Proving Gig Speed

Sun Jul 22 10:48:24 UTC 2018

On Tue, Jul 17, 2018, at 18:12, Andy Ringsmuth wrote:

> I suppose in reality it’s no different than any other utility. My home 
> has 200 amp electrical service. Will I ever use 200 amps at one time? 

No, because at 201 Amps instantaneous the breaker will cut everything.

> Highly highly unlikely. But if my electrical utility wanted to advertise 
> “200 amp service in all homes we supply!” they sure could. Would an 
> electrician be able to test it? I’m sure there is a way somehow.

Will they deal with customers calling to complain that their (unknown to the utility) "megatron equipment" says it cannot draw 199 Amps from a single outlet ? I don't think so. They just ensure the global breaker will not trigger when oven+microwave+home-wide air-con+water heating+BT rig in the basement all draw all they can (i.e. up to ~25 Amps each) for something like 5 min.

> saturate my home fiber 300 mbit synchronous connection? Every now and 
> then yes, but rarely. Although if I’m paying for 300 and not getting it, 
> my ISP will be hearing from me.

Will you waste your time if some random site says "you have 200 Mbps" ? On residential, we only accept complaints for tests in pre-determined (wired, no intermediate device, select set of test servers and tools, customer hardware check) conditions and only for results lower than 60-70% of "advertised speed". If wireless is invoved, test is being dismissed as "dear customer, please fix your network, regards".

For pro/enterprise service, we use higher bandwidth threshold, but we do expect the other side to be competent enough for something like an iperf3 test.

However, I have to mention that for the moment we can afford to run a congestion-free network (strictly less than 80% charge - usually less than 50% - measured with 1-minute sampling).

> If my electrical utility told me “hey, you can upgrade to 500 amp 

Are the 200 Amps written somewhere in the contract or is it what reads on the usually installed breaker ? Around here, the maximal power is determined in the contract (and enforced by the "connected" electrical meter/breaker that has a generous functioning margin.