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

Internet access discussion, including Fusion, IP Broadband, and Gigabit Fiber!
143 posts Page 9 of 15
by rsingel » Thu Feb 02, 2023 3:18 pm
mabruce wrote:My understanding is that the 1 Gbe port on the ONT is inactive. Only the 10 Gbe port should be used.
I just tested this and both ports are active for me. So I have the 10Gbpe port direct to the Mac Mini, getting 8Gbs down and 7 up, while the 1Gb port feeds into my wireless router. I was getting 500Mbps down on wifi on my phone simultaneous with the other test.

That means I can wait for a nice deal on a Wifi 6 or 7 router with dual 10 Gb ports, while still getting a ridiculous speed on the Mac Mini.
by artakamoose » Fri Feb 03, 2023 12:00 am
rsingel wrote:
mabruce wrote:My understanding is that the 1 Gbe port on the ONT is inactive. Only the 10 Gbe port should be used.
I just tested this and both ports are active for me. So I have the 10Gbpe port direct to the Mac Mini, getting 8Gbs down and 7 up, while the 1Gb port feeds into my wireless router. I was getting 500Mbps down on wifi on my phone simultaneous with the other test.

That means I can wait for a nice deal on a Wifi 6 or 7 router with dual 10 Gb ports, while still getting a ridiculous speed on the Mac Mini.
That's really dangerous since the ONT doesn't have a firewall. Your Mac Mini is getting a public IP and (assuming you have it turned on) you're relying on the Mac's built in software firewall to secure the machine. I'm no security expert; but from all I've ever read, that's a really bad idea.
by rsingel » Fri Feb 03, 2023 10:17 am
I did turn on the Mac firewall, which is more than enough safety for me. MacOS has a very solid surface level.

But yes if you're going to try to replicate my model, which is plugging in a Mac mini or similar computer that has 10 Gbpe port into the Sonic ONT 10 Gb port and then connecting your home wireless router into the 1 GB Sonic ONT port, the computer plugged directly in should have a firewall turned on or otherwise be safe by not having software running on that computer listening on ports.

Also FYI for anyone trying this, I also connected the Mac mini by Wi-Fi to the Wi-Fi router (e.g. both on ethernet and on Wi-Fi). That allows it to be on the local area network (for example to connect to a media server on your local network) but that connection appears to be over Wi-Fi so transfer speeds to and from the computer connected to the 10 GB port are sub 1 gigabit locally.
by mkobb » Sat Feb 04, 2023 7:00 pm
erwincoumans wrote: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.
Yeah, your upload speed going through your infrastructure was faster than your direct-connect upload. But it was still roughly the same order of magnitude. The weirdness in my case is that my direct-connect upload was extremely slow while my upload through my infrastructure was significantly faster, but still a bit less than half of my download speed.

Relatedly, I'm actually kind of disappointed in my real-world downloads. I frequently download very large files from a service that is hosted on Akamai's CDN. On my AT&T fiber, I would get ~800 Mbps from the CDN. I was expecting great things from my Sonic fiber (although I knew I would be limited to ~1Gbps by the hardware doing the actual download on my end.) But my downloads measured only about 550Mbps on Sonic. I ran speed tests to verify that there wasn't some sort of temporary issue with the connection, but I was able to max out my UDM-SE's internal speed test at 6 Gbps. So the raw connection is fast; it seems like there's some kind of limitation where Sonic's connection to Akamai is not as fast as AT&T's was.
by ngufra » Mon Feb 13, 2023 12:09 pm
For those willing to use Chinese equipment, Xiaomi released a 10 G router aptly named Xiaomi Router 10000
It sells for $399 on bang good (shipped from China.)

https://www.banggood.com/XIAOMI-10-Giga ... 79726.html
by virtualmike » Mon Feb 13, 2023 2:13 pm
How high will it float?
by artakamoose » Mon Feb 13, 2023 7:08 pm
virtualmike wrote:How high will it float?
News at 11: local house attacked by F22s.
by dane » Wed Feb 15, 2023 10:18 am
laikitso wrote:
keithah42 wrote: I use SpeedTest++ compiled on my Mac and here are some of the tests I've ran: (for some reason, it doesn't always give me speed result urls that I can link)
https://www.speedtest.net/result/14017136089.png
https://www.speedtest.net/result/14019101464.png
https://www.speedtest.net/result/14026820841.png
Interesting. It looks like taganaka's speedtest client is more optimized than the official one.

