Advantage on selecting fibre broadband

S

satimis

Hi all,

I am at a crossroads in selecting subscription plan.

My current contract shall expire on about mid April, 2012. According to contract term I must submit 2 month notice to ISP if I'm not prepared to renew it.

Current contract: - 6Mbps ADSL, 1 fixed IP and 3 free email accounts of 6MB storage each.

I expect to change ADSL to DSL also with 1 fixed IP. I have no specific requirement on free email account. I only use it to communicate with ISP. Therefore 1 free email account will be sufficient. I'm now in contact of 2 new ISPs


1)
Broadband service provider via telephone line.
4Mbps/4Mbps DSL (2 year contract), 1 fixed IP and 3 free email account each of 50MB storage. The monthly subscription is cheaper than my current contract by 10%. Free wired router will be provided

2)
Fibre-to-the-home/building broadband service provider
100Mbps/100Mbps DSL (2 year contract), 1 fixed IP and 1 free email account of 20MB storage. The monthly subscription is about 47% more expensive than my current contract. No router will be provided. They will provide Cat5-E or fibre connection to their fibre network.

I'm quite interested on the speed of fibre broadband except the monthly subscription is more expensive. I'm willing to absorb the increase on subscription if there will be an advantage to my work.

I have only 2 physical servers, one for redundancy. I'm running virtualization, i.e. about 30 VMs (virtual servers) on each box. Most VMs are running Linxu/Unix OS. I'm running them mainly for testing, only 2/3 of them for working, mail and web servers, but without heavy traffic.

Several years ago I used dynamic IP with free dyndns and curl to monitor the router address. Any changes wget will notify free dyndns which in turn will use the inbound tcp address to update/propagate their records. It worked without problem on single domain. However I couldn't make it work on multiple domains. Therefore I use fixed/static IP afterwards.

Please shed me some lights whether there will be advantage for me on selecting fibre broadband? TIA

B.R.
satimis
 
Fibre will typically be far more reliable, as you're not affected by electrical interference, and typically fibre cabling is far newer than copper as well. xDSL typically has no guarantee of service level, and even if you are on a 6megabit plan, you may not actually achieve that speed due to line conditions/interference.

Fibre is usually also symmetrical (send/receive speed the same) whereas 6Mbit xDSL is probably not (upload speed will be a lot slower than download speed).

Fibre is better in every way, but the only one who can answer whether or not the cost is worth it for you, is you.

If it is to support infrastructure that will cost you money or reputation damage if it goes down, fibre will probably be worth it.
 
Roughly 1.5x the price for 25x the download speed (and even more x the upload speed)? And you have to seriously consider this? :) I'd be jumping all over the fibre link.

Going from 7/1 Mbps cable to 25/7 Mbps was absolutely huge for us, especially since the first year is the same price as we were originally paying, and then it only goes up by $10/mth.

Going from 6 Mbps to 100 Mbps would be insane. :) Why are you even waffling over it?
 
It'd make the budget fit ;)

I wish I could get fibre.. I currently have ADSL and can't move to VDSL because I'm too far off :(

The 1Mbit/s upstream is really killing me. Uploading something to youtube takes forever.
 
Yes, I wish I could get fibre too.
In addition to the thing already listed, here is another advantage of fibre:
for an upgrade, you only need to change the "box" at one or both ends of the fibre. So it is future-proof for a longer time.
 
I would move to fiber without thinking. If not for any other reason than being more future-proof.

If the budget is too tight, perhaps you could ask for a smaller allocation: a 10/10Mbit/s connection might also be available, but not on general offer. Call them and ask.

I would easily pay 1.5x as much as I am paying not to get a 100/100Mbit/s connection.

If you have customers which are using your servers - you can offer them a faster connection. If a lot of customers are down- or uploading at the same time, you will not cripple their speed - they will be the limit.

When updating software - faster. Generally better.
 
Hi all,

Lot of thanks for your advice.

