Fiber Fever!!!

You almost certainly won't get anything approaching gigabit throughput from your Eero, but your use case mostly doesn't need it, either.

Wiring up anything you can is definitely worthwhile, not least because anything you can take "off the air" (ie using a cable rather than wifi) leaves more airtime for devices that you do want on wifi.

Depending on the shape of your house, adding another Eero may be worth thinking about in due course, if you can wire it in. As you start to use more bandwidth you may find that the throughput of your single Eero becomes a bottleneck if you have multiple users on at the same time.

Or you may not, in which case you can save your money

Unless your spectrum service is like 200/10 or something like that, you probably won't even notice the difference on anything other than speed tests and the occasional game download, unless you have some specific task you think will be faster with 1 gigabit.

Your equipment is probably fine.

Agree with other advice. Fiber was a godsend for me -- I jumped from 100/10 to 1000/1000. The difference in upload speeds was huge. But then, after watching my actual utilization for a while, I scaled it back to 200/200 and didn't notice much difference. I've still got fiber, and it's still fast both ways, but basically it was only the three-digit upload speeds that made it worthwhile to me. If you've already got that, you may not notice much difference.

That said, the reliability seems better too. Fewer mysterious brief outages -- if I've got power, I've got Internet.

With faster uploads, cloud-based backups now suddenly become a viable and fast option, so you may want to look into how your data is organized and look at backup providers. Also, setting up VPN though your home network and piping it through a pihole, for example, becomes a noticeable quality-of-life improvement.

Xelas said:

With faster uploads, cloud-based backups now suddenly become a viable and fast option, so you may want to look into how your data is organized and look at backup providers. Also, setting up VPN though your home network and piping it through a pihole, for example, becomes a noticeable quality-of-life improvement.

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Or community based backups. With a few friends on fiber you can just do offsite (ecrypted of course) backups to each other for the 3-2-1 rule, skipping $bignum/month bill if you want to upload lots of media.

Restore is a drive away to fetch a drive, that still takes forever over internet in the TB+ scale.

Or even if your friends/family are remote, a fedex package is still faster than a multi-TB download and probably cheaper, too. That old adage about "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" is still applicable today, and is still the cheapest solution in the long run.

Xelas said:

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Back when car tires leaked oil and nobody cared...

Edit: Removed. Sorry for the derail. Saw the car picture and thought I was in The Lounge.

I got fiber a few years ago. I then immediately went for the max 500/500 which later became 1000/1000. But then there was a price hike but the loophole was getting a new contract at the old price, so I opted for 100/100 to see how big the difference would be.

I do get some frame skips the first few seconds of Youtube videos, especially adds, fairly regularly, even though my TV was always hooked up wiredly at 100 Mbps in the first place. And up/downloads are obviously slower. But anything interactive, I don’t notice at all.

My experience, with the ISP-provided home/Wi-Fi router sitting in a closet in the living room, usually with the closet door open, my Apple gear (laptops, iPhone, iPad) would give that 1 Gbps a run for its money when using it in that same room. In other rooms behind brick walls, not so much, but still good enough except for heavier laptop activity. But that would be in my home office where I just plug in ethernet. I do have a couple of spare APs but decided the power use was not worth it.

So either have a single Wi-Fi access point located somewhat central and close to frequent wireless usage and live with somewhat poorer performance in some rooms, or break out the cat 5e / 6a and/or more access points.

iljitsch said:

I got fiber a few years ago. I then immediately went for the max 500/500 which later became 1000/1000. But then there was a price hike but the loophole was getting a new contract at the old price, so I opted for 100/100 to see how big the difference would be.

I do get some frame skips the first few seconds of Youtube videos, especially adds, fairly regularly, even though my TV was always hooked up wiredly at 100 Mbps in the first place. And up/downloads are obviously slower. But anything interactive, I don’t notice at all.

My experience, with the ISP-provided home/Wi-Fi router sitting in a closet in the living room, usually with the closet door open, my Apple gear (laptops, iPhone, iPad) would give that 1 Gbps a run for its money when using it in that same room. In other rooms behind brick walls, not so much, but still good enough except for heavier laptop activity. But that would be in my home office where I just plug in ethernet. I do have a couple of spare APs but decided the power use was not worth it.

So either have a single Wi-Fi access point located somewhat central and close to frequent wireless usage and live with somewhat poorer performance in some rooms, or break out the cat 5e / 6a and/or more access points.

