10 GB Internet from Eir?

turbbo · 30-04-2018 03:09PM

ED E wrote: »

I meant Singapore - its the residential internet capital of the world.

I thought South Korea overtook them a long time ago?

ED E · 30-04-2018 03:11PM

turbbo wrote: »

I thought South Korea overtook them a long time ago?

Depends on which chart you wanna look at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds

turbbo · 30-04-2018 03:12PM

looks like Singapore is still on the top:
http://www.speedtest.net/global-index

turbbo · 30-04-2018 03:16PM

Singapore - they banned chewing gum because it jammed up the doors on the trains there once.
They like their $hit to work and work efficiently. I visited there many years ago and was blown away by the place.
We have a long long way to go.

30-04-2018 03:28PM

KildareP wrote: »

Would love to see some traceroute's both within and out of the country on it.

The headline speed into the premises is only half the battle.

Let's just say it's always interesting how a 100Mb Eir line and a 400Mb Virgin Media line stack up against each other in different scenarios, the results are far from what you might assume based on the headline speed alone...

Could anyone elaborate on this or post a link I could read?

Marlow · 30-04-2018 03:34PM

11214 wrote: »

Could anyone elaborate on this or post a link I could read?

That's because the headline speed isn't everything.

Virgin is extremely restrictive with their peering and tends to overcontend certain uplinks. So you having a 360 Mbit/s is no benefit to you, when you can't get that speed to the places on the internet, that you want to visit.

Matter of fact: Virgin does only peer with a small subset of irish providers on INEX. Most other providers have to go through their upstream all the way to Amsterdam before you get a connection between a Virgin user and a user on a different irish provider.

Providers should not only be picked on speed, but also on the quality of their upstream.

The same applies to above 10gig connections. No good to you, if the bandwidth further up isn't there.

/M

Bob24 · 30-04-2018 03:44PM

11214 wrote: »

Could anyone elaborate on this or post a link I could read?

You buy a 100mbps service from provider 1 and 1gbps service from provider 2 and try to download a file from Google.

To simplify the network path is :

You <-A-> service provider <-B-> Google

A is the private network of the ISP (which is 100mbps with provider 1 and 1gbps with provider 2) and defines how quickly you can communicate with their own core network.

B is the internet network path between your ISP’s core network and google. No ISP will guarantee a minimum speed for this and it depends on how much they spend to connect themselves to the internet.

The actual speed you get between you and google is whichever of A and B is the slowest, as you have to go through both; but remember only A has a garanted speed (which is the speed the ISP is marketing to you).

So if provider 1 is good you can get your full 100mbps to google because B is not saturated and you can max-out A. But if provider 2 is bad and hasn’t invested in their infrastructure you could get only 10mbps to Google (you have 1gpbs on A alright, but their internet connectivity is completely saturated and B can only deliver 10mbps)

I.e. the 100mbps service will end up being faster than the 1gbps one because 1 gbps is the speed from your driveway to the main road, but the main road is completely jammed and can only deliver 10mpbs to go to google, while your friend only gets 100 mbps from their driveway but then reach a motorway which can also lead them straight to google at 100mbps.

Ok maybe that was a bit long and convoluted, but hopefully it clarifies!

KildareP · 04-05-2018 06:06PM

11214 wrote: »

Could anyone elaborate on this or post a link I could read?

All explained in the last two posts so won't go any further into the details

But you can take a look for yourself on the peering matrix of INEX - basically a consortium of ISP's and content providers where they can all interconnect with each other.

https://www.inex.ie/ixp/peering-matrix

Green means a direct peer.
Red means no peer.

If you look at Netflix as an example, Netflix have a content cache here in Dublin, except Virgin Media don't peer with it.
Therefore if you want to watch something on Netflix and you're on Virgin, it has to go fetch the traffic from outside Ireland.

This has caused significant issues with them before, at one stage Netflix traffic was coming in from New York, and at peak times the transatlantic links would become saturated meaning you'd struggle to get above 240p resolution on Netflix through your 360Mb Virgin line, yet your 7Mb Eircom DSL line down some country boreen would be streaming away at full 1080P.

