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Testing 5Gbps residential FTTP on Fibre Heroes network

It may be worth getting in touch with them again as things have changed since then not promising anything but worth a try.
Good shout, I was just emailing them again as you were replying to me :)
 
What is the anticipated purpose of 5Gbps into individual homes other than to show it can be done? I can't see even a busy student house with 7-8 people all gaming and streaming and downloading at once needing a connection speed like that, let alone a single family house. I'm trying to figure out what could be done with it, perhaps some technology I haven't anticipated!

I'm currently on 40/10 VDSL and I'm finding that it's getting a bit sluggish, I'm noticing more and more pages (especially complicated ones like the YouTube homepage) taking longer to load, and I find the upload too slow for me to comfortably use cloud storage for anything more than documents - but I'm looking forward to upgrading to 100/100 when I move and can't see myself needing more.
 
What is the anticipated purpose of 5Gbps into individual homes other than to show it can be done? I can't see even a busy student house with 7-8 people all gaming and streaming and downloading at once needing a connection speed like that, let alone a single family house. I'm trying to figure out what could be done with it, perhaps some technology I haven't anticipated!
Well, if you ever wanted to run your own data centre.. now you can. :)
 
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What is the anticipated purpose of 5Gbps into individual homes other than to show it can be done? I can't see even a busy student house with 7-8 people all gaming and streaming and downloading at once needing a connection speed like that, let alone a single family house. I'm trying to figure out what could be done with it, perhaps some technology I haven't anticipated!
It's very cheap advertising as it gets reported on ("fastest broadband in the country!" and similar headlines), and increases the average revenue per customer. A 5Gbps customer realistically isn't going to move more data around than a 1Gbps customer would, except they might be paying £99 a month for it instead of £49. The increase over the margin that already existed on the 1Gbps product is pure profit.

In the case of a provider like Community Fibre, their 3Gbps product is only available to customers willing to agree to 24-month terms, so when compared to the 1Gbps plan they are taking £480 more from the 3Gbps customer over the duration of the contract which creates healthy accounts.
 
What is the anticipated purpose of 5Gbps into individual homes other than to show it can be done? I can't see even a busy student house with 7-8 people all gaming and streaming and downloading at once needing a connection speed like that, let alone a single family house. I'm trying to figure out what could be done with it, perhaps some technology I haven't anticipated!

I'm currently on 40/10 VDSL and I'm finding that it's getting a bit sluggish, I'm noticing more and more pages (especially complicated ones like the YouTube homepage) taking longer to load, and I find the upload too slow for me to comfortably use cloud storage for anything more than documents - but I'm looking forward to upgrading to 100/100 when I move and can't see myself needing more.
As it stands today there will be very few residential customers that can take full advantage of 5Gbps service but it’s more of a proof of concept today.
Of course in a few years time multi gig internet may well become the norm as we have seen in the past with average broadband speeds increasing and services demanding more faster connections.
 
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What's the quid pro quo for taking part in the trial?
I happen to have a 10Gbps home network with 10Gbps capable router and while speaking with their CTO mentioned this and I asked if they had any plans to test faster than 1Gbps speeds and they said yes they were looking to test and here we are.
 
I happen to have a 10Gbps home network with 10Gbps capable router and while speaking with their CTO mentioned this and I asked if they had any plans to test faster than 1Gbps speeds and they said yes they were looking to test and here we are.
Thanks. So this is very much a bespoke one-off technical trial 5Gbps - perhaps a bit of a soft marketing opportunity?

Do you know where they are testing the 10Gbps tier that Mark alluded to?
 
Thanks. So this is very much a bespoke one-off technical trial 5Gbps - perhaps a bit of a soft marketing opportunity?

Do you know where they are testing the 10Gbps tier that Mark alluded to?
Yup that’s right and not sure about the 10Gbps did not even know they were testing that until Mark said.
 
Yup that’s right and not sure about the 10Gbps did not even know they were testing that until Mark said.
Maybe if you had a 20Gbps home network they'd be letting you perform their 10Gbps trial ;)

(I'm politely jealous of your home network, and trialing 5Gbps. That said, for me my biggest bottleneck is WiFi. I notice you mentioned WiFi 6 being a bottleneck in the article, but obviously you also have a wiring.)
 
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@nsmhd When 5 Gbps is measured by any online service, do pfSense traffic graphs ever show transient bursts above 5 Gbps? Obviously, if you have a line rate connection of 5 Gbps, there cannot be any transient bursts above 5 Gbps, but 5 Gbps is not a standard line rate that I'm aware of and thus buffer and cache effects could account for bursts above the headline rate if the headline rate is implemented by QoS etc. (e.g. when EE cap me to 2 Mbps, I can easily seen transients of above 3 Mbps before throttling back).