Code: Select all

root@f1911de6fa8a:/SpeedTest# ./SpeedTest --share --test-server speedtest.sjc.sonic.net:8080 --output verbose
SpeedTest++ version 1.14
Speedtest.net command line interface
Info: https://github.com/taganaka/SpeedTest
Author: Francesco Laurita <francesco.laurita@gmail.com>

IP: 0.0.0.0 ( Sonic.net, LLC ) Location: [0,0]
Selected server: speedtest.sjc.sonic.net:8080
Ping: 2 ms.
Jitter: 0 ms.
Determine line type (2) ........................
Fiber / Lan line type detected: profile selected fiber

Testing download speed (32) ........................................................................................................................................................................................................
Download: 9893.10 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed (12) ........................................................................................................................................................................................................
Upload: 10742.25 Mbit/s
Loving all of this. Smoking fast internet! Please tell a neighbor to switch. =)
Dane Jasper
Sonic
by iaincole » Tue Mar 28, 2023 3:23 pm
dane wrote:
johnhontran wrote:I have a computer nearby I'll plug it directly to that to test tonight. Will check and see what speed I'm getting from the ONT.

Then again i would expected the installer would have tested it to see what type of bandwidth the ONT is providing.
Yes, they're supposed to. But I checked your individual installation workflow and I only see tests from a phone on WiFi. I've already got an inquiry in to field to check on that.

But fundamentally, fiber-optic networks don't go different speeds. It's XGS-PON, which is 10Gbps technology, and which after all of the various overheads delivers about 8,600Mbps of payload throughput. Seeing lower speeds would almost always mean issues with the capacity of something like the customer premise router, or a limitation in how you're connected - Ethernet cable, laptop/desktop Ethernet capacity, IO capacity of the computer, av software interfering with performance, etc. And don't get me started on WiFi. =)
So, XGS-PON has a theoretical maximum of 8.6Gb (this article has a lot of detailed info as to why https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9271741) and with a standard TCP overhead (common speed tests are TCP) that number becomes around 8.1Gbps. So really you should expect to see a maximum speed of around 8.1Gbps when doing speed tests. While this is a little disappointing for tinkerers like me who want to optimize as much as possible, it's hard to really complain about given the outstanding performance/price that the service offers.

I would, however, argue that this information could be a bit more up front. It probably hasn't mattered much because most people aren't going to have routing hardware to hit these limits, but as these devices become cheaper and more popular people are going to start seeing that the numbers don't add up and will want to know why.

I think Sonic could improve the documentation, for example here https://www.sonic.com/residential/internet
"What equipment do I need to optimize Sonic’s 10-Gigabit connection?"

"Getting the maximum speed of 10 Gigabits requires 10 Gigabit-capable equipment. 10-Gigabit ports are required on your personal devices to achieve maximum speed. These fast speeds are achieved using ethernet cables irrespective of device location. Ethernet outperforms WiFi and achieves around 9400 Mbps with 10-Gigabit Ethernet. Please see our helpful article for more tips on maximizing your speed."
The way this is phrased makes it technically correct, but in the context of a 10Gb residential internet FAQ for a XGS-PON service the 9400 number is a number that you simply can't achieve and is unhelpful at best and misleading at worst.

The helpful article linked in the quote is here https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/article ... ion-WiFi-6 and is really where I think there is room to go in to more detail about what the maximum theoretical speed of the 10Gb service is.

This article focuses heavily on WiFi and why you're not going to see 10Gb/s with WiFi, this is totally fair and is likely to be the main source of questions for the less-technically-inclined. However it does say under "Connected via Ethernet" that you can expect "Up to 10Gb/s" which should realistically be "Up to 8.6Gb/s". Also there's a typo on this help page, it says that the "Expected WiFi Speeds" of 802.11ax are "500Mb/s up to 1,500Gb/s" 1500Gb/s!!!!! That's amazing!!!

I'm not saying that Sonic should be advertising their service as "8.6Gb Fiber Internet" because I have at least a vague understanding of how marketing works, however I think it would be good to document the theoretical maximum somewhere in the official help pages so that people who are trying to find / configure the right hardware to maximize their speeds don't have to waste time digging through forums to find out they're already hitting the limit.

I only came across this thread because it was linked to me by Customer Support when I was asking them about this (thanks btw). Doing a Google search for "sonic 10gb max speed" shows me the following result:
Image

Google is not being particularly helpful here but it shows how misleading this can be to someone who isn't going to dig in to the details. This thread is the only place I've found the actual answer so far and it is titled "What equipment to buy for Sonic 10 Gigabits Fiber" so probably isn't going to show up very high in any search results.

Anyway, love the service, I think being up front about a slightly-lower-but-still-amazing speed would be a good idea.
by oshanruiz » Sun Apr 30, 2023 10:36 am
Hi All,
So other than ubiquiti setups what is the concensus on what currently to buy?
I'm thinking max 2.5gb "switch to switch" with one workstation getting full 2.5 is what I am aiming for with current network setup/budget
Been lookin at these:

ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AX6000
https://amzn.to/3Ln7RED

ASUS RT-AX88U Pro
https://amzn.to/3Hq7c42
143 posts Page 9 of 15

Who is online

In total there are 32 users online :: 2 registered, 0 hidden and 30 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 999 on Mon May 10, 2021 1:02 am

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot], spencerw and 30 guests