I think it's "only" coming in from London now, but still an unnecessary cross-channel hop for something that could be served right within Ireland. Have a search in the Virgin Media forums for Netflix and Youtube - there's megathreads showing the extent of the issue and how long it took for it to be rectified.

It's not just Netflix - they don't peer with Akamai, Amazon, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft or SunGard here in Ireland either to name a few - which would serve up the vast majority of content based services like iTunes, Youtube, Spotify, Google Music, Sky Go, etc.
Thus any such connections to those services could potentially be going all the way to Amsterdam and back even if you were standing at that service providers rack but on a Virgin Media DIA circuit.

Can cause similar difficulties in the business world when interconnecting multiple office sites that aren't using Virgin Media exclusively as their ISP, particularly when you're using latency and jitter-sensitive cross-site VoIP or video conferencing, or where there's bandwidth intensive applications going on (like hotsite replication or pushing large files around).

Now in fairness to VM, it's not all doom and gloom, as in, for the most part their connections are generally fast, low latency and reliable, and I wouldn't be put off recommending a VM circuit into anywhere.
It's just a headache when you're trying to diagnose packet loss between two sites and you can see your traffic being hauled halfway across Europe!

tsue921i8wljb3 · 04-05-2018 06:32PM

KildareP wrote: »

All explained in the last two posts so won't go any further into the details

But you can take a look for yourself on the peering matrix of INEX - basically a consortium of ISP's and content providers where they can all interconnect with each other.

https://www.inex.ie/ixp/peering-matrix

Green means a direct peer.
Red means no peer.

If you look at Netflix as an example, Netflix have a content cache here in Dublin, except Virgin Media don't peer with it.
Therefore if you want to watch something on Netflix and you're on Virgin, it has to go fetch the traffic from outside Ireland.

This has caused significant issues with them before, at one stage Netflix traffic was coming in from New York, and at peak times the transatlantic links would become saturated meaning you'd struggle to get above 240p resolution on Netflix through your 360Mb Virgin line, yet your 7Mb Eircom DSL line down some country boreen would be streaming away at full 1080P.

I think it's "only" coming in from London now, but still an unnecessary cross-channel hop for something that could be served right within Ireland. Have a search in the Virgin Media forums for Netflix and Youtube - there's megathreads showing the extent of the issue and how long it took for it to be rectified.

It's not just Netflix - they don't peer with Akamai, Amazon, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft or SunGard here in Ireland either to name a few - which would serve up the vast majority of content based services like iTunes, Youtube, Spotify, Google Music, Sky Go, etc.
Thus any such connections to those services could potentially be going all the way to Amsterdam and back even if you were standing at that service providers rack but on a Virgin Media DIA circuit.

Can cause similar difficulties in the business world when interconnecting multiple office sites that aren't using Virgin Media exclusively as their ISP, particularly when you're using latency and jitter-sensitive cross-site VoIP or video conferencing, or where there's bandwidth intensive applications going on (like hotsite replication or pushing large files around).

Now in fairness to VM, it's not all doom and gloom, as in, for the most part their connections are generally fast, low latency and reliable, and I wouldn't be put off recommending a VM circuit into anywhere.
It's just a headache when you're trying to diagnose packet loss between two sites and you can see your traffic being hauled halfway across Europe!

Are you certain that Virgin are not using Open Connect within their own network for Netflix? I know eir use Open Connect machines for their Netflix delivery and bar the dispute between Liberty Global and Netflix that you referenced Virgin are and have been way out in front in Netflix's speed ranking.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en_gb/

https://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/country/ireland/

Cuddlesworth · 04-05-2018 06:59PM

KildareP wrote: »

But you can take a look for yourself on the peering matrix of INEX - basically a consortium of ISP's and content providers where they can all interconnect with each other.

https://www.inex.ie/ixp/peering-matrix

Liberty global is a very large ISP with lots of interconnects, BGP is a very trust orientated protocol, networks get very complex and proper peering can get difficult to manage the larger things get.

Very few of INEX's peering partners would meet their peering policy.

