[LibreQoS] The New Zealand broadband report

[Jim Forster]

Jon,

I couldn’t resist asking you for comment. :-)

Jim

> On Nov 9, 2023, at 4:56 PM, Dave Taht via LibreQoS <libreqos at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> 
> https://comcom.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/329515/MBNZ-Winter-Report-28-September-2023.pdf
> 
> While this is evolving to be one of the best of government reports I
> know of, leveraging samknows rather than ookla, it has
> a few glaring omissions that I wish someone would address.
> 
> It does not measure web page load time. This is probably a relative
> constant across all access technologies, limited only by the closeness
> of the (latency) to the web serving site(s).
> 
> It does not break out non-lte, non-5g fixed wireless. I am in touch
> with multiple companies within NZ that use unlicensed or licensed
> spectrum such as uber.nz that are quite proud of how competitive they
> are with fiber. Much of the 5g problem is actually backhaul routing in
> this report's case. Rural links can also have more latency because of
> how far away from the central servers they are in the first place, it
> would be good if future reports did a bit more geo-location to
> determine how much latency was unavoidable due to the laws of physics.
> 
> My second biggest kvetch is on figure 16. The differences in latency
> under load are *directly* correlated to a fixed and overlarge buffer
> size across all these technologies running at different bandwidths.
> More speed, at the same buffering = less delay. The NetAlyzer research
> showed this back in 2011  - so if they re-plotted this data in the way
> described below -  they would derive the same result. Sadly the
> netalyzer project died due to lack of funding and the closest I have
> to being able to have a historical record of dslreports variant of the
> same test is via the internet archive.
> 
> https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/results/bufferbloat?up=1
> 
> To pick one of those datasets and try to explain them -
> 
> https://web.archive.org/web/20180323183459/http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/results/bufferbloat?up=1
> 
> The big blue blobs were the default buffersizes in cable 2018 at those
> upload speeds. DSL was similar. Fiber historically had saner values
> for buffering in the first place - but I am seeing bad clusters of
> 100+ms extra ms at 100Mbit speeds there.
> 
> dslreports has been dying also, so anything much past 2020 is suspect
> and even before then, as the site was heavily used by people tuning
> their SQM/fq_codel/or cake implementations, not representative of the
> real world, which is worse. The test also cuts off at 4 seconds. This
> and most speedtests we have today do not include tests that do not
> complete - which is probably the most important indicator of genuine
> problems.
> 
> My biggest kvetch (for decades now) is that none of the tests test up
> + down + voip or videoconferencing, just sequentially. This is the
> elephant in the room, the screenshare or upload moment when a home
> internet gets glitchy, your videoconference freezes or distorts, or
> your kids scream in frustration at missing their shot in their game. 1
> second of induced latency on the upload link makes a web page like
> slashdot, normally taking
> 10s, take... wait for it... 4 minutes. This very easily demonstrable
> to anyone that might disbelieve this....
> 
> Despite my advocacy of fancy algorithms like SFQ, fq_codel or cake,
> the mere adoption across the routers along the edge of a correct FIFO
> buffersize for the configured bandwidth would help enormously,
> especially for uploads.  We are talking about setting *one* number
> here correctly for the configured bandwidth. We are not talking about
> recompiling firmware, either. Just one number, set right. I typically
> see 1256 packet buffers, where at 10Mbit, not much more than 50 packet
> buffers is needed. Ideally that gets set in bytes... or replaced with
> at the very least, SFQ, which has been in linux since 2002.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
> Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos
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