[Guide] What equipment to buy for Sonic 10 Gigabits Fiber

[mabruce]

I don’t have a 10G router so I haven’t tested a direct connection from my desktop (plus I don’t feel like moving half of my under stairs closet out of the way to change the cable from my patch panel to the ONT). My sudden IPv6 issue from another thread was resolved on its own without anyone from Sonic directly responding so I’m sure they’re working on it. From a few posts prior it sounds like there’s a known NOC issue so I’d wait until that is resolved before going down the testing rabbit hole.

[platypus9000]

I had a Mac Studio and didn't realize it had a 10 gig ethernet port. Tried putting it in the room where the ONT is and I see similar results to what I saw with all the Thunderbolt adapters and the ONT - 800-900mbits.

A tech from Sonic visited me today and determined that the issue is not with my hardware, fiber run, or with the ONT. There is a ticket with the NOC. I got the impression that this may be a common issue in my area (downtown san jose).

Did the tech give any time frame on a fix for the area and if each of us has to get a truck rolled to our place for the same thing?

I was told this afternoon to retry my speed test and I got 8200 mbps downstream and 1200 mbps upstream. Maybe others in the area who were having issues should try again now as well.

[iwilson4]

Well, I just clocked in at 1926/3344 on my NAS's new 10GbE adapter, so I guess that's an improvement. Hopefully they can continue tweaking on their end to bring us a little closer.

[mkobb]

Got my 10g service installed in Belmont a week ago, and I'm getting some very confusing speed test results. My router is a Unifi Dream Machine SE. Here's what I've experienced so far.

1. Initially, I had the Sonic modem's 10G port connected to the UDM-SE's 2.5Gbps RJ45 WAN port. With this configuration, the UDM-SE's built-in speed test registered ~2.3Gbps up and down, which seemed to be basically maxing out the port when factoring in overhead. So far so good. Of course, I wanted faster.
2. I ordered a Unifi 10Gbps RJ45 SFP+ module and installed it and connected that interface to the Sonic modem with a Cat6A cable. The built-in speed test registered ~6Gb down, but only ~1.8Gbps up. Why would the built-in test be slower on uploads with the SFP+ port than on the 2.5Gbps RJ45? (I did go back to that RJ45 to double-check that it wasn't just a transient issue with the speed test server, but the results were again ~2.3Gbps.)
3. Having read Dane's admonitions about the unreliability of speed tests built into routers, I went ahead and ordered a Thunderbolt 4 10Gbps interface to connect to my Mac, which is a 2021 16" M1 Macbook Pro with three 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4 ports. (I got the one from OWC.) I also downloaded the native Speedtest app for the Mac. I had also read that there were some potential upload speed issues with certain SFP+ modules on the UDM, and everybody recommended this particular unit from MicroTIK. So I ordered one from Amazon as well, even though it seemed like using a Unifi module in the Unifi router should be solid.
4. The OWC interface arrived today, so I direct-connected the Mac to my Sonic modem using that new interface and ran the native speed test. 8.1Gbps down, woo-hoo! And 1.0Gbps up, woo-huh wait what the hell?! I ran this test multiple times, and those numbers were quite consistent. I'm using the Sonic speed test server, although I tried some others including one of the ones listed in this thread. The Sonic server was the fastest. How could the native Mac direct-connect upload be so much slower than the router's test? I even tried different Thunderbolt ports, just in case.
5. The MicroTIK SFP+ interface also arrived today, so I swapped that in for the WAN connection on the UDM and ran the built-in test. The results were identical to the previous test with the Unifi module (~6 down / 1.8 up), so no apparent change using the magic MicroTIK.
6. I put the Unifi SFP+ back into the WAN slot, and I put the MicroTIK into the LAN slot on the UDM. Then I connected the Thunderbolt interface to the MicroTIK. So now instead of going direct to the modem from the Mac, I'm going through the UDM-SE. The download speed was 8.1Gbps down, as with the direct connection. Upload numbers have varied, but they have all been faster than any other permutation. I got a number of ~3-3.5Gbps runs, and the best test I got was 4.6Gbps up!

So, I'm really, really confused. Why is the native app direct-connect upload performance so poor?? Why is it faster going through the UDM? And why is the UDM's upload speed so different on the SFP+ port from its 2.5Gbps RJ45 port?

The good news in all of this is that I have little need for fast upload, and the download speeds are consistently blazing fast.

[artakamoose]

I'm guessing you have IDS, IPS, and Smart Queues turned off on the UDM SE? If not, try the tests with those features turned off.

[mkobb]

Yes, IDS/IPS are off, as are Smart Queues.

[erwincoumans]

Got my 10g service installed in Belmont a week ago, and I'm getting some very confusing speed test

Also in Belmont, CA:

Getting about 10G download, 8Gbit upload using ASUS RT-AX89X Router connected to Sonic ONT using 10G port, then 10G switch (Unify Flex XG 10Gbit) connected to Asus router using second 10G port and 10GBase-T SFP+ Transceiver, 10G T, 10G Copper, RJ-45 SFP+ CAT.6a Module, and Sonnet 10G Solo USB-C/thunderbolt network cards and TP-Link 10GB PCIe Network Cards (TX401). This is using native apps (Ookla or open source). Browser based tests are slightly slower: about 8Gbit download for https://www.sonic.com/speedtest

Code: Select all

./SpeedTest
SpeedTest++ version 1.14
Speedtest.net command line interface
Info: https://github.com/taganaka/SpeedTest
Author: Francesco Laurita <francesco.laurita@gmail.com>

Finding fastest server... 10 Servers online
..........
Server: San Francisco, CA sf-speedtest.race.com:8080 by Race Communications (23.0115 km from you): 3 ms
Ping: 3 ms.
Jitter: 0 ms.
Determine line type (2) ........................
Fiber / Lan line type detected: profile selected fiber

Testing download speed (32) ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Download: 9234.31 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed (12) ........................................................................................................................................................................................................
Upload: 7970.79 Mbit/s

My 'official' Ookla speedtest had a bit slower results: 8Gbit download, 7Gbit upload, https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/511168479

[mkobb]

That's encouraging. Out of curiosity, did you ever direct-connect to the Sonic modem to run a speed test, or did you go through your other infrastructure. I'm still scratching my head as to why my upload speed was exceptionally slow when connected directly to the modem.

[allsport2001]

Well after talking to tech support about this issue again about getting a truck rolled due to the speed they finally got in contact with network ops and opened a ticket with them. then today I noticed I didnt have an active connection with sonic, UDM SE told me it went down since 2am last night so did a power cycle and now I am finally getting 8000/8000 hopefully everyone is getting fixed soon. Thanks Sonic for fixing my connection!

[erwincoumans]

That's encouraging. Out of curiosity, did you ever direct-connect to the Sonic modem to run a speed test, or did you go through your other infrastructure. I'm still scratching my head as to why my upload speed was exceptionally slow when connected directly to the modem.

This was going through the infrastructure (router, switch, nic). I just ran a speed test using direct connecting the network card to the sonic modem, and results are similar, so there isn't much overhead.

Those two tests are taking within a few minutes, using Sonnet 10 G https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07BZRK8R8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 on Macbook M1with Speed test executable and Cat7 ethernet cable (should be same as Cat 6a)

direct connection to modem:
https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/511558073

going through router and switch
https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/511558781