Marlow · 04-05-2018 11:48PM

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Liberty global is a very large ISP with lots of interconnects, BGP is a very trust orientated protocol, networks get very complex and proper peering can get difficult to manage the larger things get.

Very few of INEX's peering partners would meet their peering policy.

That's a bit of BS to be honest. Because there's vastly larger networks than Liberty, that have no problems having an open peering policy.

Matter of fact, Virgin UK had no problems peering with pretty much everybody before everything got stuck together with UPC. UPC has traditionally always been extremely reluctant to peer with anybody .. even when they weren't that big.

It's their own loss. Because they actually loose customers over it, when the peering between work places and home workers get routed via NL or UK and back companies often tell their employees to find a provider, that has better peering. And that's Virgin out of the window then.

The only reason Virgin does this, is to entice everyone to use their network. But most of the time, it backfires for them.

/M

KildareP · 05-05-2018 11:25AM

Kenya Bitter Shootout wrote: »

Are you certain that Virgin are not using Open Connect within their own network for Netflix? I know eir use Open Connect machines for their Netflix delivery and bar the dispute between Liberty Global and Netflix that you referenced Virgin are and have been way out in front in Netflix's speed ranking.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en_gb/

https://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/country/ireland/

It has been a few months since I checked Netflix specifically but the last time I checked they were not.

Also it is normal for you to peer with Netflix locally for your country for the daily cache infill. So I'd say its still probably no.

But open to correction!

KildareP · 05-05-2018 11:55AM

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Liberty global is a very large ISP with lots of interconnects, BGP is a very trust orientated protocol, networks get very complex and proper peering can get difficult to manage the larger things get.

Very few of INEX's peering partners would meet their peering policy.

What would restrict most interconnections is the 1:3 and 3:1 ratio. All of those I mentioned above would meet all other requirements bar that one.

oscarBravo · 05-05-2018 01:22PM

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Very few of INEX's peering partners would meet their peering policy.

That's because their peering policy is radically OTT. Almost every other ISP in Ireland, including some much bigger companies than them, manages to peer without such a restrictive policy.

So, yes: the reason very few networks peer with them is because of their restrictive peering policy. But that just pushes the question back: why do they have such a restrictive peering policy?

Cuddlesworth · 05-05-2018 11:03PM

oscarBravo wrote: »

That's because their peering policy is radically OTT. Almost every other ISP in Ireland, including some much bigger companies than them, manages to peer without such a restrictive policy.

So, yes: the reason very few networks peer with them is because of their restrictive peering policy. But that just pushes the question back: why do they have such a restrictive peering policy?

Because a laxer peering policy means more staff, more work, more chance of mistakes, more money. This is the company that threw out DS-lite with no hesitation, they are clearly cost conscious over customer.

Its worth noting as well, they don't really host a lot of business traffic so very few of the providers in INEX would send any really traffic to them. Netflix/Microsoft/google and Facebook is a bit odd, as they would be a pretty serious percentage of their bandwidth within Ireland.

Marlow · 06-05-2018 01:51AM

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Because a laxer peering policy means more staff, more work, more chance of mistakes, more money. This is the company that threw out DS-lite with no hesitation, they are clearly cost conscious over customer.

It doesn't mean more staff or more work.

And it also doesn't mean more cost. They have more cost right now, because they're hauling tons of their traffic out of Ireland and to primarily NL. That means they need to pay for that capacity, when the traffic could be handed off locally.

As a result of that quality suffers.

All of that actually goes against their customers.

/M

Impetus · 06-05-2018 02:37PM

Please don't miss the point. I have had DSL since 2000 (not in Ireland). It started off with 512k and moved up. There were so few competing subscribers that 512k looked fast on screen page fills.

I now have 1GB (for EUR 25 pm), and I have a 10 GB Ethernet connection on my workstation.

Time moves on. I uploaded a 5 GB video of a trip in 4k to AWS last week, and it didn't take long - but few of my friends have fast enough internet connections to download while watching, so they have to download and save and watch from their mass storage.

Any company installing fiber, might as well install 10 GB fiber. It is far more appealing compared with what competitors might do. And it gives their infrastructure investment a longer life.

The other issues are contention ratios, jitter (eg for phone calls), ping time, and the issue of up and down speeds. These are areas where back street operators (and their so called 'regulators') can con the average subscriber.

The main difference between IRL and CH is that Xavier buys an also ran network (Orange) in Switzerland, and has to out do Swisscom's - excellent but expensive service. So Swisscom's 1 GB looks slow compared with Xavier's 10 GB.

In Ireland, Xavier has bought Eircom (Eir), which is the Irish Swisscom type legacy operator. Expensive, but Eir is a low quality company in comparison with Swisscom. In most parts, Eir's only competitor is a second rate cable operator, who in addition to delivering a handful of crappy TV channels, also does internet, over EuroDOCSIS3.

Ireland is dominated by high price low quality companies. Europe's downmarket capital. In Irish supermarkets you can usually only find small packages of an item at extortionate prices. The typical Irish aircraft is dirty, serves poor quality junk food and beverage and nickels and dimes its victims, at every opportunity. I prefer to travel Lufthansa (which includes Swiss, Austrian, Brussels Airlines, and many others) - the only fire star airline in Europe. Most of the time the LH group ticket cost a fraction of the price charged by an Irish airline, to Ireland. And the Lufthansa crew are far easier to interact with, more friendly than their equivalent on an Irish airline. The country is full of poorly designed, one off housing (which makes internet and other utilities expensive to provide) - as a result of poor zoning and planning regulations by an overpaid, over pensioned, incompetent government. Why? Because people put up with it.

tsue921i8wljb3 · 06-05-2018 02:59PM

Marlow · 06-05-2018 03:06PM

Impetus wrote: »

Europe's downmarket capital.

In how many countries do you post on forums and tell them, that their internet operators and broadband products are only 2nd rate to Switzerland ? And that they essentially are third world countries ?

Just asking.

/M

oscarBravo · 06-05-2018 06:08PM

Impetus wrote: »

Any company installing fiber, might as well install 10 GB fiber.

You don't really understand how fibre works, do you?

Cuddlesworth · 11-05-2018 10:49AM

Marlow wrote: »

It doesn't mean more staff or more work.

And it also doesn't mean more cost. They have more cost right now, because they're hauling tons of their traffic out of Ireland and to primarily NL. That means they need to pay for that capacity, when the traffic could be handed off locally.

As a result of that quality suffers.

All of that actually goes against their customers.

/M

It means more staff and more work, every peer and interconnect needs to be route sanitised. Every maintenance change, route changes, new ISPs which want to peer, require resources to manage and maintain. And your routing can very easily be messed up by all these small peers, which means support calls with their networking while you get it sorted. Their is a reason why laxer areas like Asia see small ISP's leaking global route tables, causing serious problems. Or why Russian ISP's can accidentally borrow subnets for a few hours.

If they are happy to pay for the bandwidth and use it, keeping in mind in general Ireland is a small market, then they clearly see it as worth their while. I don't see any contention and most of the routing has always followed their network within Europe.

oscarBravo · 11-05-2018 10:54AM

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

It means more staff and more work, every peer and interconnect needs to be route sanitised. Every maintenance change, route changes, new ISPs which want to peer, require resources to manage and maintain. And your routing can very easily be messed up by all these small peers, which means support calls with their networking while you get it sorted. Their is a reason why laxer areas like Asia see small ISP's leaking global route tables, causing serious problems. Or why Russian ISP's can accidentally borrow subnets for a few hours.

All of that would be entirely plausible if restrictive peering policies were the norm. Either every other major ISP in Ireland is criminally lax in their approach to peering, or Liberty are ridiculously restrictive. You have your view on that, but I doubt you'll find it's widely shared.

Cuddlesworth · 11-05-2018 03:10PM

oscarBravo wrote: »

All of that would be entirely plausible if restrictive peering policies were the norm. Either every other major ISP in Ireland is criminally lax in their approach to peering, or Liberty are ridiculously restrictive. You have your view on that, but I doubt you'll find it's widely shared.

