[LibreQoS] The New Zealand broadband report

Mon Nov 20 06:12:31 EST 2023

My larger point is that the relationship between overbuffering and
latency under load is VERY statistically significant, and independent
of the underlying physical transport, and if it were called out more,
we would more rapidly see an improvement here, across all technologies
you survey. As an example in the USA, both COX and Comcast have
deployed DOCSIS pie (RFC8033), in the past few years - 3-4x
improvements! From looking at your data, that seems not to have
happened yet there, and knowledge of the netalyzer work and all the
bufferbloat research that followed, spreading still all too slowly.

The rfc8290 technology the wisps have been deploying is pretty great,
but of course I would say that benign one of the authors! I hope that
these algorithms become common against all network infrastructure
types some day.  Fiber benefits too!

It just involves rigorously creating a correct buffering number on the
cpe, or putting in a better algorithm, to deploy, nearly no new
physical infrastructure.

I liked the dslreports style of report which tried to call out winning
and losing ISPs on its metrics. It would spur competition. Thx for
engaging a bit! I otherwise like this reporting series a lot!

On Mon, Nov 20, 2023 at 3:14 AM Brewer, Jonathan <jon at brewer.nz> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> The WISP association in NZ claims coverage of 70k households, but this includes many situations where WISPs purchase wholesale 4G, fibre, or even VDSL from the larger operators and resell where it's available. Then there are a few WISPs who operate 4G/LTE networks based on Telrad and Cambium cnRanger too. Our Commerce Commission still doesn't understand how it all works and continues to use "WiMAX" to describe the mainly 5 GHz Ubiquiti and Cambium FWA networks used by Uber (mentioned below) and many others.
>
> So the reason the report doesn't break out non-lte, non-5g FWA is that it's probably not more than a few tens of thousands of subscribers, and not statistically significant. These providers do great work and more than 30 of them are customers of my radio engineering practice, but few have significant numbers of non-LTE, non-5G FWA.
>
> I've attached a different report from NZ's ComCom that might be of interest as it looks at the industry makeup, not just performance.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jon
>
> On Mon, 20 Nov 2023 at 13:35, Jim Forster <jim at connectivitycap.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > LibreQoS mailing list
>> > LibreQoS at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/libreqos
>>
>
>
> --
> Web: https://jon.brewer.nz/
> Mobile +64 27 502 8230
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>

-- 
:( My old R&D campus is up for sale: https://tinyurl.com/yurtlab
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos