On 2023-03-03 10:11, James Knott via talk wrote:
On 2023-03-03 09:37, Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
Rogers offers 2.5Gbit fiber in some places. Feel free to correct me but I believe that all the "optical" and co-axial cable based services are shared(GPON).
So you could be sharing your 2.5Gb with up to 100 other people and if everybody decides to download a few hundred GB of video files at the same time you could be seeing speeds like 25Mb. So last mile bit rate is almost always much greater than the bandwidth that is available from the end node(home) to the core(151 front). I have seen 6Mbit DSL reduced to hundreds of bps by chronic back-haul congestion.
So a fiber/cable modems buffering with a 1Gb output may be enough to cover the practical bandwidth available on a reasonably loaded network.
ADSL always comes in as a poor 2nd to cable. I'm on Rogers with a 500/30 package. I rarely see less than about 920/32. That is pretty good, getting just about 2x the service speed.
xDSL has some serious speed limitations trying to run over old POTS copper lines. I am amazed that they can get 100Mb over old copper lines. The upside of ADSL is that it is wire speed from the customer point to the node equipment is what you can get before back-haul. With cable the all the customers on the segment are sharing the same bandwidth. So if your the first one on the cable you have the full speed to yourself but if your number 100 then you and the 99 other people are sharing that speed. Everybody oversells their bandwidth because not all your customers will be using the full bandwidth all the time. Generally the averaging works well but at some point your customers start using more of their bandwidth and your back-haul and upstream bandwidth need to increase. The carriers ran into this problem years ago and resorted to deep packet inspection and heavy duty traffic management because the cost of increasing the back-haul was higher than the cost of the fancy routers. All that infrastructure is still there and in use, which is the reason you will see blazing speeds using speedtest but not so fast with real-life data.
Are there any ISPs distributing from 151 Front W. to customers? (I worked in that building for 17 years.) The nearest Bell offices are on Simcoe, near Dundas and on Adelaide, near Bay. I'm not sure where the nearest Rogers office is and I don't know where Beanfield is. 151 Front W. is the Torix Internet Exchange point, where various carriers and ISPs meet to exchange data. For some reason, Bell doesn't seem to be there. https://www.torix.ca/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Internet_Exchange
I picked 151 front as a common point that people would know as a backbone point. There are a hand full of IX points in Toronto now but 151 is still the biggest. There is also a reasonable likelihood that some of your traffic will still transit 151 Front. Bell has facilities in the building but last time I looked was not a member of TORIX. I am sure there are still some boutique ISPs serving from 151 front. When UUNET moved into 151 front the reason I was given was because of the adjacent CO. That was also LONG before the building became a data center, and lots of big Bell COs are gone now or nothing more than a small brick building, so that CO may have gone also.
Never trust speedtests because the carriers manipulate the traffic to prioritize speed test sites. Try copying a multi GB file and see what your speeds are. Better still wrap it in a VPN. The point I would like to make is that the speed of the cable into your house is seldom if ever the same as the throughput of the overall backing network.
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