You'd have to have quite a house to need internal runs longer than 100m (300'). For runs up to 100m: 2.5 Gbps can be done with Cat5e, 5G with Cat6, and 10G with Cat6A:
> If you're wiring a home today, I would 100% use OS2 over CatN unless you also need PoE.
It would be future-proof but not present proof, as you likely don't have anything else than RJ45 plugs on your devices…
On the other hand, replacing a cable in a conduit by a fiber is a half-hour task (you just stick the fiber to the cable, then pull the fiber with the cable) so it's not really worth it to be future proof in this case. You'll only be saving a hundred bucks in cable by doing so.
If I were wiring a home I would probably run two OS2 cables (just so I do not have to deal with one breaking in the future) from one side of the house to the other and also a termination somewhere central. And then probably Cat7 everywhere else honestly. The cost of the actual cable does not seem to be really all that much comparative to other costs
If you're wiring things today and you want them to be truly future proof, run some kind of conduit from everywhere to a central location. It makes replacing broken cables easy and you can focus on just installing the relevant types of cable in locations that make sense right now.
Does anyone have thoughts on appropriate hardware/software? At the moment I'm just running a Linux machine as my router, using standard nftables for NAT and firewall, but I'm curious what others think.
The problem with >1GB/s is the energy you need to saturate it.
10GB/s needs a 10+W router and you'll need atleast 50W of compute behind that.
On lead-acid if you want long battery life and a good uptime you'll need atleast 4x 50Ah batteries.
25GB/s does not scale without waste unless you are ok with having 10x lead-acid batteries in the room where you live/sleep because that energy is heating.
Dunno about the hydrogen problem. Lithium only fixes the space problem in exchange of fire hazards, a hefty price increase and short battery life.
You don't need cycles, unless power outages are frequent. (good point but power outages are probably going to be correlated to our capacity to make lithium batteries at all)
Lithium has ~half the longevity compared to lead-acid unless you heat/cool them like Tesla to keep them at a stable temperature (too high/low and the longevity drops like a stone because of tiny impurities between the metal sheets).
NiMH is actually my preferred battery tech now, but it's WAY too expensive for the Ah you need for anything beyond say a maglite solitare LED (awesome torch btw).
Lithium and high power vehicles are completely meaningless for the wider human population in the long run because electricity is NOT an energy source.
Battery backups for when the power goes out. There's a high correlation to the power going out to the needs of being able to communicate. If your main modes of communication go down during an emergency things can get pretty bad.
Its pretty common in the US. There are a lot of availability requirements on residential telephone service, so if the customer in the US bundles in phone service their device usually comes with a small UPS. Verizon ONTs usually had a battery backup built-in to the wall unit. AT&T's gateways had a UPS as a part of the 12V adapter. It seems like maybe these rules have relaxed a bit, but its still relatively common to have your home internet connection and phone service on some level of backup.
This goes back to the idea that POTS usually had its own power service, so when the power goes out the phones would often still be working. When things changed over to fiber and VoIP, similar availability requirements were being applied. As mentioned I'm not sure if this is still the case, I haven't bundled phone service with internet in well over a decade.
Ultimately though of course I would put at least core network things on a UPS (ONT, router, PoE switch for APs) as if the power goes out I'd want to be able to see WTF is going on. If its a big enough event to knock the power out for a little while there's a decent chance it could also lead to lots of people stressing cell networks, so you might not want to rely on that. For those core things I have on a UPS, a small-ish gel cell battery would operate them for a bit under 4 hours. I live in an area prone to both tornadoes and remnants of hurricanes though, so I'm in semi-disaster-prone area.
Init7, the subject of this thread, supplies 25Gb/s, not 25GB/s.
And why are batteries being brought into the discussion? This is a fibre service, it only operates in fixed installations, where grid electricity is available.
Careful with not reading other comments... it's already explained.
I misstype GB and Gb all the time because I talk about disc sizes and network all the time, but you see humans can adapt to my misstake and correct without having to tell me I'm wrong again after the edit timeout has expired... Xo
But to further expand on the battery solution: humanity needs to move away from centralization ASAP, and the most efficient way to do this is to host servers at home. If you only use the fiber you have for consumption you are a slave but if you produce (and potentially sell) something of value from home you are a king.
Unless of course the companies and governements take your external IPv4 away, then you're a slave again, so it's important that EVERYONE that has fiber with an external IP to use it as hosting now, so it's harder for them to undo!
