10 Mbit/s problem in your network

Constantine A. Murenin mureninc at gmail.com
Sun Feb 10 03:55:59 UTC 2013


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!).

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.




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