Is a fibre connection really necessary?

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Shindig

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#289258 23-Aug-2021 13:48

Currently looking for property up north, Kaipara way.

I'm looking rural with land; life style blocks you could say.

When it comes to an internet connection they are out of a fibre laid area. I currently use a bigPipe Gigabit plan, which is tops.

I put fibre broadband availability quite high up in the criteria a house must have, but am I being too strict with placing such emphasis on a fibre connection.

Are VDSL and StarLink suitable alternatives for everyday, multi-user usage?

As I sit right now, typing this, I know my connection is serving:

5 laptops

3 MS Teams connection

1 VPN connection

1 Citrix desktop session

2 Outlook sessions

Multiple browsering tabs

1 zoom session

later on this evening we will stream the news, stream netflix, watch spark sport

We can be classed as heavy users, do I really need fibre?!

The little things make the biggest difference.

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#2765435 23-Aug-2021 13:51

For your use case I would totally try and get fibre if at all possible. Most other connection type will struggle with juggling all of these.

shk292

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#2765436 23-Aug-2021 13:52

It would be interesting to measure your peak bandwidth requirement and compare that with what's available at the house. VDSL covers a huge range of max speeds.

The limiting factor with satellite is likely to be cost - what would your average monthly traffic cost over Starlink? And how does the latency of Starlink suit video calls etc?

Shindig

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#2765438 23-Aug-2021 14:02

I'm leaning towards that fibre requirement!

The little things make the biggest difference.

Senecio

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#2765442 23-Aug-2021 14:04

VDSL covers a range of speeds from 10-100Mbps download. I would suggest a 100Mb connection will cope with your usage but the reality is that most rural VDSL connections would be <30Mb unless you were fortunate enough to buy a property with an exchange at the end of your driveway.

quickymart

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#2765472 23-Aug-2021 15:07

Does the Chorus map say you can get VDSL at this location?

tchart

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#2765558 23-Aug-2021 16:28

After we moved to our current house we were on VDSL for 5 years before we finally got fibre. We were hitting about 35-40mbps.

It's doable but if someone is smashing the network with a download, 4k streaming etc then it definitely affects other users. We are pretty heavy users (WFH + teenage gamers + wife watching telly). We often use over 1TB per month.

For work I ultimately used a Skinny 4G broadband connection so that I didn't have any interruptions.

Now that we are back on fibre it's a non issue.

nztim

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#2765596 23-Aug-2021 16:55

Based on what you are looking for Fibre is best obviously but, if not possible broaden your search to no more that 500m from a VDSL cabinet, as they will give you 115/50 which is ample for your use case

Any views expressed on these forums are my own and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer.

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Linux

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#2765600 23-Aug-2021 17:02

I'm in Kaipara and have a Gb Fibre connection on 2d via North Power

Shindig

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#2766026 24-Aug-2021 14:51

Linux: I'm in Kaipara and have a Gb Fibre connection on 2d via North Power

I have been looking at places in Mangawhai, where there is such a narrow band of fibre availability.

The little things make the biggest difference.

Linux

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#2766037 24-Aug-2021 15:37

Shindig:

Linux: I'm in Kaipara and have a Gb Fibre connection on 2d via North Power

I have been looking at places in Mangawhai, where there is such a narrow band of fibre availability.

I am further out on the West coast

hio77

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#2766132 24-Aug-2021 17:25

Depends on how good the VDSL is really....

Fibre is always a step up, even if your currently getting 150/30 and stepping down to 100/30.

Just the responsiveness particularly around faults is worth it tbh.

But in rural land, it really comes down to the question of how good it is.

my parents used to run 2x VDSL lines(22/1), load balanced with 3G backup. I've transitioned that across to a wisp that provides 75/30 and it's rock solid. you don't get the every 6 months a tech has bumped a lead and it's a half open ciruit or the likes...

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Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

richms

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#2766154 24-Aug-2021 18:32

I would factor in the cost to get fiber to any land into the purchase price of it as IMO it is now essential to have if you are into anything to do with computers. I forsee sometime soon that ISPs will just start culling off their copper customers since there is no obligation to sell service to them, or else price them to the point where they leave. Copper gets no love from chorus to replace at the end of its life so will just start to die more and more when it rains etc.

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raytaylor

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#2768221 29-Aug-2021 00:10

50% of VDSL connections would probably meet your needs.

A netflix 720p stream is 2.6mbits

Typical VPNs will almost perform the same over fiber as it would for VDSL - that often comes down to routing paths and total latency. Fiber would only give you a few milliseconds advantage over VDSL so not a huge amount of difference.

Citrix desktop sessions dont use much unless playing video through it. If your using a typical practice management program or ms-office then no problems with a 0.5mbit upload and 1mbit download speed.
We ran a branch of an accounting firm with 6 seats running office, MYOB and xero on a windows terminal server (similar tech to citrix) over a 5mbit radio link (not cellular) quite happily. The citrix protocol is very optimised for non-video stuff so you would probably be surprised how little data you use.

Zoom requires good isp upstream routing, performance would be similar over vdsl vs fiber. Teams is probably going to need 5mbits down 1mbit up depending upon how many other participants in the session.

So i would suggest expanding your options to any address with VDSL of 40down/8up or more, and use a router with QoS functions and it would work well.

I would also suggest using the windows task manager to see how much bandwidth your applications actually use.

Edit: Punch some addresses into the chorus website and see what vdsl speed you can get. Take about 20% off and its reasonably accurate. Add a master line filter for the quoted speed.

An xbox download can saturate a connection - no matter how much speed you have. That is the only reason to have fiber is if your children regularly download 50gb+ games during the working hours because the ISP will usually have very good routing to a CDN server and can serve up the data very quickly. A QoS router can help with that.

Cloud backups - 8 hours will upload 20gb to onedrive in the background at under 10mbits. I doubt anyone who isnt editing video would ever need to upload that amount each day. So that isnt a concern.

I find having fiber and high speeds for business applications is more of a "mine is bigger than yours" contest and you dont actually need as much throughput as you think you do.

I am not a very good sales person - In my day job I am in the business of providing high speed custom connections in tricky areas. If i am talking to a sales lead and i dont agree that they need the speed, and I explain why I disagree, yet they still want to pay then I cant say no.

One customer likes to have the top speed, top plan, always wants to pay for the best that we can offer him (talking business grade, not residential grade connections here) Despite what i tell him about not needing to spend so much, he still wants it. In reality he barely draws more than 3mbits for over a few minutes at a time during the day working from home stock trading and video conferencing his company office in New York.

Ray Taylor

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raytaylor

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#2768223 29-Aug-2021 00:22

Oh here is an idea.
See if your current ISP can tell you how much data you use each month (non-lockdown).

If you take that and divide it by 8 hours per day then you could get an idea of your speed requirements.
If you work from home then it will probably be spread over 12+ hours per day but by calculating to 8 hours gives you a bit of overhead to account for bursty traffic patterns.

10mbits = 1,080GB per month when saturated at full speed for only 8 hours per day.
20mbits = 2,160GB per month. ""
30mbits = 3,240GB per month. ""
50mbits = 5,400GB per month. ""
100mbits = 10,800GB per month. ""

To be pulling more than 2TB a month you would have to be in the top 5% of new zealand households. At the start of 2021 the average household used less than 500gb per month on the chorus fiber network.

Ray Taylor

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Shindig

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#2768252 29-Aug-2021 08:18

Top replies there Ray, thank you very much!

The little things make the biggest difference.

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