This is the ISP that I’m using, and they are insanely great, imho. I especially like that you get a static IPv6 /28 for free, something that has finally made me learn IPv6 in depth.
Still only on 1 Gb/s fiber though, because I havent found any router that is 10 or 25 Gbps that I’d really like to have at home. Are there any good consumer-grade 10 or 25 gbps routers?
Also, what is up with all computers _still_ having 1 gbps ethernet ports? It’s been the standard forever, feels like. Why arent there more computers with 10 GbE as standard?
Any recommendations? I’m currently using a Protect CLI 4 port vault running PFSense. Want to replace it with a 2.5gb or higher device but I can’t find anything.
I don't have any specific recs - I've just seen desktop motherboards with 2.5Gb/s and my boring standard AT&T fiber box has a 2.5Gb/s LAN port on it.
If you're already running a device like that Protectli then maybe you'd be comfortable building a small-form-factor PC with a 2 port 2.5Gb/s ethernet card (around $40) and running it to a 4-port 2.5Gb/s switch (around $125 for this TRENDnet one I see on Amazon). You could even install PFSense on the PC and keep your setup mostly unchanged.
There is really just not much point. The most data intensive thing a normal user will run into is 4k streaming and that will work on a 100mbs cat5 fine. No server is going to push that much content to a single user so unless there is P2P it would be pretty hard to saturate that much. Every use case involving 10 GbE is specialized so there is no point adding the cost to consumer hardware...
Not much is really out there for routing to the internet at those speeds; there's lots of stuff for 10GBe in-house, and some machines are starting to come with it (it's power hungry). The Mac mini can come with it, for example. I have a decent setup at home with some 10GBe cards in some old servers through a 4 port SPF 10GBe switch.
25 Gbit sounds nice, but even my 1 Gbit line is mostly wasted. I use a Raspberry Pi as my torrent box which seems to cap out at 7 MB/sec write speed. Even Steam tends to only download at 30-50 MB/sec most of the time.
People tend to grossly overestimate how much bandwidth they need, especially non-technical people. Even a 100 Mbit connection is more than capable of letting a family of five all stream Netflix at the same time, but that won't stop Xfinity from up-selling them to a 300 Mbit plan.
I currently pay for 78Mbps for myself and my partner. At most I am going to downloading something from steam (~10Mbps), watching something from YouTube (~10Mbps) and my partner will be streaming something to the TV (~10Mbps)
Even at this extreme there's still ample headroom, and our rate is ISP limited; so the line can do much more.
I have a 1G symmetric line and with a fast enough disk write setup I can hit ~108MB/s for Steam downloads and still be on video calls and stream content simultaneously (different people usually). It’s definitely not wasted for us.
From what I can tell, with Steam, I limited by the datacenter itself. I have friends in my local area, and also nearer the same datacenter, all on much higher bandwidths and write speed, but still hit 10Mbps at best.
Saying that, I am no Steam power-user. Most games will be <10GB with updates <1GB
At this point, I have no services or use cases for anything faster.
Gigabit is definitely worth it for me. I can start download for a 50+ GB game on Xbox game pass and be ready to play in a few minutes. I often get home and finish eating by 9pm, and not needing to wait 45 min to an hour to download a game makes a huge difference.
I dunno, I'm downloading from steam at 89 MB/s right now and I'm pretty sure I'm the limiting factor there.
Both my wife and I work from home and are on video conferencing a good portion of the day. I also build locally and push artifacts to the cloud and those clock in at 10+ gigs from some classes of devices and I obviously have to wait for them to build and upload before I can test (yes we have a full CI pipeline but during crunch time it gets smashed and I can be waiting in line for hours, or build it myself in 10 minutes). All things individually don't require such a large pipe, but they add up, quick.
25 is probably overkill, but I would take 10 in a second.
The limiting factor for me is usually uplink speed, especially when moving media around or dealing with backups. I can easily saturate 1G (up) right now, but I’m stuck with crappy xfinity with max uplink speed of 40Mb(bits)/sec. That’s on their highest plan, in the heart of Silicon Valley.
I have a 970/390 Mbps link (France, Orange) that I took more for the fun than anything else. Despite having a lot of self hosted environnements I will never even come close to that with current equipment and technology.
It would take a huge leap in a service requirements to change that, and would mean that I have to change my server and probably switch
I would pay a lot to not have to worry about bandwidth anymore. Too bad the only available ISP in my area only offers up to 50mbps even though they're already using a fiber line.
I got a feeling that any service not sitting behind a major CDN would struggle to feed more than handful of 25Gbit/s clients. That is maybe the biggest reason I feel >1Gbps for consumers at this point is kinda dubious prospect.
You can think of it differently - multiple people in your household can access different services or multiple 4K streams without interfering with each other.
4K streams rarely spike above 50 Mb so that'd be a really big house before you'd notice.
As someone with symmetric 1Gb, it is really nice in that the effective distance from your house to anywhere and anywhere to your house becomes a lot smaller. With Gb+ backing it, cloud storage with a local cache becomes an attractive alternative to ever buying disks again.
It would be great to see ISPs in the USA, even rural or municipal ISPs begin offering this.
The biggest issue I see with doing this (for residential users) is the fiber handoff. For 25Gbit, the very minimum is going to be a SFP28 module with an LC connector. The linked Init7 article is a bit light on details, but consumer grade hardware is not even close to that that in 2022. (SFP Ports OR the packet processing power to move that much traffic!)
Maybe the OTO Init7 installs on the house breaks it out into multiple 1Gbit or 10Gbit links to be more compatible? Even then, in the USA, basic SFP+ 10Gbit fiber, (inside the house) is rare in a residential setting. (Most fiber-based ISPs in the USA provide a 1Gbit copper uplink inside the house.)
Though beware, its CPU is probably not fast enough to route 25Gb/s with typical setup (NAT, a few firewall rules). More like 15-20Gb/s. Mikrotik itsef says 13Gbps with 25 filter rules.
If you turn on nerd mode, they offer /48 IPv6 prefixes to customers as a standard feature. That means they have a true /32. Most consumer IPv6 infra, if it exists at all, is /60 or /56 which really is kinda measly.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadNote, it's not a PON, but real symmetric, point-to-point connection.
I once had 250mbps over 1000BaseLX, and it was way more expensive than 500mbps GePON coming after it.
They're expanding aggressively in those areas, too.
it's been a surprisingly stable and solid product.
It always puzzled me why internet in the US is so expensive. I heard the argument that the sheer size of the US makes the infrastructure expensive, but Kazakhstan is even "bigger" per capita, and not exactly known for being an "advanced economy", yet here we are...
I could see netbooting your desktop to avoid having to buy a hard drive.
Also instead of downloading large game assets they could just stream on demand. (Even though downloads would go really fast anyway.)
4K and 8K video streams are already done reasonably at 100 mbps. Some sort of 3D point cloud streaming?
25 Gb/s, in this light, is small.
CHF 64.75 = ~$70USD. But why does 1 / 10 / 25Gbps all cost the same?
I am wondering if there are any cheap Swiss Cloud Storage that one could make use of the upload and download speed. You really could have an external HDD in a DataCenter.
[0] https://www.infomaniak.com/de/swiss-backup/tarife
The one-time fee is for covering the expense of the faster optic.
The only expensive thing is the fiber optic line to your house. As long as that’s paid for, bandwidth usage is small potatoes.
The above is things you should do when you have 1gbps in order to actually get those speeds. I know people will argue citing 640k being enough for everyone and have some edge case that needs this but.... 25gbps is overkill.
It has a steep learning curve though, albeit it's extremely rewarding and powerful once you gwr over that curve. It should handle routing 1 gig with zero issues, and is under $200. You can do bonding, vlans, esoteric ip rules, and tons of "misc" functionality.
Do not go with ubiquiti, their hardware is very poor and their UI is very buggy and simply poorly designed, it's focused on people who know a bit above an average person about networking, which I suspect is not the case for most people here.
Once you start doing much esoteric the speed slows down, if you get off the fast path it can be pretty intense (thought they do sell bigger ones that can route more packets).
The main thing is that the CPU in it is 1.5ghz quad core. Before that I had a Linksys with a 800mhz a single core that literally couldn't route traffic fast enough.
Running opnsense on it, and it’s doing fine and saturates the line when I’m maxing out downloads. For comparison, the isp (Verizon) router was consistently around 100Mb/s less than this one.
Router has had no problem pushing 1Gb and the switch is rated for something like 44 Gb. Has enough of a firewall and other built in services, plus POE for home devices and SFP+ ports so in the event you need a faster link. Average current draw is < 5 W and it's quiet.
Although nearly any modern mini-PC running Opnsense or VyOS or whatever linux/bsd can trivially do gigabit routing as well. 25 Gb would be a bit harder of an ask :)
For 25Gbps? Or are you meaning for the 1gbps you have? If the former, of course, but otherwise Cat5e can handle 10GbE if you have good connections and the loop length isn’t too long.
Most hard drives will keep up with a full gigabit pipe, too, on a sequential write. I think the poster is exaggerating a bit.
Yes, for sure. 99% of the time, based on personal experience, the person either doesn’t realize the difference or is just incorrectly using the term Cat5 to mean Cat5e. It’s pretty rare you’ll find the former even in older homes (again, my experience based on living in the US). This is why I intentionally used the term Cat5e in my reply. Cat5 was deprecated by Cat5e back 20+ years ago, long before the average US home began getting wired with Ethernet. Further, many (majority?) of Cat5 cables older than 10 years old actually meet the 5e requirements, just weren’t certified specifically.
> Cat5 struggles with 1gbps.
Like with my original point, that depends on the length and the quality of the connections. Inaccurate blanket statements mislead or worse, so I encourage you to avoid it.
1000baseT requires plain old category 5 for distances of up to 100m.
Most plain category 5 out there will have no problem with 2.5gbase-T at 30m and less.
(And, of course, most "cat 5" is actually "cat 5e".
P.S. - a lot of your recent comments are showing as dead, might want to email HN mods and see what’s up.
There is actually a semi-reasonable case for there being a limit on useful bandwidth for most purposes. Exact numbers are hard to come by for many reasons both obvious and subtle but around 25gpbs you're getting to the point that with reasonable compression you can saturate a human's entire sensorium with retina-quality video, full audio, touch, proprioception, etc.
While there are use cases that exceed that, like running a search across the entire locally-stored output of the Large Hadron Collider, you're certainly getting to the point where the applications are getting more and more specialist relative to the average person sitting in their home, no matter how exotic the the requirements. I mean we're literally talking about having enough data bandwidth to stream your next-next-next-next-gen VR system a holodeck-like experience for you.
"3. Fair Use Policy The Internet subscriptions for private customers are intended for normal personal use. Init7 reserves the right to temporarily or permanently restrict or discontinue the provision of services for connections whose data volume exceeds 0.5 petabyte (500 terabytes) in a period of 4 weeks, or to take another suitable measure."
(https://www.init7.net/de/kleingedrucktes/072021_contractual-...)
You can build some serious infrastructure on 500T/4weeks on a 25Gbps line, service uptime withstanding. They also provide optional /29 subnets with the private plan so it looks like it's intended for more than just personal browsing.
As a part of de-monopolization they made it lease links to any willing ISP (bit-stream access?), so many ISPs arose, and they have relatively "cheap" and advanced offerings: 1Gb/s, 10Gb/s, 25Gb/s, fixed IPs, IPv6 etc.
This bitstream access is now extended to pretty much anyone who installs FTTH. E.g. one can have it installed by a city or cantonal electrical company or TV provider, but still be able to buy IP access from pretty much anyone through some form of open market - https://litexchange.ch/
Many municipalities still haven't gotten fiber deployments from the local utilities, and in practice you can be stuck on Swisscom's fiber. It's not too bad since several ISPs are also able to use it: for instance Sunrise before (I'm not sure they still allow it), but also Init7 (their Hybrid7 offering). However an ISP like Salt uses only open fiber, at least for now.
Salt and Sunrise had signed an agreement to push for extensive open fiber deployments by 2027. But then the deal blew up when Sunrise got acquired by UPC, since they'd rather use the existing DOCSIS infrastructure in the less dense areas.
Swisscom was going to push its own deployment as well (even though G.fast is not bad) and Salt was now interested in chipping in, but soon after the Comco has stopped Swisscom from using P2MP which is a big setback in its strategy to cover sub-urban areas. I understand the decision to enforce P2P deployments and give smaller ISPs a fair chance but it's definitely going to hinder the speed of new deployments. I believe we're rich enough, and we should mandate (and fund) open deployments in all these sub-urban municipalities that won't do it on their own.
Yup, I'm using some 3rd party ISP. I have from them 1Gb/s (ODC - optical direct link), and the first hop is their IP.
And also 10Gb/s via Swisscom's XGS-PON. Here the first 2-3 hops are located within Swisscom's net (except the immediate gateway). I guess init7 complained about it - i.e. paying more for using Swisscom's L3 net, instead of leasing fiber?
Why would P2P slow down deployment?
You have the same exact amount of cables in a P2P and a P2MP topology, the only difference is the amount of fiber in the cables. There is a (small) cost savings, but that's about it.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but I believe P2P topologies would be inefficient (i.e. too expensive) for sparsely connected areas. Conversely, the kind of hardware needed to operate XGS-PON is prohibitively expensive to small ISPs, and they're all deploying P2P topologies, and only that.
XGS-PON isn't that expensive. You can buy disaggregated XGS-PON modules in a SPF+ form factor for $1500. CPEs are $120 each.
I don't really get why Swisscom wouldn't be able to deploy P2P in low or medium density areas if they wanted to.
I guess the key is that they _are_ actually more expensive than the competition here, and they provide less ”value”.
But less is very much more in this case, since you don’t have to use a locked-down provider-specific router. I guess they save money that way too.
I might be incredibly unlucky but I had two major multi day downtimes with Init7 (neither their fault).
If you depend on your internet as part of your business, make sure you have a plan for when it might fall out.
On that note, I'm hosting my own personal fileserver over that connection and the public IPv4 address has not changed once in the two years I've been using them so far ^^
And by Linux ISOs I mean porn.
I'm already using Mikrotik CCR-2004 with 10Gb/s + 1Gb/s links, it has 2x28Gbps ports, so it should be fine when init7 comes here.
Though, with CCR-2004 I'm seeing about 50% CPU usage with 8Gbps up or down, which means I won't be able to use full 25Gb/s with it, most likely 20Gb/s max. And no, there's no specific reason for me to have it - it's just the price is sort-a the same as local 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s offerings.
I hope the whole of Switzerland will do something similar because there are still a lot of places without good internet and fiber is quite future proof.
Home office out of a mountain cabin would be cool...
I believe Init7 leases fibre from Swisscom in other locations. My understanding is that federal law requires Swisscom to give access to its infrastructure to other companies for a fair price.
[0] https://www.swisscom.ch/en/business/wholesale/angebot/anschl...
Oh wait..
The Book Of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal And Free The Net
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
I am also glad the government saw that it was an anti-competitive move and blocked it.
To give an example - OS2 single-mode fiber is the standard fiber for contemporary datacenter deployments and I assume also for last-mile deployments. It's super cheap (less than 20cpf for indoor cable, whereas cat7 copper is closer to 60cpf), has an insane range (a standard $25 fiber PHY can operate with a cable from 0m-10km), and has an insane bandwidth limit (it's currently used for everything from 1gbps to 400gbps).
If you're wiring a home today, I would 100% use OS2 over CatN unless you also need PoE.
Won't you end up with a bunch of media converters everywhere though?
Or if not - how should one think about deploying all this in a new home?
OS2 is not needed for most homes. Use multi-mode fibre (OM4 or OM5), which can do 25-100 Gbps @100m (or more):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-mode_optical_fiber
You'd have to have quite a house to need internal runs longer than 100m (300'). For runs up to 100m: 2.5 Gbps can be done with Cat5e, 5G with Cat6, and 10G with Cat6A:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Var...
I never seen it used outside North America.
The biggest reason to use multimode - cheaper equipment, is no longer here. High-end multimode NICs, and transmitters now cost more than SMF.
It would be future-proof but not present proof, as you likely don't have anything else than RJ45 plugs on your devices…
On the other hand, replacing a cable in a conduit by a fiber is a half-hour task (you just stick the fiber to the cable, then pull the fiber with the cable) so it's not really worth it to be future proof in this case. You'll only be saving a hundred bucks in cable by doing so.
Source: I wired my entire home last year.
Does anyone have thoughts on appropriate hardware/software? At the moment I'm just running a Linux machine as my router, using standard nftables for NAT and firewall, but I'm curious what others think.
Also, congrats!
10GB/s needs a 10+W router and you'll need atleast 50W of compute behind that.
On lead-acid if you want long battery life and a good uptime you'll need atleast 4x 50Ah batteries.
25GB/s does not scale without waste unless you are ok with having 10x lead-acid batteries in the room where you live/sleep because that energy is heating.
Dunno about the hydrogen problem. Lithium only fixes the space problem in exchange of fire hazards, a hefty price increase and short battery life.
Lithium has ~half the longevity compared to lead-acid unless you heat/cool them like Tesla to keep them at a stable temperature (too high/low and the longevity drops like a stone because of tiny impurities between the metal sheets).
NiMH is actually my preferred battery tech now, but it's WAY too expensive for the Ah you need for anything beyond say a maglite solitare LED (awesome torch btw).
Lithium and high power vehicles are completely meaningless for the wider human population in the long run because electricity is NOT an energy source.
