Quality of home broadband vs business broadband

[marko2]

Mod - split from this thread (https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/coronavirus-what-impact-might-it-have-on-the-railways.202196/).

One thing to note about working form home - Home broadband is not guaranteed and has no SLA up time compared to business broadband. A lot of companies will start to throttle speeds once the network gets congested and speeds will start to slow down a lot - again business specific broadband has QOS (Quality of Service) SLAs

Yep. The bottom-feeding end of the consumer broadband industry is ruthlessly competitive. Customer support is one way they save costs (no doubt very busy with all of the extra users in the daytime encountering difficulties). Another is potentially on their network. At the evenings and weekends, when the traffic peaks usually occur, much of the traffic is streaming media such as TV (and porn) - which the bigger players network-edge-cache. VPNs traffic cannot be cached. Do they have the backhaul capacity?

 

[Bletchleyite]

One thing to note about working form home - Home broadband is not guaranteed and has no SLA up time compared to business broadband. A lot of companies will start to throttle speeds once the network gets congested and speeds will start to slow down a lot - again business specific broadband has QOS (Quality of Service) SLAs

My (fibre) broadband connection is much, much faster at all times than even our head office. Yes, there's no formal agreement so a backup (phone) is useful but really there is not a practical issue.

 

[nidave]

Yep. The bottom-feeding end of the consumer broadband industry is ruthlessly competitive. Customer support is one way they save costs (no doubt very busy with all of the extra users in the daytime encountering difficulties). Another is potentially on their network. At the evenings and weekends, when the traffic peaks usually occur, much of the traffic is streaming media such as TV (and porn) - which the bigger players network-edge-cache. VPNs traffic cannot be cached. Do they have the backhaul capacity?

I am currently doing a mirror of a server over a VPN (its 8tb) as the connection to the internal network is not going to cope with everyone having to work from home - most of the traffic is generated internally - going to be interesting to see if things dont just fall over next week - thankfully we are moving to Office 365 so its all started going on the cloud but there is still a lot of internal data being moved.

 

[marko2]

My (fibre) broadband connection is much, much faster at all times than even our head office. Yes, there's no formal agreement so a backup (phone) is useful but really there is not a practical issue.

This speaks volumes about your employer rather than anything else.

 

[nidave]

My (fibre) broadband connection is much, much faster at all times than even our head office. Yes, there's no formal agreement so a backup (phone) is useful but really there is not a practical issue.

Its not just that - think about the data going in and out of the company network as a % compared to the data transferred internally and if 90% of people try to shift that data over the connection into the company network as well as the normal external traffic.

edit: especially if you are adding things like voip phones via vpn - it all has to go into the internal network via that poor connection. There is a LOT of variables.

 

[Bletchleyite]

This speaks volumes about your employer rather than anything else.

It really doesn't.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Its not just that - think about the data going in and out of the company network as a % compared to the data transferred internally and if 90% of people try to shift that data over the connection into the company network as well as the normal external traffic.

Nope, all our services are 100% cloud, so everything is external at all times. No domain to log onto etc.

 

[nidave]

Nope, all our services are 100% cloud, so everything is external at all times. No domain to log onto etc.

Not even an internal voip system? (we are getting there but there are a lot of custom systems running internally)

 

[Bletchleyite]

Not even an internal voip system? (we are getting there but there are a lot of custom systems running internally)

Nope, we use Skype for Business and Teams.

 

[nidave]

Nope, we use Skype for Business and Teams.

Not every employer will have made that switch yet or fully done it - going to be interesting times. Its bad enough when Azure falls over

 

[Bletchleyite]

Not every employer will have made that switch yet or fully done it - going to be interesting times. Its bad enough when Azure falls over

It does help that we've been near enough like that from day one, I suppose We have been around a while but have always been quite forward-looking in that regard.

 

[nidave]

If you want to see the bandwidth used in the UK - this is a pretty interesting site: https://portal.linx.net/

 

[Darandio]

If you want to see the bandwidth used in the UK - this is a pretty interesting site: https://portal.linx.net/

Interesting to see bandwidth drops by about 1/2 at 4.15 ish pm

I think you mean am.

 

[nidave]

I think you mean am.

You are right - didnt notice it was 24hr time like an idiot Corrected

 

[plugwash]

If you want to see the bandwidth used in the UK - this is a pretty interesting site: https://portal.linx.net/

Be aware that site only shows traffic flowing over linx's public peering lans. It doesn't show traffic flow over private interconnects (whether provided by linx or not) or other exchange points.

 

[Snow1964]

It all depends on location and what you pay for, our relatively small (10 desk) office in shared office building, we pay for minimum of 80 mb (we are international and have internet meetings), but when I called my home internet provider to change as thought I was paying too much, they offered me new package of about 45mb with min 30 for less than used to pay. Didn’t use to have a minimum, previous contract had been a typical or max speed of about 32

The office uses fibre to premises, home is fibre to cabinet (at end of road about 150m away), with last bit the old copper phone cables.

So really depends on location, how close your fibre gets, and if you have a contract specifying minimum speed, or an older contract without a minimum. You have to pay more for higher minimums (so also depends on how much willing to spend)

 

[ajs1981]

Another home vs business broadband difference is issue resolution times (Often referred to as SLA - Service Level Agreement). Most home contracts are probably a day or longer, most work contracts are 4-8 hours.

 

[gordonthemoron]

My employer's UK VPN seems to be having problems with the number of employees working from home, so I'm using the US one as they start work later