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400 Mbps over normal twisted pair for regular apartments

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The cat and I “broke up” the twisted pair coming into the apartment

It is usually considered that the DSL “ceiling” is 20-30 Mbit / s, FTTB (optics to the building plus twisted pair to the apartment) is 100 Mbit / s, and PON supports speeds above 100 megabits. My colleagues and I decided to dispel the myths and “disperse” FTTB for a single provider.

First we climbed to the attic in the house. Already now at least 1 Gbit / s comes to each house, and there is a suitable gigabit “copper” port on the house node. That is, we can simply take and switch any apartment where our cable lies to a suitable port and provide speeds of more than 400 Mbit / s.
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Actually, we have already done this as part of the beta tests, and recently launched services for commercial operation in Moscow with new speeds. Yes, you can most likely connect.

What was it, cap?


Our backbone and city networks have a free capacity margin that far exceeds the needs of customers even at the hours of the highest, maximum load. Take, at least, the New Year's holiday, beloved by me and the cat, in which more greetings are received by those grandmothers who have already become friends with the Internet and Skype.

What is the difference with PON


The fact that our FTTB network, which allows to do all this, already exists. No modifications are required. The cable is already entering your apartment. All the wires are. Optics passes to the nodes in the houses. You just need to take and switch the cable to another port of the switch. Everything! Such a channel already approaches you, but you did not know about it. And PON needs to be built - this is a new infrastructure throughout the city. There is one more ambush - optical cores diverge from district ATS, which require proprietary client devices. And with our usual FTTB network, you can use anything. Although adapted for L2TP devices a bit.

How it works


From the trunk ring to the city level comes a hefty transport channel. Further on the city several large rings diverge. From them - rings or mesh-structures are smaller, “stars” are made at the level of entrances. From the first level to the cabinet at the entrance go optical transport links. On the access level switch, we will re-connect the cable to the gigabit port ... and that's it, we now have a gigabit link to the client.


These are the results of my colleague without a cat, but with Wi-Fi (801.11 ac).

Technical capability


After I was able to verify this at several points, we set up such links for all the company's employees working on the project. Pretty quickly, I must say. There are almost no technical limitations: the only thing is that there are literally a couple of dozen blocks in Moscow, where it is necessary to modernize the equipment a bit, but we are already working on it.

More restrictions


You will laugh, but we have not found ways to utilize such speeds. So, it turned out that such a channel can be hammered only by very specific tasks - this is either CCTV from a pile of cameras, or HD video on all family members at the same time, or the task of a photographer flooding a picture somewhere. More - network drives. In general, with the exception of torrents, the provider’s dream: a client once a day does a “big shot” with a heavy file and rejoices wildly.

But there was a number of other things that are directly related to marketing. The first is that almost all resources give content much slower than it allows to receive a channel. This is the eternal problem "why my Internet is slowing down, and tests show normal speed." Because we need resources that can provide a large number of customers content delivery at high speed. So someone will have to part with illusions, not every resource meets these requirements.
100 Mbps is already very fast to connect to the Internet for the vast majority of users. Speeds even higher may be necessary for those who have to work with very large files.


On this photo everything is correct, including the router

The link should be suitable for copper on the desktop or laptop - Wi-Fi, moreover, in terms of interference from other networks, simply will not allow distributing the channel at that speed. Therefore, the best option - the desktop on the cable, tablets and phones - by air.

The end devices themselves can also cut traffic. Naturally, you should have a device that supports 400 Mbps (router or network card). In beta, however, a couple of surprises came to light with the fact that not all devices can actually hold such traffic, despite statements about it.

Tests


This is where the fun begins. We took 10 high-performance devices with L2TP support.

Gigabit is fast, especially for home use, so routers should be appropriate. I’ll say right away that it was not possible to cover all the models and quickly test them, so we relied on support for gigabit connectivity, dual-band Wi-Fi and good feedback from users.

Our shortlist:
• Asus RT-68U
• D-Link DIR 825 D1
• Pre-sale sample from a new Totolink manufacturer
• Zyxel Keenetic Ultra
• Apple Air port Time capsule

As soon as I tested the devices according to our checklists in the office, it was time to test the devices in the field, then you can evaluate the real performance of the device.

For this action, I tried to prepare thoroughly, took the MacBook Pro 15 retina (late 2012) - the main working laptop, stuck a 128GB SSD into a separate desktop and connected the Asus PCE-AC68 Wi-Fi adapter to a heap so that nothing would stop I took a Totolink A2000UA USB Wi-Fi adapter with 802.11ac support just in case. In addition, I captured iPad mini, iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy note - we will test Wi-Fi on them.

To check the speed, in addition to the usual resources, such as - speedtest, downloading files, installed Iperf on one of our servers connected via a gigabit link to our core network. It seems everything turned out somehow like this:



A bit about the test methodology


In many reviews of routers that I have seen, there are usually stands with programs for generating traffic. We decided to act differently: to test how the subscriber will do, checking the speed of our Internet access.
The main tools exposed:
1) Speedtest.net - nowhere without it
2) Mirror.yandex.ru
3) Iperf - some synthetics
4) Youtube

The list is small, but on these resources one can estimate how fast Internet access works, so to speak a natural product and no synthetics.

We start tests


First, let's see which Wi-Fi networks are already nearby.



"People's" 2.4GHz range - no less



5GHz - even got here, but not so many networks, two of them are ours

Asus RT-68U




Top router from Asus. The device stuffing is respectful: a chip from Broadcom BCM4708A, 256MB RAM, 128MB Flash, support for 802.11ac and Beamforming is present.

