First step to Improve Home Networking Performance, don't run Internet Connectionat 100%

May 23, 2017 Dave Ohara

Of the things that you have at home what runs at 100% of capacity? Your heating and cooling? No. Your fridge? Your lights? Your Car? No. Would you run your kids, family or dog at 100%? No.

Yet almost everyone expects their Internet Connection to run at 100%. I did. I fell into the trap of running speedtest, fast.com, speedof.me to see if the Internet Connection is working. The only data I had is the speed and latency.

QOS settings would be there, but so hard to use. So blindly think that all is good.

Then I decided to try Pfsense Traffic Shaper. And, one of the first things you need to do is input upload and download to use the network at 96% of top speeds. Why? Because running the network at 100% is not good. And without a traffic shaper the capacity will go to 100% for a large file which affects all other traffic.

Does it work to use Traffic Shaper? The best test is my son saying Xbox One Grand Theft Auto is so much better. Audio is perfect. No lag. No drops. And it is so much more fun to play.

A benefit to me is the inline writing and editing in squarespace is now better as Web pages have a higher priority. VOIP has top priority. Next is Games. Facetime and Web are in the middle. oh yeh game IMAP, POP3, and SMTP a mid level priority too. P2P traffic is the lowest.

Here is an article on setting up PFsense Traffice Shaper.

Thanks to my Netgate SG-2220 and PFsense software running as a firewall with Unifi Cloud Key and Access points I am making improvements in my home network. I also have a Xirrus AP and another router when i really mess things up, but haven't done that for months now.

Greening the Local Area Network with Passive Optical LAN

March 26, 2017 Dave Ohara

I have been in the world of Wireless Access Points and Mobile for months now, and part of what I started looking at is with 802.11ax coming in 2019-2029 an access point is going to need a 10G connection. Well actually even now there are needs for over 1gigabit connections to access points. The access point I have been playing with for the past week is Xirrus XD2-240 which has a maximum bandwidth of 6.9Gbps. I have two gigabit ethernet connections to the AP which I can set up for failover, aggregate, or load balancing.

An active multimode fiber local area network would be an option to 10gig copper, and scale to higher speeds. Then I found information on passive optical lan (POL). This is the same technology used for FTTH. In researching POL I found information how much greener POL can be. Nokia has this post.

“For example, the amount of power consumed by a traditional Ethernet local area network (LAN) is significant. All the active switches and aggregators, not to mention the air conditioning units needed to cool these components, consume a lot of electricity.

A new technology is beginning to gain traction that promises to boost the LAN’s performance and make it much, much greener.

Passive Optical LAN (POL) is to Ethernet LAN what fiber-to-the-home is to copper telephone lines.

POL brings the power of fiber optic broadband technology to enterprises, university campuses, hospitals, hotels or anywhere else that uses a local area network. It is both cheaper and more powerful than Ethernet and, as well as lower energy consumption, holds many other advantages.

Passive technology actively saves 20-40% in energy

CablesThe clue to POL’s energy efficiency is in its name: it is a passive technology. For example, it only needs passive splitters to aggregate data from users and end-points whereas Ethernet relies on active components. Also, POL can be run on a centralized architecture – a rarity in Ethernet LANs larger than a few hundred end-points – and signals can travel up to 30km without needing to be boosted, so there is no need for a server room at the end of every corridor. The performance of a typical POL switch (known as an optical line terminal) is also much greater than an Ethernet switch, so you don’t need as many. In fact, whereas organizations often run separate LANs for different services, POL can handle everything in one. The overall energy savings of POL are therefore substantial.

A comparative study of POL and Ethernet LAN by our Bell Labs Consulting team calculated energy savings of between 20% and 40%, depending on the size and configuration of the LAN. These kinds of figures are invaluable for meeting targets for green initiatives such as LEED certification. And they contribute greatly to POL’s 5-year total cost of ownership being 20%-60% cheaper than active Ethernet solutions.

Cheap and green. Now that’s a good combination. This way to a greener LAN.”

— https://blog.networks.nokia.com/optical/2016/04/20/saving-energy-greener-lan/

I'll write more about POL and other fiber technologies in addition to wireless.

Microsoft and Facebook Partner for Atlantic cable from VA to Spain, a step in connecting the World

May 26, 2016 Dave Ohara

Microsoft's PR group sent me the announcement of the new Atlantic cable project with Facebook. There is a race to wire the world and this is just one more step by a couple of the big players.

There is a blog entry. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/server-cloud/2016/05/26/microsoft-and-facebook-to-build-subsea-cable-across-atlantic/

Wired has some statement from Facebook. http://www.wired.com/2016/05/facebook-microsoft-laying-giant-cable-across-atlantic/

““If you look at the cable systems across the Atlantic, a majority land in the Northeast somewhere,” says Najam Ahmad, Facebook’s vice president of network engineering. “This gives us so many more options.””

Best 8 Watts of Power Spent in Home Office - PFSense Opensource Firewall

May 18, 2016 Dave Ohara

If you want an all in one easy to use Router, Firewall and Access Point than Google OnHub is a good choice.

If you want to run a more powerful system with security features than try PFsense. I've been running PFsense SG-2220 Security Gateway appliance for 9 months and it has been solid using only 8 watts.

here is a post by PCGamer reviewing OnHub and preferring the use of PFsense.

“The ideal situation for us was using the OnHub in bridge mode, so that we could use a more advanced router to do routing duties. In our case, connecting the OnHub to a product like the pfSense gateway is the ultimate solution.”

For my home office I use Ubiquiti access points. I have two in the main house. I could use one, but the data center DNA has me wired to prefer redundancy. Then one in the office. And another in the beach house. Single SSID. Automatic frequency configuration. And all kinds of good monitoring so I know things are working.

Why the focus on monitoring? Because monitoring fits in a more secure solution.

InfoWorld wrote a review of PFSense.