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Did you mean you had opted for 1000/1000 (pseudo-gigabit)? If you were able to double speeds via a loophole in the contract at the same price as old, it would be logical to do so. Going opposite and dropping to 100Mbit from 500Mbit isn't all that logical unless there is a considerable savings to be had and things are unaffected by doing so.

I was on 300/30 cable, then got fiber initially at 500/500 but soon upgraded to 1000/1000, and then the price hike thing came along and I went down do 100/100.

The idea was to see how big the difference would be. I could/can easily upgrade to 200/200, 1000/1000 and now even 4000/4000 at any time. The prices are 42.50, 50, 52.50 and 64.99 euros per month, respectively. I guess 1000/1000 is the sweet spot, as it's only 10 euros extra and all my stuff except my TV and retro computers can do 1000 Mbps wired and/or 500+ Mbps wirelessly.

For 4 Gbps I'd have to get a new switch at minimum and then my Mac Mini could use the full speed and one of my laptops 2.5 Gbps, but everything else would still be at 1 Gbps or below. Right now I'm sometimes waiting for 100 Mbps downloads that I know would be a lot faster at 1 Gbps, but the step up to 4 Gbps will definitely be less meaningful. But... always cool to have the latest and greatest!

(BTW, the speed difference between "100 Mbps" and "1000 Mbps" is only a factor 8. At 100/100 speedtest.net tells me I get around 120 Mbps, while at 1000/1000 it's 930. The latter is explained by all the protocol overhead.)

iljitsch said:

(BTW, the speed difference between "100 Mbps" and "1000 Mbps" is only a factor 8. At 100/100 speedtest.net tells me I get around 120 Mbps, while at 1000/1000 it's 930. The latter is explained by all the protocol overhead.)

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iperf3 over 1000BaseT, between two computers sitting 3' away from each other and directly connected by a cable, will max out at around 940 Mbps.

iperf3 over 10GBaseT will max out around 9.5 Gbps.

stevenkan said:

iperf3 over 1000BaseT, between two computers sitting 3' away from each other and directly connected by a cable, will max out at around 940 Mbps.

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Makes sense, as my PON fiber line adds a VLAN header and a PPPoE header to each packet, adding 0.8% extra overhead to a full size Ethernet frame.

What's a fiber building penetration like? My new apartment landlord is... not the most responsive, but also potentially protective of the building. I would like fiber, and the local fiber co is extremely interested in signing me up to the point of suggesting that I just proceed without discussing it with the landlord. Is it actually something that is plausibly not noticeable?

WM314 said:

What's a fiber building penetration like? My new apartment landlord is... not the most responsive, but also potentially protective of the building. I would like fiber, and the local fiber co is extremely interested in signing me up to the point of suggesting that I just proceed without discussing it with the landlord. Is it actually something that is plausibly not noticeable?

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For retrofits you have to go through the wall and the envelope, usually running some interior fiber to a small mounting box for the ONT on an interior wall that can patch into the unit wiring via Cat5/6 jumpers, or else just plugged directly from the ONT into the customer's gateway device (usually an all-in-one router/switch/WiFi access point). This has to be done for each individual unit. A fiber drop can be run from the exterior of the units to a buried, above-ground, or pole-mounted splitter that patches it into the neighborhood fiber lines.

I know for some installs the fiber is extremely thin (like, 0.7mm mechanical pencil lead thin), white, and well-secured, but still run along e.g. the baseboard on the wall itself. That usually requires specialist installation and is usually done all at the same time on a building-by-building basis.
Other times the stuff is almost identical to Cat5 in outer appearance (and bend radius). If the fiber infrastructure outside the buildings is there, a lower level of technician can do the install the same as installing copper Internet without any other special concerns re: cable management.

WM314 said:

What's a fiber building penetration like? My new apartment landlord is... not the most responsive, but also potentially protective of the building. I would like fiber, and the local fiber co is extremely interested in signing me up to the point of suggesting that I just proceed without discussing it with the landlord. Is it actually something that is plausibly not noticeable?

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Here's mine:



The ONT is about the same size as a typical router, or maybe smaller. The power supply is bigger than the ONT.

The armored fiber is, as mentioned, roughly the same cross-section area as Cat cable, but flattened, and once it's inside they may transition to a much thinner interior fiber to plug into the ONT.