This goes back to the idea that POTS usually had its own power service, so when the power goes out the phones would often still be working. When things changed over to fiber and VoIP, similar availability requirements were being applied. As mentioned I'm not sure if this is still the case, I haven't bundled phone service with internet in well over a decade.
Ultimately though of course I would put at least core network things on a UPS (ONT, router, PoE switch for APs) as if the power goes out I'd want to be able to see WTF is going on. If its a big enough event to knock the power out for a little while there's a decent chance it could also lead to lots of people stressing cell networks, so you might not want to rely on that. For those core things I have on a UPS, a small-ish gel cell battery would operate them for a bit under 4 hours. I live in an area prone to both tornadoes and remnants of hurricanes though, so I'm in semi-disaster-prone area.
Init7, the subject of this thread, supplies 25Gb/s, not 25GB/s.
And why are batteries being brought into the discussion? This is a fibre service, it only operates in fixed installations, where grid electricity is available.
I misstype GB and Gb all the time because I talk about disc sizes and network all the time, but you see humans can adapt to my misstake and correct without having to tell me I'm wrong again after the edit timeout has expired... Xo
But to further expand on the battery solution: humanity needs to move away from centralization ASAP, and the most efficient way to do this is to host servers at home. If you only use the fiber you have for consumption you are a slave but if you produce (and potentially sell) something of value from home you are a king.
Unless of course the companies and governements take your external IPv4 away, then you're a slave again, so it's important that EVERYONE that has fiber with an external IP to use it as hosting now, so it's harder for them to undo!
Still only on 1 Gb/s fiber though, because I havent found any router that is 10 or 25 Gbps that I’d really like to have at home. Are there any good consumer-grade 10 or 25 gbps routers?
Also, what is up with all computers _still_ having 1 gbps ethernet ports? It’s been the standard forever, feels like. Why arent there more computers with 10 GbE as standard?
If you're already running a device like that Protectli then maybe you'd be comfortable building a small-form-factor PC with a 2 port 2.5Gb/s ethernet card (around $40) and running it to a 4-port 2.5Gb/s switch (around $125 for this TRENDnet one I see on Amazon). You could even install PFSense on the PC and keep your setup mostly unchanged.
Have we learned nothing...
Not much is really out there for routing to the internet at those speeds; there's lots of stuff for 10GBe in-house, and some machines are starting to come with it (it's power hungry). The Mac mini can come with it, for example. I have a decent setup at home with some 10GBe cards in some old servers through a 4 port SPF 10GBe switch.
See last week’s discussion on “A disquisition into the sadly slovenly takeup of 10GBASE-T” and note that the article was written TEN years ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30315790
People tend to grossly overestimate how much bandwidth they need, especially non-technical people. Even a 100 Mbit connection is more than capable of letting a family of five all stream Netflix at the same time, but that won't stop Xfinity from up-selling them to a 300 Mbit plan.
Even at this extreme there's still ample headroom, and our rate is ISP limited; so the line can do much more.
Saying that, I am no Steam power-user. Most games will be <10GB with updates <1GB
At this point, I have no services or use cases for anything faster.
Both my wife and I work from home and are on video conferencing a good portion of the day. I also build locally and push artifacts to the cloud and those clock in at 10+ gigs from some classes of devices and I obviously have to wait for them to build and upload before I can test (yes we have a full CI pipeline but during crunch time it gets smashed and I can be waiting in line for hours, or build it myself in 10 minutes). All things individually don't require such a large pipe, but they add up, quick.
25 is probably overkill, but I would take 10 in a second.
It would take a huge leap in a service requirements to change that, and would mean that I have to change my server and probably switch
As someone with symmetric 1Gb, it is really nice in that the effective distance from your house to anywhere and anywhere to your house becomes a lot smaller. With Gb+ backing it, cloud storage with a local cache becomes an attractive alternative to ever buying disks again.
The biggest issue I see with doing this (for residential users) is the fiber handoff. For 25Gbit, the very minimum is going to be a SFP28 module with an LC connector. The linked Init7 article is a bit light on details, but consumer grade hardware is not even close to that that in 2022. (SFP Ports OR the packet processing power to move that much traffic!)
Maybe the OTO Init7 installs on the house breaks it out into multiple 1Gbit or 10Gbit links to be more compatible? Even then, in the USA, basic SFP+ 10Gbit fiber, (inside the house) is rare in a residential setting. (Most fiber-based ISPs in the USA provide a 1Gbit copper uplink inside the house.)