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iptrans

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Fiber network design and consulting

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Obvious caveats:

GPON networks are often vendor locked. This means you cannot just buy any random SFP ONU and expect it work.

Even if you do get it to work, no ISP will offer you any kind of support if you do this. Some might even take to it poorly, if they find out.

Generally, the best option is to ask your ISP if they offer other ONU models and choose from those.

Bulk transfers aren’t that being interesting from a networking perspective.

You gonna have a bad time if you optimize only for the best case scenario.

Even using IMIX is a low bar. The proper way to do things is linerate using small packets.

Interrupt moderation only gives a modest improvement, as can be seen from the benchmarking done by Intel.

Intel would also not have gone through the effort to develop DPDK if all you had to do to achieve linerate performance would be to enable interrupt moderation.

Furthermore, quoting Gbps numbers is beside the point when the limiting factor is packets per second. It is trivial to improve Gbps numbers simply by using larger packets.

TCP/IP offload isn’t the issue.

The core problem is that the Linux kernel uses interrupts for handling packets. This limits Linux networking performance in terms of packets per second. The limit is about a million packets per second per core.

For reference 10GE is about 16 million packets per second at line rate using small packets.

This is why you have to use kernel bypass software in user space to get linerate performance above 10G in Linux.

Popular software for this use case utilize DPDK, XDP or VPP.

Google fiber had very specific requirements for their build-out. Not all locations were able or equipped to meet those demands.

Other than that, what specific regulation are you referring to?

More often than not it’s the economics that prevent overbuilding an existing monopoly rather than regulatory barriers.

Oh, sweet summer child, do you think you can escape the NSA? :)

More seriously, private ISPs in a (local) government owned open access network does not mean the (local) government controls and observes everything.

If you are afraid of the local government, run for office.

An ISP grows a large user base by doing aggressive price competition, then starts shaking down services, rate limiting their traffic if they don't pay up.

Yeah, we’ve already seen this in the Comcast/Netflix debacle and Deutche Telekom vs the world. In fact a lot of large incumbents do this.

Meanwhile they use some of the shakedown money to lower prices and get more users.

If things were even so rosy. The shakedown money is used for larger profits and monopoly positions to get more users.

Until recently NBN fiber connections only came with 2 Mbps of bandwidth. Any usage over that was billed at $8 per Mbps to the ISP.

In other words, an ISP customer taking full advantage of their gigabit fiber connection could cost the ISP almost $8000 per month.

And that was just the cost for the local bandwidth in Australia. Add all the costs for cross connects and Internet capacity in addition to all the normal costs of running a business.

Obviously this was and is a millstone around the ISPs’ neck. You can find a plethora of complaints and write ups on the ISP business in Australia illuminating the extremely thin or negative margins in the business.

The only thing that kept the ISPs in business was statistical multiplexing at scale and aggressive traffic shaping.

The Australian NBN would also have sucked a lot less if the government hadn’t sneaked in usage fees on the network.

It is, or at least was, insanely expensive to use the Australian next generation network. It cost ISPs providing service on the network thousands of dollars per month if a fiber customer actually used their gigabit connection, instead of a fixed line rental fee.

Batshit crazy stuff.

Victims of Vimeo 4 years ago

I think you are overstating the problems of relying on IP transit somewhat.

A typical content creator is unlikely to have enough demand for their videos to congest IP transit links.

IP transit is also very,very cheap. At scale IP transit is only about 5 cents per Mbps.

Source: built and operated a global CDN in-house

Starlink Premium 4 years ago

I can see this being used for backhaul in remote areas.

There’s a bit of a risk for adverse selection, as anybody willing to spend $500 per month on this is going to want to get their money's worth.

Back in the day dial-up over GSM was supported via Circuit Switched Data (CSD). However, many carriers discontinued support for CSD when it was superseded by GPRS and EDGE. Furthermore, even if this was supported, it would most likely be turned off by the government when they disable Internet access.

This leaves you with the GSM voice channel which is only 9.6 kbps. The voice channel is further impaired by the audio compression which makes it rather unsuitable for data transmission. You should probably not expect data rates of more than 2.4 kbps.

However, a voice channel is a voice channel. If nothing else you should be able to use a modem via an old school audio coupler to your head phone jack using a very low bitrate modulation. Theoretically you could do the same with an app if you can find or make a softmodem app.

Failing anything else, there are a number of TCP over sound libraries that you could hack to work over a telephone call.