Gigabit speed and gear thread

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Gigabit speed and gear thread

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370 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1648857 11-Oct-2016 01:44

dt:

cynnicallemon:

Have you thought about creating an 2Gbps link via NIC bonding between your pfsense box and your PC?

Just wondered if those speeds would increase a little.

Would be interested to hear if anyone is running gigabit fibre through a stock FreeBSD or OpenBSD router.

Will give it a crack tomorrow evening and post up the results

My connection seems to be getting faster by the day at the moment

You could first try disabling multi-threading in the BIOS as suggested in this article, this might give you a bit of a boost hopefully. Don't forget to backup your config before playing :)

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Move to New Zealand's best fibre broadband service (affiliate link). Note that to use Quic Broadband you must be comfortable with configuring your own router.

Rudster

117 posts

Master Geek

#1648861 11-Oct-2016 02:11

dt:

Intravix:

Awesome, is pfsense virtualized? I'm running it (on 100/20Mbps Bigpipe) in ESXi with 1 core and 512MB, I think it runs around 30% memory utilization and similar CPU but sometimes goes up to 100% (with no noticeable changes in performance). Will look at increasing the resources and possibly replacing/upgrading the host soon especially when I go to gigabit.

I'm running a physical box. This setup appears to be way overkill however. CPU very rarely goes up to 15% and memory sits around 5-10%. Pretty much running a full UTM suite as well.

It was a re purposed HTPC I had laying around. currently looking to build something less beefy with lower power requirements.

I did see a blog where someone put in the effort running multiple tests in virtual/physcial configurations and there was next to no difference in the results

cynnicallemon:

Have you thought about creating an 2Gbps link via NIC bonding between your pfsense box and your PC?

Just wondered if those speeds would increase a little.

Would be interested to hear if anyone is running gigabit fibre through a stock FreeBSD or OpenBSD router.

Will give it a crack tomorrow evening and post up the results

My connection seems to be getting faster by the day at the moment

Interesting, I upgraded the firmware on my RT-AC87u and found a slight reduction of speeds from 940 down to 925. After a bit of tinkering about, seemed the CPU was the bottleneck. Something to note for those running consumer routers

peterxxmeme

20 posts

Geek

#1649532 11-Oct-2016 23:47

Bigpipe Elite

Henderson, Auckland

Asus RT-AC3200

Xeon

302 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1649834 12-Oct-2016 16:01

dan:

you may be limited by the capabilities of the PC/laptop/whatever actually doing the speed test?

Testing with a PC (i5-3570k, 16GB DDR3) straight to ONT with CAT6:

This was the best I got to Auckland Spark server, but a few minutes later I'm now getting around:

Also for the 2degrees Dunedin server out of interest:

With some downloads last night I also noted it capped out at 450mbps (desktop via my Asus RT-AC87U), also I've pushed at gigabit fine over LAN in the past.

dt

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#1649860 12-Oct-2016 16:37

NIC drivers perhaps?

mdooher

Hmm, what to write...
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#1649884 12-Oct-2016 17:44

I'm in Dunedin on Bigpipe, Having the same problems as Xeon, they have been working on the problem for at least 3 weeks. My gigabit connections is maxed out at 350 down 400 up.

At first I thought it may have been the PPPoE overhead causing issues, but they changed me over to DHCP and it is still the same

Chorus says all settings are ok on their end and I was getting the full gigabit speeds on Vodafone...now not so much

I'm sure BigPipe will sort it... how often do I really need the full gigabit stream anyway ...

Matthew

BarTender

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#1650023 12-Oct-2016 23:11

mdooher:

I'm in Dunedin on Bigpipe, Having the same problems as Xeon, they have been working on the problem for at least 3 weeks. My gigabit connections is maxed out at 350 down 400 up.

At first I thought it may have been the PPPoE overhead causing issues, but they changed me over to DHCP and it is still the same

Chorus says all settings are ok on their end and I was getting the full gigabit speeds on Vodafone...now not so much

I'm sure BigPipe will sort it... how often do I really need the full gigabit stream anyway ...

I would put fair money on it being your hardware and that the line is fine.

I spent far too long working with a friend down in DUN trying to diagnose why they weren't getting gig. I7+12GB of Ram + SSD and their "Gaming" adapter was doing all sorts of weird things and it just couldn't sustain a high throughput in the browser using speedtest.net

My view of this is... Is the internet working, yes, is it going fast enough, yes.... Is it worth your time trying to figure out why you're "only" getting 300Mbit rather than 900 or whatever just for the "mines bigger / the same as yours" factor of showing off your speedtest. No.