Wire whatever you can, then seperate your 2.4 and 5ghz networks. Run all smart devices that dont need speed on 2.4, laptops and phones on 5ghz.

The above will give consistent good performance, which I think is better than peak performance with hiccups.

I used 30/30 fiber for years, including streaming 4k, and never had issues. When my kids got old enough to use devices I bumped it to 300/300, and didn't notice much difference outside Steam downloads. I'm tempted by multigig but don't know what I'd do with 2G, 5G, 10G, or the ridiculous 50G service that's available.

Hmm the fiber rollout here hit a snag. The ones who are connected are complaining about instability, something's broken or overloaded further along the path and provider halted new connections until next year.

Neighbors are switching back to DSL, at least that was steady 100/30 or 200/60. Or gigabit over coax.

I wonder what they fubared that has months of lead time.

Yeah they’ve been laying fiber down oceans for decades now, this isn’t rocket science... (And before that they even had coax cables with fucking vacuum tube amplifiers at the bottom of the oceans! Think of maintaining vacuum in a glass tube with 4000 meters of water = 400 bars of pressure pushing on that tube...)

50G isn’t going to be useful in any way for any single app, as I doubt you’ll be able to talk to any remote servers that will keep up with you. And that’s without considering that round trip time is going to at the very least make it hard to ramp up to maximum speed and probably keep you from reaching that speed at all due to TCP congestion control algorithms that simply aren’t made for this.

I had the forum talk me out of upgrading to 4 Gbps, the max here, as the advantages are dubious and I’d have to get a bunch of new hardware. If hardware considerations are not an issue, sure, go to 10 Gbps as that is pretty widely supported everywhere. But 50 Gbps means you’ll have to heavily invest into new hardware and then see 10G+ speeds once every blue moon. But the sweet spot is 1G. That is already super fast and your LAN stuff almost certainly already supports it.

And last year I downgraded from 1000 Mbps to 100 Mbps, and apart from waiting a bit longer for large downloads (uploads are also 100 Mbps so still a lot better than my old 300/30 cable line) and having some Youtube ads skip frames in their first couple of seconds, I’m not seeing a difference. Now I’m not recommending 100 Mbps as the ideal choice, but 100 Mbps is definitely good enough and 1000 Mbps is a lot better pretty much without any effort, but anything more is definitely in deminishing returns territory.

When fiber was new, I got it but still kept my cable line for a few months so I could easily compare and also run IPv4 over one and IPv6 over the other so I had 500 + 300 Mbps = 800 Mbps BitTorrent downloads.

If you’re trying something completely new it’s always a good idea to keep your old shoes until the new ones are broken in.

w00key said:

Hmm the fiber rollout here hit a snag. The ones who are connected are complaining about instability, something's broken or overloaded further along the path and provider halted new connections until next year.

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If they're getting strong light along the path then it has to be something with the electronics at either end.

Wheels Of Confusion said:

If they're getting strong light along the path then it has to be something with the electronics at either end.

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Multiple affected in same area so probably not end user side. Cutting off new sign ups tells me it's fubar, they want new subscribers more than anything else.

I would guess the network architecture revealed a flaw in their design/configuration. Probably they built in some kind of loops that they didn't expect, equipment problems with network growth (MAC limitation, NAT limitation, or raw packet throughput, etc.) or similar. Actually installing fiber is not that hard if you use the right parts and have skilled labor to do the job. The problem is building a network that is cost effective, performant and efficient and reliably scalable and configured properly.

If they made a mistake that limits the network performance at the edge (the internet uplink) or the amount of NAT sessions they can do, or something similar, I can imagine where they would hit a plateau where any additional customers will cause more and more performance and reliability degredation so they have to stop the whole rollout until they fix the core issue. If it were just a smattering of bad fiber, only certain areas would be affected and it would be consistently bad for those areas and not the rest (unless it was at the core of the network and that is much easier to fix since it would be in their facility most likely).

As it also affects wholesale service (PPPoE) to other providers the problem is at L2 and L2 tunneling to core router layer. Not L3, other providers have their own IPv4 and v6 space, and also other services like IPTV and VOIP over certain VLANs.

The new edge / PON terminal with a handful users can't be congested. Maybe a bad backhaul fiber or fault line card / router along the route. If it was a bad SFP it would be ez peasy to fix.