From the above, it's seen that the loaded latency of 10 ms is the same as the unloaded latency which suggests to me that no link is saturated. One thing to check is whether the WAN links at higher than 5 Gbps (e.g. 10 Gbps). Using OPNsense, I need to have a refresh of 500 ms to catch transient behaviour as high as 500 Mbps when https://fast.com catches a transient behaviour of 400 Mbps. https://fast.com isn't intended to be used to benchmark a connection but if a user insists on using it for this purpose, it would be better to adjust the settings so that the minimum period of the test is 60 seconds (I believe the default is around 5 s, and the test producing the 6.2 Gbps transient was about 8.5 seconds) so that the transient behaviour is essentially eliminated.


1681218861936.webp


Below is an example of where a Surface Go returned a report of 300 Mbps which I wanted to confirm was even possible. A Samsung Tab 8 was used to confirm 300 Mbps was reached by the connection. Incidental information was that it reported transient behaviour of 400 Mbps which was confirmed by OPNsense as transient behaviour of 500 Mbps was seen which confirmed the 400 Mbps report as valid (but the test time is too short to claim this as the speed of the connection; Netflix streaming is a bursty service so sustained is less important than bursting above about 25 Mbps and this is reflected in their default short duration of test). The below also captures that the test was under 10 seconds which can only be used to give an indication of whether a connection is slow and cannot be used to claim a connection is fast (e.g. the sustained performance).

1681209258470.png
 
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@nsmhd When 5 Gbps is measured by any online service, do pfSense traffic graphs ever show transient bursts above 5 Gbps? Obviously, if you have a line rate connection of 5 Gbps, there cannot be any transient bursts above 5 Gbps, but 5 Gbps is not a standard line rate that I'm aware of and thus buffer and cache effects could account for bursts above the headline rate if the headline rate is implemented by QoS etc. (e.g. when EE cap me to 2 Mbps, I can easily seen transients of above 3 Mbps before throttling back).

From the above, it's seen that the loaded latency of 10 ms is the same as the unloaded latency which suggests to me that no link is saturated. One thing to check is whether the WAN links at higher than 5 Gbps (e.g. 10 Gbps). Using OPNsense, I need to have a refresh of 500 ms to catch transient behaviour as high as 500 Mbps when https://fast.com catches a transient behaviour of 400 Mbps. https://fast.com isn't intended to be used to benchmark a connection but if a user insists on using it for this purpose, it would be better to adjust the settings so that the minimum period of the test is 60 seconds (I believe the default is around 5 s, and the test producing the 6.2 Gbps transient was about 8.5 seconds) so that the transient behaviour is essentially eliminated.


View attachment 5959

Below is an example of where a Surface Go returned a report of 300 Mbps which I wanted to confirm was even possible. A Samsung Tab 8 was used to confirm 300 Mbps was reached by the connection. Incidental information was that it reported transient behaviour of 400 Mbps which was confirmed by OPNsense as transient behaviour of 500 Mbps was seen which confirmed the 400 Mbps report as valid (but the test time is too short to claim this as the speed of the connection; Netflix streaming is a bursty service so sustained is less important than bursting above about 25 Mbps and this is reflected in their default short duration of test). The below also captures that the test was under 10 seconds which can only be used to give an indication of whether a connection is slow and cannot be used to claim a connection is fast (e.g. the sustained performance).

View attachment 5952
Not noticed anything on the PFSense traffic logs over 5Gbps on the WAN interface.
The link to all houses is 10Gbps as it’s XGS-PON and they police aka traffic shape/ limit this down to what profile you pay for.

My circuit is a 5Gbps one so limited from 10Gbps down to 5Gbps.

I must say not sure if there having issues just now as when doing some speed tests just before I can’t seem to get much over 1Gbps upload download still fine though.
 
Hi all,
After over 3 years of waiting last Tuesday (28th March) I finally got FTTP installed at my home for the first time and I am very lucky to be trialling a 5Gbps symmetric residential service on Full Fibre Ltd aka Fibre Heroes network.
I have written a blog about my experience with the connection so far https://fttppro.co.uk/testing-5gbps-residential-fttp-with-fibre-heroes/

Let me know if you have anything you would like me to test on the connection or any questions etc.
A friend of mine of mine in Shrewsbury has had Fibre First kit on the telegraph pole outside his house since 2020.

He still cannot place an order.

Do they just cable up areas in the hope one of the bigger boys comes in and buys them out? Seems a ridiculous time to wait.
 
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