Otherwise purchase a ODroid C2 and run Android Speedtest on it. It can do the full 1GB rate in both directions and it's the size of a Raspberry Pi. It is however depressing and deflating to some geeks when you can't do that with a full sized I3/5/7 PC and a Pi sized box plugged into the USB port of the router for power can.

cynnicallemon

370 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1650027 12-Oct-2016 23:22

BarTender:

mdooher:

I'm in Dunedin on Bigpipe, Having the same problems as Xeon, they have been working on the problem for at least 3 weeks. My gigabit connections is maxed out at 350 down 400 up.

At first I thought it may have been the PPPoE overhead causing issues, but they changed me over to DHCP and it is still the same

Chorus says all settings are ok on their end and I was getting the full gigabit speeds on Vodafone...now not so much

I'm sure BigPipe will sort it... how often do I really need the full gigabit stream anyway ...

My view of this is... Is the internet working, yes, is it going fast enough, yes.... Is it worth your time trying to figure out why you're "only" getting 300Mbit rather than 900 or whatever just for the "mines bigger / the same as yours" factor of showing off your speedtest. No.

Oh that's quite amusing considering the speedtest result in your sig.

Why shouldn't he try to get the max out of his gear.

michaelmurfy

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#1650033 12-Oct-2016 23:53

cynnicallemon:
Oh that's quite amusing considering the speedtest result in your sig.

Why shouldn't he try to get the max out of his gear.

Heck I can't even max out my line due to a router limitation (as @BarTender rightfully pointed out to me) however this is around 940Mbit down, 480Mbit up so personally not replacing my router anytime soon - might try building a PFSense PC to play around with but thats about it.

My main PC is a i7 with 16GiB DDR3 ram, SSD storage and all that stuff and yet I can't max out anything close to 940Mbit down on it - able to get around 900/400Mbit which is a tad less than what my connection supports.

Other PC's support far less than that - my crappy Alienware laptop only gets around 500Mbit down, 250Mbit up because of its crappy Killer Ethernet card.

Really - there are both routers and devices that won't see anywhere close to a full connection speed. Still, even 200/200Mbit (which I had before) was more than I needed and for most people 100Mbit is even overkill. It is literally a "dick measuring contest".

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sbiddle

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#1650068 13-Oct-2016 07:21

cynnicallemon:

BarTender:

mdooher:

I'm in Dunedin on Bigpipe, Having the same problems as Xeon, they have been working on the problem for at least 3 weeks. My gigabit connections is maxed out at 350 down 400 up.

At first I thought it may have been the PPPoE overhead causing issues, but they changed me over to DHCP and it is still the same

Chorus says all settings are ok on their end and I was getting the full gigabit speeds on Vodafone...now not so much

I'm sure BigPipe will sort it... how often do I really need the full gigabit stream anyway ...

My view of this is... Is the internet working, yes, is it going fast enough, yes.... Is it worth your time trying to figure out why you're "only" getting 300Mbit rather than 900 or whatever just for the "mines bigger / the same as yours" factor of showing off your speedtest. No.

Oh that's quite amusing considering the speedtest result in your sig.

Why shouldn't he try to get the max out of his gear.

He potentially *is* getting the max out of his gear, and that's the fault of the gear, not the connection.

It's safe to say BarTender would have had more to do with testing Gigabit connections for performance and testing hardware to see what it's capable of than probably 99% of users on here.

Gone are the days where the Internet connection was the bottleneck. Now the choice of router and physical hardware can be the limitation.

mdooher

Hmm, what to write...
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#1650073 13-Oct-2016 07:34

sbiddle:

cynnicallemon:

BarTender:

mdooher:

I'm in Dunedin on Bigpipe, Having the same problems as Xeon, they have been working on the problem for at least 3 weeks. My gigabit connections is maxed out at 350 down 400 up.

At first I thought it may have been the PPPoE overhead causing issues, but they changed me over to DHCP and it is still the same

Chorus says all settings are ok on their end and I was getting the full gigabit speeds on Vodafone...now not so much

I'm sure BigPipe will sort it... how often do I really need the full gigabit stream anyway ...

