10 Mbit/s problem in your network

Sun Feb 10 19:02:52 UTC 2013

On 2/9/13 7:55 PM, Constantine A. Murenin wrote:
> Dear NANOG@,
>
> In light of the recent discussion titled, "The 100 Gbit/s problem in
> your network", I'd like to point out that smaller operators and
> end-sites are currently very busy having and ignoring the 10 Mbit/s
> problem in their networks.
>
> Hotels in major metro areas, for example.  Some have great
> connectivity (e.g. through high-capacity microwave links), and always
> have a latency of between 5ms and 15ms to the nearest internet
> exchange, and YouTube and Netflix just work, always, and nearly
> flawlessly, and in full HD.
>
> Others think that load-balancing 150+ rooms with Fast Ethernet and
> WiFi in every room, plus a couple of conference/meeting rooms (e.g.
> potentially more than a single /24 worth of all sorts of devices) on a
> couple of independent T1 and ADSL links is an acceptable practice.
> Yes, a T1 and an ADSL, with some kind of Layer 3 / 4 balancing!  This
> is at a time when it would not be uncommon to travel with an Apple TV
> or a Roku.  And then not only even YouTube and cbs.com don't work, but
> an average latency of above 500ms is not unusual in the evenings, and
> ssh is practically unusable.  (Or sometimes they do the balancing
> wrong, and the ssh connections simply break every minute due to the
> broken balancer.)
>
> And this happens even with boutique hotels like the Joie de Vivre
> brand in the Silicon Valley (Wild Palms on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale
> has an absolutely horrible bandwidth even when it's half empty), or
> with brand-new properties like Hyatt Place in the hometown of a rather
> famous ILEC that has the whole town glassed up with fiber-optics (the
> place is less than 2 years old, and Google Maps still shows it as
> being constructed, yet independent T1 and ADSL links from two distinct
> ILECs is the only connectivity they have!).
Network is rather far outside  the core competency of most hotel 
manangement corporations and REITS assuming they have any at all.

There's fairly abundant reasons reasons why they or their contractors 
might not be very good at it or be able to deliver a decent service at 
the pricepoint they have budgeted.

When you consider  the alternative is bringing your own (in the form of 
HSDPA/LTE)  and that might in many cases be an order of magnitude 
faster, it's hard to imagine how most of them would address that in a 
fashion that generates in cost recovery  on the service or pricing power 
on rooms.
> How should end-users deal with such broadband incompetence; why do
> local carriers allow businesses to abuse their connections and their
> own customers in such ways; why do the sub-contracted internet support
> companies design and support such broken-by-design setups?
>
> When you are staying at a 3* hotel, should you have no expectations
> that you'll be getting at least a 3Mbps pipe and at least an under
> 100ms average latency, and won't be getting a balancer that would be
> breaking up your ssh sessions?
>
> Best regards,
> Constantine.
>