If Virgin Ireland set up a Irish AS number, sure. But I don't see any other global Tier 2 ISP's with open peering on their global AS sitting in Inex.

Vodafone(1273), ****e peering. Vodafone Ireland, great peering.
BT(5400), ****e peering. BT Ireland, great peering.

No Tier 1's, no TATA, no AT&T, Level 3, Verizon. These are the providers a company the size of liberty global gives a **** about peering with.

Just a lot of transit providers, local ISP's and company's trying to reduce costs and latency.

I'm not defending Virgin for their crap peering in Ireland, they could mitigate it. But I don't think their peering policy for their company type and the complexity of their network is justified in relation to the Irish market and Inex.

Also, considering their current connectivity, blacknight, Viatel? The more I look at it, the weirder it is.

Marlow · 11-05-2018 06:27PM

Hurricane Electric has an open peering policy and is at INEX.

I can find more examples.

It's like open firewall vs closed firewall. Closed firewall means more work. Closed peering policy equally means more cost and work.

It's closed because of politics, not cost nor workload.

/M

Cuddlesworth · 11-05-2018 07:04PM

Marlow wrote: »

Hurricane Electric has an open peering policy and is at INEX.

I can find more examples.

It's like open firewall vs closed firewall. Closed firewall means more work. Closed peering policy equally means more cost and work.

It's closed because of politics, not cost nor workload.

/M

Hurricane Electric is a low level transit provider, not a high level ISP.

tsue921i8wljb3 · 11-05-2018 07:15PM

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Also, considering their current connectivity, blacknight, Viatel? The more I look at it, the weirder it is.

Speedtest.net servers maybe? (Viatel is Digiweb I believe) although there are other Irish speedtest server providers that they don't peer with at Inex.

ED E · 11-05-2018 07:19PM

Kenya Bitter Shootout wrote: »

Speedtest.net servers maybe? (Viatel is Digiweb I believe) although there are other Irish speedtest server providers that they don't peer with at Inex.

Plausible. From VM in Dublin I always end up bouncing off Vodafone or Blacknight.

Marlow · 11-05-2018 08:39PM

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Hurricane Electric is a low level transit provider, not a high level ISP.

Hurricane Electric is on par with Cogent, but you're missing the point.

/M

Ultimanemo · 05-06-2018 09:01PM

I don't know what people want to do with 10GB speed, If I get solid 10mbps I will be happy man

Marlow · 05-06-2018 09:39PM

Kenya Bitter Shootout wrote: »

Speedtest.net servers maybe? (Viatel is Digiweb I believe) although there are other Irish speedtest server providers that they don't peer with at Inex.

Only getting around to having a look at the peering matrix again.

Viatel = Digiweb, yes, and open peering policy.

Colt peer selective, but peers on the route-servers.
euNetworks peer selective, but are on the route-servers.

BT are selective, but BT Ireland have an open peering policy.

Hurricane is Tier 2, but often considered Tier 1 (they are Tier 1, when it comes to IPv6) and have an open peering policy.

Liberty Global and Virgin Media are different networks. Even classified differently (Liberty Global: Tier 1, Virgin Media: Tier 2). That and the fact, that Virgin Media have a seperate AS number for Ireland. They are closed/selective and don't peer on the route-servers on INEX for any of their networks unless you're a big player or pay them money. AT ALL. And sometimes even money can't get you peering. And that was already the case pre Liberty Global, pre Vigin Media, pre UPC. It's a policy that goes all the way back to NTL.

They just don't like to talk to other providers, nor do they like to share infrastructure. They don't wholesell, sublet or give others access to any of their infrastructure .. in any way.

For above: being on the route-servers means open peering, they just don't want to set direct peerings up unless it suits them and limit the amount of requests by choosing that state.

So no .. there is absolutely no technical nor budgetary reason for their peering policy.

They just don't like to share or improve anything globally. Their attitude is: you're with us or you're not. If you're not, then we don't talk to you or give you sh*t routing.

/M

10 GB Internet from Eir?

Comments