Longmont/NextLight gigabit internet

[freeskier93]

I'm lucky enough to live in the small(ish) city of Longmont, Colorado, which has been sitting on top of a fiber optic loop since the late 90's. Unfortunately due to local laws the city was prohibited from offering internet as a utility, until recently. A year or two ago voters repealed the law and funded a project to rollout fiber to everyone in the city.

After much waiting the city chose NexLight to contract the work and after more waiting our neighborhood was finally offered connection. They started by laying the main fiber lines behind each row of houses (lucky us got the loud horizontal driller behind our house) then for anyone who signed up they then laid fiber straight into the house. The deal is anyone who signs up early gets symmetric gigabit internet for $50 a month, half the price of Comcast's 100 mbps connection.

This morning they finished hooking us up so I finally got to take it for a test. Here's the before with Comcast:

After with the city:

I'll be doing more tests at different hours to see if I can get higher, I was expecting around 600 mbps up/down but I suspect the SpeedTest server is the limit here, I doubt the servers can even serve a gigabit reliably even during off-peak hours.

Another interesting note is our public IP address starts with 192. I know it's possible as it's a class C designated address, but I've just never seen it before. Not sure what the significance is there.

For some real world testing I fired up Steam.

I first downloaded DiRT Rally, which is nice and big.



Hmm, something is going on here. Not consistent at all... but taking a closer look I see the "busy writing to disk" message and realize it's installing to the spinning data drive. So first world problems, our internet can saturate a 7200 RPM spinning drive. So I switched to the SSD and tried again with Splinter Cell Blacklist:



Now that I like!

I'll keep doing speed tests but as it sits can't argue with 4x the download and 40x the upload for half the price of Comcast.

 

[azazel1024]

It might well be your router, what are you running? Other than fairly new routers, most are going to run in to a wall around 300-400Mbps for a "gigabit" router.

Most medium/high end 802.11ac wireless routers can typically handle in the 600-900Mbps range though.

 

[freeskier93]

It might well be your router, what are you running? Other than fairly new routers, most are going to run in to a wall around 300-400Mbps for a "gigabit" router.

Most medium/high end 802.11ac wireless routers can typically handle in the 600-900Mbps range though.

Sorry, I meant to post hardware. Router is Netgear R6300 (year or two old), connected to that is our Plex server, TP-Link 24 port gigabit switch, and TP-Link 8 port gigabit switch. The SpeedTests are done one my desktop connected the 8 port switch. All wiring is CAT-6.

You might be right about the router, both Steam and SpeedTest seem to be topping out at 400 mbps. I haven't tried wireless yet, I'll have to do that in my iPhone 6+ since it's the only ac device I have.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You might be right about the router

Look for a gigabit LAN/WAN router, with "Hardware NAT" support. Also, don't flash 3rd-party firmwares, they don't support it, that I know of.

 

[freeskier93]

Look for a gigabit LAN/WAN router, with "Hardware NAT" support. Also, don't flash 3rd-party firmwares, they don't support it, that I know of.

I'll look at some new routers. The box they installed in the basement is a router that's hardwired to the fiber, right now it's just a passthrough, but when I get back home I'll test the speed directly at their box. That should tell me if our router is the issue.

 

[freeskier93]

Looks like our router is the bottleneck. Directly off their box using my laptop:

I would probably attribute that download to peak hour load.

EDIT: I also had to do some reading about the box they installed, it's a Optical Network Terminal, which is what converts the fiber to copper. It has the hard wired fiber line, power, and 4 RJ-45 out. I assumed because of the 4 ports it was also a router but it appears not. When the guy installed everything he hooked our router back up so I assumed he configured things as everything was working. It's not a router, 3 ports are dead and just the one is the WAN connection. I was hoping I could plug everything into their box and just use our wireless router as an AP but no dice. Looks like a new router is in order to get full speed.

 

[freeskier93]

After a bunch of research I decided to get an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. After looking at all the consumer stuff I just don't like the lack on real information and it seems like we go through routers constantly because they either crap out or are start getting flaky quickly. Plus to get a good router with something that appears to have hardware NAT is going to cost $100+. Minus well get a good quality enterprise router that will easily handle gigabit. I'll just use the old wireless router as an AP and throw it somewhere more convenient in the house.

 

[freeskier93]

Got the Ubiquiti router in this afternoon and set up...

 

[freeskier93]

Yes, that's a "busy writing to disk" message with an SSD.

 

[creativeBoulder]

Thanks freeskier93 for your input. That was a little over two years ago. Just curious as to how things are going now a-days? We just moved North Longmont (66th and Pratt) and are nearing the end of a 12 month agreement with Comcast. Since, probably 2003/2004, I have had Comcast (with a two year exception that I had Qwest now CenturyLink). Since I work from home about 95% of the time, I am highly critical of my internet connection. Comcast is really hit or miss. When we moved North Boulder about 6 years ago the speeds improved drastically but outages were frequent and the reasoning behind the outages were never sufficient. ie. There was an 8 hour outage over the holidays and they said "it was a human error where a worker at a substation basically mismanaged some hardware". While I appreciated the honesty, which is rare, that type of excuse has happened over 10 times just with in 2017.

Anyways, just curious to how NextLight has been treating you. What hardware you ended up with. As of now, I have a custom built server headed my way (just for Plex and more power consuming tasks such as compiling) and have an ASUS RT-664N running. NextLight should be installed on August 10th at the latest- which I'm really looking forward too.

