Posts by andretomt

Openreach tests 50 Gbps broadband – don’t expect it anytime soon

Broadband speed tiers, especially in the modern fiber era is a borderline scam.

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

Netflix fail proves copper NBN leaves Australia utterly 4Ked

Meanwhile in Norway.. my home connection is running a little "hot" today...

eth0 / daily

day rx | tx | total | avg. rate

------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------

04/11/15 1.36 TiB | 1.41 TiB | 2.77 TiB | 331.65 Mbit/s

Still leftover capacity for about 30 concurrent Netflix 4K streams methinks.

Sheffield ISP: You don't need a whole IPv4 address to yourself, right?

Mobile ISP's often do this already yes, and its one of the reasons mobile internet is so fricking painful. At least the ones I know of have it opt-out, if I need a public IPv4 I just set another APN on my device, which makes it a bit more bearable for me personally. But that is not really enough for the health of the internet as a whole. When a significant portion of the internets users are crippled, the usefulness of the intertubes suffers in some way or another even for those with proper connectivity.

Anon is right that you could portforward at the ISP in some cases, you just need a new home gateway/router/cpe to support UPNP IGD/NAT-PMP to PCP proxying ;-) And you will still need some 3rd party negotiation of the ports if its going to be useful for other than techies (on the other hand, not as infra/latency/bw critical as a full detour). At least these new devices will also support IPv6!

FWIW, my cable operator have provided me with proper native ipv6 for almost a year at home, as many routed subnets as I need, at work there is ipv6 to the workstation, mom has native at her place, dad has at work (home still a few months out). Cable, FTTH and DSL techs covered. Really UK ISP's need to get their shit together and just deploy IPv6. Its not that hard and others are doing it AT SCALE already.

Re: PlusNet and IPv6

If your ISP is willing to be a sponsoring LIR, getting your own AS number (and a PI - Provider Independent block) for multihoming it is not that expensive anymore. That is - you dont have to pay RIPE for the pleasure like you used to. However the ISP is likely to require you to be on a business plan - it is extra management and paper work after all.

Meaning, PI is likely to be much more common in IPv6, than it was with IPv4.

There are other options too, like prefix translation (a form of completely stateless, and thus fast and scalable NAT), just announcing a prefix from each ISP to the local network, or if the network is sufficiently simple, using IPv6's rapid renumbering features.

Quad NAT

Its not really double NAT when everyone have to implement it. When both ends of a "peer to peer" connection is behind a carrier NAT, it becomes quad NAT. Thats right, *four* levels of NAT. For games, voip, Skype and anything peer to peer-ish this is going to suck. Only option will be latency inducing detours through centralized choke points (maybe not even on same continent, I see this already) every time NAT port mappings fails, which will be pretty much always. Quality will suffer, and running the services becomes more expensive as more infrastructure is needed to support bouncing all that extra traffic, perhaps even prohibitive for new players.

Skype for example, will often have a much better experience when it is able to connect the participants directly together, today. With at most one layer of NAT at each end, it often succeeds too. When it fails to it bounces everything off Microsoft.

This might be a good thing though. Soon the IPv4 experience might be so miserable that "usable internet" becomes the IPv6 killer application. I hope.

Review: Kingston Hyper-X 3K 240GB SSD

Re: Backup Backup Backup!!!

Having a 20% failure rate, you either have sourced some pretty bad SSD's or your workloads must be of the quite insane type.

I have no idea what kind of type drives you buy, but for consumer level drives I've found that for the gnarly workloads where TRIM is generally ineffective for one reason or another - overprovisioning your SSD by buying one size bigger and then locking out the extra space from the OS using HPA or just not partitioning all of it for the lazy bums - you'll get significantly better lifetime and long-term write performance. This in effect gives the SSD much more spare area to organize its writes in a flash friendly way, resulting in significant reduction of write amplification - in order of magnitude in some cases.

This little trick can give you quite close to "enterprise grade" write endurance at consumer price points. A typical consumer drive have 0-7% spare configured at the factory, pushing this up to around ~20% or maybe even 25% helps a lot. Intel had a paper on this, but I cant find it right now..

If you want to do this on already used drives, keep in mind you'll have to TRIM the entire drive or "secure erase" it before doing this, or else the sectors will generally not be considered free and this entire exercise rendered futile.

Or you could just let the vendor do it for you and charge you 10x the price (for that and a few other features that may or may not be important to you)

64 *bits* aint much of a queue.

Satellite broadband rollout for all in US: But Europe just doesn't get it

Aliens

Of course satelite internet is a no-go, we do not want aliens to snoop on our dirty habits.