Patch cord: speedtest showed 224Mbps on download and 196Mbps on Upload


A good result, we continue to test, on the Iperf line.



On this test, we have the unexpected. Whether the router began to “fail”, or iperf, but the results did not rise above 50Mbps. It's okay, let's look at a more vital test - downloading a file from Yandex.



Almost 35MB per second!

I drove the tests a few more times, then decided to still clean the SSD, with such speeds it quickly got clogged.

Now take a look at how fast Wi-Fi works. A wireless network, a capricious thing, and a lot of factors can affect the final performance. The laptop was located 4 meters from the router in a straight line.

Speedtest showed almost 165Mbps on Download and 166 on Upload. Worthy! Especially when it comes to the 2.4GHz range





Iperf showed similar values:



Switch now to 5GHz. Since the router can work with 802.11ac, and my working Macbook does not, I connected an external adapter with 802.11ac 2x2 support.



The connection was successful ... Let's look at speedtest:



209Mbps on Download 111 on Upload, most likely 210Mbps is the current ceiling for L2TP router performance. Let's hope that the new firmware Asus fix it.

Iperf showed the results even lower:



D-Link Dir 825 D1





Next in line is the representative of the mid-range D-Link DIR825. The router is equipped with a Dual-Band Wi-Fi module, which is currently uncommon for the average price range. Let's see what this router is capable of.

Connection via patch cord







Let us turn to testing Wi-Fi network. The router has two Airgain antennas, so I expect high speeds over Wi-Fi.

For a network operating in the 2.4GHz range:





This frequency is maximally loaded, so this result was, in principle, expected. How will 5GHz manifest itself?





130-150Mbps. With a detailed tweaking of the settings, it turned out that if you turn off Wi-Fi network encryption, the performance increases. Of course, I did not discover America, but I didn’t get such a pattern on other routers.

Moving on to the next test subject - Totolink


This router has similar characteristics with the D-Link DIR 825, they are built on the same SoC - RTL8197D, but in this router the radio module supports 802.11ac. It will be interesting to evaluate its capabilities in real conditions.

Patch cord:


Eh ... okay, leave no comments.



Getting closer to reality.



Honestly, I did not think that the "old man" RTL8197D is capable of pumping through itself at such speeds through L2TP. From this it becomes more interesting test results Wi-Fi network.

"People" frequency - 2.4GHz





Both speedtest and iperf showed almost identical results.
At 5GHz, the speed should generally be beyond! Maybe…

But no, although the connection showed that the connection was established at a speed of 867Mbps.



Iperf is trying to lower to the ground, and this is not bad at him.



Our last marathon participant - Zyxel Keenetic Ultra





Popular model among L2TP devices. It “accelerates” well and works stably. Connect the patch cord and run speedtest:



Iperf



And I’ll download the Fedor distribution kit, which has already become native, for the duration of the tests:



Unfortunately, this model from Zyxel does not support 802.11ac, so I will be content with 802.11n. Getting started!

2.4GHz:





Let's look at 5GHz





Nothing more - standard. I was not satisfied with this situation, and I decided to connect a new Time Capsule with 802.11ac support to the router (quite conditional for the PCT model).



Here! It is a pity that the manufacturers do not put timecapsules together with their routers.

And if you measure the speed on the phone / tablet?



Most users, especially those who are not familiar with the methodologies of various performance tests, and simply run the application on their phone. I'll do it too.

Available was the iPhone, tablet and phone on Android. Testing on each of the router connection, it makes no sense, so I stopped at the latest model of the router.





For 2.4GHz and 5GHz, respectively, here we came up against the ceiling of the Wi-Fi performance of the module on the phone. The devices on the android showed about the same results, while on the tablet this speed was obtained when connected to the network at 5GHz, at 2.4GHz it will most likely be lower:





Well, tests on the street:



What happened?


The process of testing a new service extremely fascinated us with a cat, so in the end we checked 10 routers from different manufacturers, price categories with different “fillings”. Here are the most interesting:

So if you have an SSD or RAID from HDD in your home, there is a good Wi-Fi router, and if you are solving specific tasks that require fast Internet, then a new service will be useful for you.

Price


The service is new, the description on the site will appear in a couple of days. The cost of 1850 rubles per month, if without our router.

UPD, as requested in the comments:
Asus RT-68UD-Link DIR 825 D1Toto-linkZyxel Keenetic Ultra
By cable (WAN-LAN)
SpeedtestD: 224.2 Mbps U: 196.77 Mbps
D: 352.16 Mbps U: 370.3 MbpsD: 462.6 Mbps U: 255.8 MbpsD: 408.22 Mbps U: 275.59 Mbps
Iperf26.3Mbps354 Mbps379 Mbps293 Mbps
Download from Yandex~ 35MB / s~ 43 MB / s~ 50MB / s~ 52MB / s
Wi-Fi 2.4GHz
SpeedtestD: 164.53 Mbps U: 165.68 MbpsD: 86.72 Mbps U: 57.82 MbpsD: 155.01 Mbps U: 118.62 MbpsD: 131.57 Mbps U: 113.53 Mbps
Iperf140Mbps52.5 Mbps152Mbps132 Mbps
Wi-Fi 5GHz
SpeedtestD: 209.4 Mbps U: 111.38 MbpsD: 148.27 Mbps U: 149.45 MbpsD: 233 Mbps U: 132.76 MbpsD: 185.4 Mbps U: 181.07 Mbps
Iperf163Mbps130 Mbps192 Mbps171 Mbps

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/222715/

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