Yes, that's a "busy writing to disk" message with an SSD.

 

[freeskier93]

Unfortunately we moved out of Longmont a little over a year ago (now in south Denver) so I've had to go back to dealing with Comcast and Century Link. Never had an issue with Nextlight, they were always great to work with.

Not sure what kind of pricing you will get, but if you get the $50 a month charter price for gigabit there's no competition. I don't remember what the non-charter prices are. TBH if you don't get the charter price I would probably go with a slower speed to save the money. I can actually get gigabit right now with Century Link, and it's actually not a horrible price (~$80 a month), but I feel for 75% of the usage it's a total waste. Your almost always limited by servers at the other end. Other then Steam the only other thing that could really take advantage of the speed was torrenting.

What I find far more beneficial is the asymmetric connection for a fast upload. You'll really want that for Plex and remote streaming.

Hardware wise the EdgeRouter is what I stuck with (and still use) along with Ubiquiti access points. Awesome hardware for the price and always super fast speeds. The only place the EdgeRouter falls on its face is if you want to do QoS. When you turn QoS on you no longer get hardware NAT, can't even keep up with my current 100 Mb connection. At this point the only other setup I'd consider is making my own box using Pfsense or something.

 

[creativeBoulder]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Much appreciated. Okay, yeah, my wife and I are on the same path. We ended up moving out of Boulder because of the crazy prices there. It just wasn't really feasible. We moved to a cheap apartment on the east side of Longmont which in retrospect was a terrible mistake. No matter how much money we ended up saving. Anyways, we ended up moving a tad north west. Love the neighborhood. It is actually quiet and so far all of the neighbors are truly nice.

As for pricing, The non-charter prices are not terrible. They are offering the Gig City discount at $59.99/month for 1gbps up and down stream and only $10 less per month for the Charter plan. As of know, we are locked in on the Charter plan and they are installing everything on Wednesday.

Now, I'll be frank and say that I am not really into torrenting. Streaming services have made it pretty much reasonable to not have to go through the hassle of working with torrents (or NZBs). Then again, it's always nice to have the option for items that are practically impossible to find streaming or that I honestly could not afford at the moment. I do like to archive for Plex- so there is that.

For me, I have been a broadband user since Comcast rolled out the test groups a long time ago and I as a web developer and programmer (and researcher), speed it paramount. I obviously could get by with out crazy speeds if needed. Between my wife and I, we usually use the 1TB/month but that also includes heavy Plex usage (with 5 sub accounts for family and friends). Using that much data seems crazy- Comcast swears that I am an outlier when it comes to usage. I also work from home and have been content with using a residential package instead of a business package.

I've been looking into the hardware. Thanks for the tips. QoS isn't usually a big deal for when it comes to local networking. My ASUS RT-644N/U has been a great device but it will be time for an upgrade soon. Pfsense has been recommended as well.

I'll try and post an update with how everything works out. Thanks again for the reply.

Unfortunately we moved out of Longmont a little over a year ago (now in south Denver) so I've had to go back to dealing with Comcast and Century Link. Never had an issue with Nextlight, they were always great to work with.

Not sure what kind of pricing you will get, but if you get the $50 a month charter price for gigabit there's no competition. I don't remember what the non-charter prices are. TBH if you don't get the charter price I would probably go with a slower speed to save the money. I can actually get gigabit right now with Century Link, and it's actually not a horrible price (~$80 a month), but I feel for 75% of the usage it's a total waste. Your almost always limited by servers at the other end. Other then Steam the only other thing that could really take advantage of the speed was torrenting.

What I find far more beneficial is the asymmetric connection for a fast upload. You'll really want that for Plex and remote streaming.

Hardware wise the EdgeRouter is what I stuck with (and still use) along with Ubiquiti access points. Awesome hardware for the price and always super fast speeds. The only place the EdgeRouter falls on its face is if you want to do QoS. When you turn QoS on you no longer get hardware NAT, can't even keep up with my current 100 Mb connection. At this point the only other setup I'd consider is making my own box using Pfsense or something.

 

[mnewsham]

Using that much data seems crazy- Comcast swears that I am an outlier when it comes to usage

In a house of 4 heavy internet users, I myself manage about 1.2 to 1.7TB per month, pretty much every month. The other users end up using another 1 to 1.5TB. The idea that a modern house should be fine on 1TB or less per month, in my mind is just not reasonable. Now obviously I am on the upper end of the spectrum, but with 4k and larger and larger game sizes I can easily see even more average users breaking 1TB in a month.

 

[creativeBoulder]

Oh I can see that. For sure. Last year we switched from unlimited LTE with T-Mobile to pre-paid setup with GoogleFi which has drastically changed how I utilize my home network. When I have younger family members visit our consummation just sky-rockets. T-Mobile was actually good with me. We had them for about 5 years and between the two of us, we would use about 50GB (EDIT- not 50TB, lol) of monthly data from them but now share 3-4GB of data which means we using our home network is crazy. I've really only heard good things about NextLight. So this month will be a good test run.

In a house of 4 heavy internet users, I myself manage about 1.2 to 1.7TB per month, pretty much every month. The other users end up using another 1 to 1.5TB. The idea that a modern house should be fine on 1TB or less per month, in my mind is just not reasonable. Now obviously I am on the upper end of the spectrum, but with 4k and larger and larger game sizes I can easily see even more average users breaking 1TB in a month.