My view of this is... Is the internet working, yes, is it going fast enough, yes.... Is it worth your time trying to figure out why you're "only" getting 300Mbit rather than 900 or whatever just for the "mines bigger / the same as yours" factor of showing off your speedtest. No.

Oh that's quite amusing considering the speedtest result in your sig.

Why shouldn't he try to get the max out of his gear.

He potentially *is* getting the max out of his gear, and that's the fault of the gear, not the connection.

It's safe to say BarTender would have had more to do with testing Gigabit connections for performance and testing hardware to see what it's capable of than probably 99% of users on here.

Gone are the days where the Internet connection was the bottleneck. Now the choice of router and physical hardware can be the limitation.

My point is this, I was on Gigatown with Vodafone and I was getting 980 down and 500 or so up

I changed to Bigpipe and started getting actually around 100 down 400 up, but now around 300-350 down 400 up

I have tried every piece of hardware I own and they have even set my connection to DHCP so it is as close to what I had before as possible

Chorus say I am Evolve Max-500.... but I am suspicious that something went wrong in the changeover

Matthew

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#1650079 13-Oct-2016 08:01

cynnicallemon: Oh that's quite amusing considering the speedtest result in your sig.

Why shouldn't he try to get the max out of his gear.

I never said I wasn't a hypocrite. The reason for the sig is it's a source of amusement when I get asked about it.

I suspect his gear is the issue and not the line.it's not the job of the ISP to diagnose hardware issues with the customers gear.
If you can't figure it out get geeks on wheels or similar to come around. Which if anyone said that to me I would take it in a similar vein as someone throwing a Molotov cocktail at my house. I better sort my shizzle out. It's not the job of the ISP. Even less so with Bigpipe as they are BYO router. So they have even less control over the connection as they don't know if the router can do it or has been misconfigured.

cynnicallemon

370 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1650096 13-Oct-2016 08:14

michaelmurfy:

Really - there are both routers and devices that won't see anywhere close to a full connection speed. Still, even 200/200Mbit (which I had before) was more than I needed and for most people 100Mbit is even overkill. It is literally a "dick measuring contest".

True, routers will not see the full gigabit, some won't get close due to hardware contraints. I guess there's a certain degree of benis bragging with this but if I were to go and buy a fast car that does say 400km/h, I would be pissed it only did 100km/h tops when I got it.

I can also agree that 200mbps is probably quite enough but will it be enough in a year, or two? We're on the verge of 4K streaming now with approx 25mbps for each connection so a family of four could generate 100mbps down quite easily. 8K streaming is twice that of 4K so your family of four is now potentially using 200mbps.

Gigabit will future proof (to some degree) your internet experience, so make sure you get the best out of it from day one.

NzBeagle

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#1650098 13-Oct-2016 08:19

cynnicallemon:

michaelmurfy:

Really - there are both routers and devices that won't see anywhere close to a full connection speed. Still, even 200/200Mbit (which I had before) was more than I needed and for most people 100Mbit is even overkill. It is literally a "dick measuring contest".

True, routers will not see the full gigabit, some won't get close due to hardware contraints. I guess there's a certain degree of benis bragging with this but if I were to go and buy a fast car that does say 400km/h, I would be pissed it only did 100km/h tops when I got it.

I can also agree that 200mbps is probably quite enough but will it be enough in a year, or two? We're on the verge of 4K streaming now with approx 25mbps for each connection so a family of four could generate 100mbps down quite easily. 8K streaming is twice that of 4K so your family of four is now potentially using 200mbps.

Gigabit will future proof (to some degree) your internet experience, so make sure you get the best out of it from day one.

Isn't your analogy the wrong way round? The car is your router, and the roads are your connection? So if you buy a 400km/h car, you're constrained by roads that limit you to 100km/h, so you hit the race track. However, if you buy a 1990 Toyota Corolla, and take it to the race track, it'll never hit 400km/h, as the constraint is your car?

cynnicallemon

370 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1650106 13-Oct-2016 08:33

NzBeagle:

Isn't your analogy the wrong way round? The car is your router, and the roads are your connection? So if you buy a 400km/h car, you're constrained by roads that limit you to 100km/h, so you hit the race track. However, if you buy a 1990 Toyota Corolla, and take it to the race track, it'll never hit 400km/h, as the constraint is your car?

In a word, NO.

I have not yet seen a router drive down a fibre (or copper) connection so far.

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