Openreach tests 50 Gbps broadband – don’t expect it anytime soon Network builder and maintainer Openreach says it has tested a 50 Gbps fiber broadband connection in the UK, as a first step towards making it commercially available at some point in the distant future. The infrastructure arm of former state-owned telco BT says it ran trials from a residential property in Ipswich near England's …
It's still a contended service on the optical network though - the current 2.4Gbps is divided amongst 30 subscribers (well, technically, 30 subscribers each getting 1/32 of the total available) - the guaranteed minimum is 80Mbps per subscriber (yes, ISPs oversell that massively)
It's entirely feasible to think that a 40Gbps network might get shared with a greater number of subscribers - it's possible that they'll combine 2 of the current PONs so there's 60 subscribers each with a guaranteed 640Mbps.
What the article doesn't mention is that the various speeds use different wavelengths and can therefore occupy the same fibre simultaneously, so you don't need all subscribers on that leg to upgrade at the same time.
Easily with no problem at all, considering that current routers do 100 Gigabit Ethernet or 400 Gigabit Ethernet or 800 Gigabit Ethernet per port and double that is coming soon™; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/400_Gigabit_Ethernet?useskin=monobook#800G_port_types
But instead ISPs will probably bond 10 10GbE ports together and figure that'll be enough for 100 customers, with some on the "40/20" plans.
The appeal of 50G PON is to be able to provide a symmetric 10G service, which is not possible with XGS PON due to the overhead. I do not imagine they would sell any higher than that for a long time. At that point, it would make more sense to use P2MP ethernet optics (where one 400G SFP can support 16×25G services)
You've never NOT had a bottleneck, unless you paid for a no-contention ISDN, DSL or a leased line, and even then there are no real 100% guarantees.
So... no different to any other connection you've ever had. Ever.
The line will still "sync" at 40Gb. You might even be able to burst it to that. But you're ultimately sharing the connection with your neighbours, everyone connected to the local exchange, the entire BT backend network, the Internet infrastructure of the UK, etc. So there is no way to guarantee that your 40Gb will give you constant 24/7 maxed out 40Gb without issue. There's nothing that says that, even on a leased-line agreement.
Sync speeds are very different to real-world download speeds, and like everything "fair use policies apply". Which means you're still syncing at 40Gb, but we slowed you down and/or gave other customers priority because it just doesn't scale like that anywhere in the world, on any network.
I have a 10Gbit leased line in work. People have literally asked in meetings why they don't get 10,000 Mbps in Speedtest. They just conveniently forget that they're sharing the network with 1000 other people which means that - at peak - your individual allocation of fair bandwidth is less than you get at home, or on 4G. Of course it is. It has to be.
"So what's the solution?" they say.
Simple. A 10 Terabit leased line, all the scaled up equipment in-between (replacing every switch, router, etc. with a model that can handle the relevant portion of traffic), so that every port has 10Gbit guaranteed dedicated slice of the leased line connection, and you having only a 10Gbit physical bottleneck at your desktop stopping you using all that up and denying it to others. I'm not sure you want to budget for that.
Or you can just share nicely and then not even notice because most people don't use 1% of the available connection on average anyway.
I've NEVER had less than the max possible bandwidth from any connection. Maybe I don't live as densely a populated area as you, but all the way from dialup through ADSL, ADSL2, SDSL, I always get the max my connection would allow, any time of the day or night.
You've never NOT had a bottleneck, unless you paid for a no-contention ISDN, DSL or a leased line, and even then there are no real 100% guarantees.
There is a world of difference between what is technically possible or even commercially available and what you get given in a consumer package that is tailored for superficial claims and a low price.
Of course it's possible. These days it will most likely be via MPLS, if you have two sites already on the same cloud you can ring up your provider and say "we want X Mpbs between these two sites" and they'll give it to you, often the same day if you need it urgently since it is essentially a software reconfiguration. They will guarantee you not only the bandwidth but the latency as well.