I have following points expected to be clarified;
  1. The Broadband service provider, 4Mbps/4Mbps DSL max, abovementioned can provide 200M fibre connection for Internet access ONLY. But when I requested for fixed IP they only offered 4Mbps/4Mbps DSL, saying that this was fibre connection. However I doubt why fibre connection for fixed IP only at such slow speed 4Mbps/4Mbps?
  2. Do fibre connection need cable modem? ISP -> Modem -> Router -> PC? If 'No', how is the PC connected to ISP network?
  3. Can fibre connection use Cat-5E cable to connect ISP network?

TIA

B.R.
satimis
 
  1. Consumer-grade Internet connections rarely allow you to get a static IP address. And they can ramp up the "speed" to high levels since they don't have to guarantee it. "Get 'up to' 200 Mbps" on the consumer connection means you'll probably only get 20-30 Mbps regularly, with the occasional spike above that.

    Business grade Internet connections generally include static IPs, and lower speeds as the speed is guaranteed (4 Mbps means you always get 4 Mbps). Generally, it costs more to have that static IP and guaranteed speed.
  2. Depends on the ISP. There's no "modem" per se, but some kind of junction box. May be an ethernet-to-atm converter, may be a PPPoE end-point, may be a router, may just be a switch. Computers in your home/business plug into a switch. That switch plugs into a router. That router plugs into the ISP fibre network.
  3. Depends on the ISP. See point 2 above.

We have a private fibre network connecting 10 sites in town to the school board office. In the school, the connection looks like this:
Code: 
PCs -> LAN switch -> firewall -> fibre switch at school -> fibre switch at board office -> core router -> Internet

Some of our schools have E10 (10 Mbps) fibre connections. In the school, the connection looks like:
Code: 
 PCs -> LAN switch -> firewall -> router -> fibre box -> Internet

Most of our schools have ADSL connections. In the school, the connection looks like:
Code: 
 PCs -> LAN switch -> firewall -> router -> ADSL modem -> Internet
 
Hi phoenix,

Thanks for your detail explanation.

ISP on 1) and ISP on 2) abovementioned in my original posting are competitors. ISP on 2) also offers consumer-grade Internet connection without static IP address. The month subscription is much lower than that with static IP address. They offered me business-grade connection with static IP at 100Mbps/100Mbps both way. Of course the monthly subscription is much higher. They emailed me a draft contract indicating "Bandwidth (Upstream and Downstream) 100Mbps/100Mbps * with One fixed IP address. The monthly subscription is about 60% more than ISP on 1). The speed is quite interesting. But if I don't need such a bandwidth I just burn my money. I have to take a thorough consideration even though I have no budget limit.

B.R.
satimis
 
If you can live with a slightly lower SLA, and you are not required to always have the full speed - I might go with the consumer grade connection. Personally I could live very well with having 20 Mbit/s during high-use time, with a full 100 Mbit/s during off-peak time. Depends on your usage and how heavy the overbooking is. My local telco is generally good at not over-booking too much, so most of the speed is available.

Regarding the static IP - have you tried DNS aliases? domain1.net -> domain.dynamic.net
 
mix_room said:
- snip -

Regarding the static IP - have you tried DNS aliases? domain1.net -> domain.dynamic.net
Click to expand...

I tried it several years before. It worked for single domain name without problem. I run servers on the virtual machine mainly for testing. I won't run all of them at the same time. Actually only one web server and one email server are working for production. The traffic is not heavy. 100Mbps/100Mbps to me is over speed.

Monthly subscription
4Mbps/4Mbps single fixed IP USD50/month (approx)
100Mbps/100Mbps single fixed IP USD70/month (approx)

With only USD20/month I can get 96Mbps/96Mbps speed increase that attracts me.

Consumer fibre connection 100Mbps/100Mbps is only USD20/month (approx). Contract period is 30 months with 6 months free, i.e. the average being only USD16/month. If I can short out testing multiple domain names on dynamic IP I would definitely go consumer fibre connection.

B.R.
satimis
 
For 20 USD extra, or about 4 Big Macs (depending on location), you get a 25 times as fast connection. I would have to pay roughly 20 USD for a fixed IP.
70 USD seems cheap for a business grade 100/100Mbit/s connection.
 
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