Upgrading network to 1Gbit

Arwin

Arwin

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So I've finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade our network infrastructure to 1GBit. This involved replacing the wifi/router in the livingroom with a 1Gbit capable one (Linksys E2000) and the one in the study pretty much the same (this one didn't have wifi), but now with an 8 port basic 1Gbit router (the only device in my house that doesn't support is my old 360 ... ). What I noticed so far is that it does matter - everything is snappier, even browsing, despite my connection being only 30Mbit and so theoretically not mattering.

But the cable modem is 1Gbit capable itself, and it seems that this upgrade has improved latency quite a bit. I'm getting the exact specified speed from my network provider, with a very respectable ping of 12ms (testing a location at 100miles distance, in Belgium).

1198254686.png


So far it was a very painless upgrade, very easy to do. Next up is seeing what I need to do with the network storage I also added (1 Terabyte DNLA Iomega thingy).
 
Davros said:
what you need now is a killer nic
http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/killer-nic-m1/
Click to expand...

Though nominally a Gbit NIC, I benched one of those vs some Intel and Broadcom NICs and couldn't get more than 140 Mbits of throughput out of it, autoneg or not. And that was on a high end Cisco switch. Sure, the grotty drivers bypass some of your TCP/IP stack for lower latency, but as a general purpose Gbit NIC these things suck.
 
My guess is not only the Gbit network speed but also the fast/low latency routers you are using that is making difference.
To have such low latency close to the ISP specs the Linksys E2000 should be very low latency.
 
Cable ... :)

I also tested the wireless connection with my iPhone and my laptop. Got a modest improvement for the iPhone, but the laptop now is just about exactly as fast over wireless vs utp, which is a big improvement - previously it would top out at a third of the download speed, the same as the iPhone is still sometimes getting, though my best speed has increased from 1,2MB/s to 1,6MB/s even on the iPhone.

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The iPhone has also improved its ping a little, but is still pretty horrible compared to the laptop (63ms).

@AlphaWolf: heh, 4200mi. If you tell me what server, I'll try the same. ;)
 
Cable is killing xDSL over here ... xDSL just can't touch the performance and is usually more expensive as well.
 
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Who can I blame? The crazy thing is the real speed is about 1/10th that to most overseas sites due to congested cables out of my country.
 
MfA said:
Cable is killing xDSL over here ... xDSL just can't touch the performance and is usually more expensive as well.
Click to expand...
Cable internet would be far more expensive for me since I would need to buy a cable TV subscription on top of the internet subscription (don't have cable TV right now, don't need it and don't want it), and the speed increase would be marginal at best since most sites cap download speeds far below 30mbit/s anyway.

Hell, the only sources that I regularly download larger amounts of data from that reliably max out my current link (15ish Mbit/s ADSL2+) are Nvidia and AMD, and sometimes Steam on a good day, but usually not.

I could have a 1gbit/s backbone link, doesn't matter if nothing is able to fill up that pipe...
 
Here in Estonia I have 130/10Mbit cable and around EU I get pretty much the max speed as long as servers are capable of providing it. To US the speeds are about 10% of that but for more popular p2p files it's not uncommon to see sustained speeds of around 15-17MB/s. Having served files to friends in UK they also seem to max out my upload pretty reliably. Though problem seems to be only very few servers (and steam) rarely offer speeds >5MB/s. Last night I downloaded bunch of BF2 stuff from EA downloader and that was running two downloads in parallel at around 7MB/s each, Steam usually tops out at around 2.5-3MB/s no matter what severs I use.

It costs me around €28 per month for that connection and I get TV+landline ontop of that, though I don't use either of those at all.
 
hoho said:
Here in Estonia I have 130/10Mbit cable and around EU I get pretty much the max speed as long as servers are capable of providing it. To US the speeds are about 10% of that but for more popular p2p files it's not uncommon to see sustained speeds of around 15-17MB/s. Having served files to friends in UK they also seem to max out my upload pretty reliably. Though problem seems to be only very few servers (and steam) rarely offer speeds >5MB/s. Last night I downloaded bunch of BF2 stuff from EA downloader and that was running two downloads in parallel at around 7MB/s each, Steam usually tops out at around 2.5-3MB/s no matter what severs I use.

It costs me around €28 per month for that connection and I get TV+landline ontop of that, though I don't use either of those at all.
Click to expand...

That's pretty good. I can get about the same if I pay the max, but that cost me about double that (though relative to cost of living/salary that might be similar pricing, I don't know)
 
1201941595.png


Do I get a cookie? :)

Btw, most of that 15% that are faster than me are poor students, that got 1000/1000 Mb fiber or better, for free. ;)
 
Nice. :) I can get that too, but I'll have to pay 15 euro a month more than I do now, which I'm not quite yet ready to, especially as right now I don't do anything that gives me a real benefit as not enough stuff actually supports much more than I have now - though the faster upload counts for more here than the faster download in being useful at times for me personally.

Interestingly, I just checked that ziggo apparently guarantees 22Mbit for the current price I'm paying, but I always get 30Mbit.

I also like how 120Mbit is more than the local LAN of many people, including myself up to a few days ago, and that my 360's network card also maxes out at 100Mbit. :LOL:

Oh and that 15% obviously isn't really 15% of NL, it's just 15% of people who used speedtest.net, and in those obviously mostly people who care enough about speed to go for higher end.
 
Another bonus - I'm now running Ubuntu 10.10, and whereas DNS resolving could be a little slow earlier, now everything is snappy (I hear earlier routers sometimes had some kind of borked ipv6 support enabled that caused slowdown, and that you could disable, but I never tried, as I only had some issues on Ubuntu really, that didn't matter much)

@AlphaWolf:

1203560296.png


@Squilliam: I noticed that the top Auckland test server was much slower than the bottom one. The bottome one got me:

1203566695.png
 
Arwin said:
That's pretty good. I can get about the same if I pay the max, but that cost me about double that (though relative to cost of living/salary that might be similar pricing, I don't know)
Click to expand...
National average salaries here are rather low compared to you I bet. They are at around €700-ish per month. I'm lucky and get about twice that :)
Frank said:
1201941595.png


Do I get a cookie? :)
Click to expand...
If you do we need to share:
1203578316.png


Funny thing is that I've seen sustained upload speeds of nearly twice that. Guess speedtest servers have a bit of problems measuring the maximum uploads as well as they do with download
[edit]
Stocholm server at around 400km distance over sea:
1203586574.png
 
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