Yes, that is GUARANTEED, not aspirational - if you don't get what is specified that is treated as a fault. In the short term it may mean less capacity for the plebs that don't pay for those quality of service guarantees but you'll get what you are promised.
Commercial networking is a whole different world away from home networking toys and services.
It doesn’t it’s pretty pointless proof of concept…. and also where it ultimately sources data from - say Microsoft, AWS, Corporate VPN, Disney+, BBC iPlayer.
You’d also need WiFi 7 to realise any benefit as this will have been hardwired in the test property.
You can see that today when you download something of significant size and the MBit/s throughout wobbling about all over the place…. That has little to do with your Fibre connection.
Don't be sceptical. OpenReach will keep rolling out upgrades to those with a decent service. It postpones getting everyone up to a reasonable standard of service irrespective of where they live.
To they that hath shall be given, from they that hath not shall be taken away that little they hath.
>keep rolling out upgrades to those with a decent service
Sadly that's so true. Whilst I am happy to see research into how to improve at the top end of things, a bit of attention to the bottom end wouldn't go amis. An uplift to Gb/s sounds great, but for me an uplift from Kb/s to Mb/s on my uplink would be nice.
Just last night:
"Hi girls, is that the presentation homework with pictures in?", "Yes?"
Checks SWMBO's laptop and sees a grid of pixellated faces with one familiar black rectangle showing the message "Insufficient bandwidth".
"Don't upload it now, Mum's on a conference call".
I think it's great that network providers are building in that kind of capacity as a means of future-proofing, but what I really object to is sales-folk from ISPs telling us that we need that kind of capacity "now*.
At home I have FTTC which gives me around 80 Mbps download / 20Mbps upload, which is plenty fast enough. I keep getting calls from other ISPs and also the upgrades team at my current ISP, inviting me to move to a package that offers better speeds than that...obviously for more money than I'm paying right now.
But I don't need more. The household has a finite number of eyeballs and can only consume a finite amount of HD streamed content. Any extra capacity would be wasted. Fortunately I understand my needs and know to say no, but I do worry about less savvy people being suckered into packages where they're paying for way more bandwidth than they need.
For me, moving to fibre broadband was driven by my copper broadband being very unreliable (and speeds slowly dropping as more people signed up). I'm currently on a lowly 160Mb/s. My inner geek would love to say "I've got 1Gb/s broadband" I just don't need it. Looking at my usage graphs I rarely go above 10Mb/s.
I'm using an "unlimited" 4G service from a MVNO that provides sufficient speed for me, is less than half the price of a wired option and is on a monthly rolling contract. It won't suit everyone: CGNAT and a bit of latency, though the former can be remedied with Andrews & Arnold's L2TP service. I have no intention of signing up to a two-year contract with in-built price hikes and will, if necessary, adjust my "needs" accordingly.
I can see the need for greater backbone capacity, though even that must have some limit - unless the surveillance state grows to the point there's a camera in every room.
It's all going to be massively oversubscribed, so in practice you'll probably get worse speeds than a symmetrical 1000BASE-T connection (consider that such technology is over 20 years old).
20Mbit/s upload is not enough upload to deliver much free software to those that desire it - 1000Mbit/s or 10000Mbit/s symmetric is really what you need, but to get that, you better bust out thousands...
How does watching a video consume it and why would it leave you content?
I was satisfied with 76/16 until the bit of copper from the pole over the road decided to fail. BT came and fixed that and at the same time, fitted the box that allowed FTTH. I decided to upgrade.
I went from 76/16 to 500/150 for less than the price of a cheap coffee a month.
The download speeds are just ... oh, it is done already. That makes it worth it.
Yup, it's not so much that (m)any of us need a constant gigabit+ connection to the rest of the world, rather that it's very nice to have a fast link for the times when you're trying to send/receive a large chunk of data and would prefer not to have to wait at that specific moment. Because yeah, for some stuff we could just go back to the old ways of doing things - i.e. queueing up a load of transfers and leaving them to chunter along overnight while we sleep, or during the day whilst we're out at the office/shops/etc - but that's not viable for everything these days.
Do I *need* a gigabit connection at home? No. But if VM are willing to continue giving it to me for a reasonable price (which, following a bit of contract renewal negotiation, they are...), then why would I look to save just a few quid a month in order to drop down to whichever of the lower speed tiers would suffice given my *average* transfer rates, when I genuinely can justify the small incremental cost based on the number of times having that extra bandwidth genuinely does come in handy on a *per transfer* basis.
Just set everyone to the link speed of the underlying transport and be done with it*. It literally costs us more to manage and sell higher speed tiers. Some ISPs really should be thinking about how much those salespeople are bringing in borderline scamming people, taking into account their pay and also all the systems and stuff needed to manage it. Dropping all that complexity and you may not even need a "Broadband Network Gateway" (a hugely expensive piece of gear that ALSO limits an ISPs network scalability by beeing a choke point BTW)
Most people wont even use more in total and even if a few customers end up maxing out their connection 24/7 the extra bandwidth is just a rounding error for an ISP anyway.
* Of course there is *SOME* nuance to this when there is shared last mile like coax/HFC and to some small extent GPON
Gotta love asymmetrical connections.
You really just grab 50GBASE-SR or 50GBASE-LR QSFP+ modules and plug em in and then you get 50 Gigabits a second symmetrical, but instead there's asymmetrical GPON...
But those shareholders love to get paid per byte transmitted, so that's not going to happen.
I'm in Wimbledon! Still no fibre to the flat. 6 YEARS on the waiting list for Hyperoptic. Openreach needs to be broken up and forced to open up it's last mile.
My 5g is faster than my BT connection.
It took Openreach over 6 months to deliver an Internet line into a datacentre where they already had POP on a project I was working on
The openreach last mile is already open. PIA allows other firms to put cable in the openreach ducts. FTTC is wholesaled from the cabinet. FTTP is wholesaled from the handover exchange.
If hyperoptic are in your area but not delivering to you, it's not an openreach problem!
In a flat the most common issue is getting a wayleave agreement from the freeholder/management agent.
FTTP = Fibre To The Premises
I asked BT (aka OpenReach) recently:
Q: "When can I get FTTP in my apartment?"
A: "Sorry......your postcode isn't on our list"
Funny that:
(1) Swedish company OpenInfra (Yup....Swedish) offered me FTTP last year.
(2) The new sheltered housing apartment next door ALREADY has FTTP suppied by BT/OpenReach
Puzzled....Yes! Particularly since OpenInfra are using BT/OpenReach infrastructure!!!!
My conclusion: BT/OpenReach do not know anything about what's going on.......even at BT/OpenReach!!!
Here in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada our local internet provider/telephone company Telus has it's Telus PureFibre 3 Gigabit Home Ethernet package which has your Internet and multiple programme cable and movie channel packages of 4K video for about $140 CDN per month ($110 USD or $100 Euros). We can even get 10 Gigabits full Duplex at a bit of a premium and in certain urban/suburban locations, we can now order 100 Gigabits per second. If I goto a business plan with an outright purchase of one of the higher-end optical routers, Telus now lets me buy a 400 Gigabits per Second Internet bundle. The only problem with that is not even GOOGLE/Youtube connects at 400 Gigabits per second or even 100 gigabits per second so it's used more for site-to-site 4K/8K video upload/download or super-heavy data transfer uses, so instead I make do with 10 Gigabit Ethernet for the home office!
Just thought I would let you know what internet is like over on this side of the world is like!
Our mobile phone plans though are atrociously expensive compared to Europe!
It's usually about $70 CDN ($50 USD or 45 Euros) for North America calling and 20 gigabytes per month data plans!
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