How often are you maxing your fibre, and how?

This thread is born out of some curiosity. I noted a 4k stream buffering quite badly a couple of days back. A check on my 62-ish megabit connection showed it was saturated. It remained saturated until I stopped streaming.

I have a router that produces various statistics and confirmed what was going on. There were 3 devices streaming, 1 browsing and an XBoxOne downloading. There were 4 active users. The XBOne is the heaviest device for usage, its owner streams and downloads demos and games a fair bit.

Usage is heavily skewed towards peak period. The connection is consuming around 750GB downstream a month, up from less than 500 last year, so the CAGR on my connection isn't exceptional and it will probably be over the 1TB a month mark next year.

Is it just me that is finding my above-average FTTC insufficient at times?

I have noticed exactly the same issue.

I have BT TV and it was buffering a lot the other night. Granted I was watching a recording and recording 2 more in background but none were 4k channels. At the same time, the wife was on the net doing some work and I was on BBC News.

I sync at about 64Mbps so wouldn't expect the above to be saturating my connection so much but it did seem to be. Haven't had the time to do any more in-depth analysis but I will try to this weekend.

That's easily managed by having the xbox user set a load of games to download before going to bed?

Even 3 Netflix 4K streams should only utilise about 45-50mbps.

Perhaps you should use QOS to prioritise outgoing ACKs and maybe implement FQ-codel

It's kinda the reason why I have my own connection. Before when I wanted to download I would make the wife's IPTV stream buffer. So I agree that it's getting more restrictive as streaming quality increases and the speeds do not.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Perhaps you should use QOS to prioritise outgoing ACKs and maybe implement FQ-codel

As it was downstream congestion prioritising acknowledgements wouldn't really have helped, that only fixes upstream.

Changing queuing strategies wouldn't have really been helpful as all the significant traffic was single flow TCP and time insensitive, removing buffer bloat wouldn't have done much. My stream was getting a fair share of the downstream pipe, there were just too many other demands on it for that fair share to be adequate for my application.

My only real option would've been to either prioritise my own devices above others or to use something layer 7 aware that prioritises traffic from YouTube, etc, above other traffic or recognises XBoxOne downloads and deprioritises them. From the point of view of TCP they would all look pretty similar.

In reply to a post by lee111s:

That's easily managed by having the xbox user set a load of games to download before going to bed?

Even 3 Netflix 4K streams should only utilise about 45-50mbps.

I can manage it easily enough but the question was more about if I were somehow unusual in being on a 'superfast' connection and having to manage it.

TL;DR I shouldn't have to manage it.

The stream was a YouTube 4k stream, a busy one, so was averaging well over the sustained 15-20Mb that has been mentioned.

So you definitely don't use QOS or FQ_Codel? I wonder why you're having buffering problems then.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

So you definitely don't use QOS or FQ_Codel? I wonder why you're having buffering problems then.

Not sure I understand. How would upstream QoS or a mechanism for combating buffer bloat and prioritising small packets help me get more bandwidth downstream when competing with similar flows? The flows were all TCP, all long lived, so would've all ended up in the same queue without some additional configuration.

The only thing that would work as far as I'm aware is prioritising either streaming video or my own machine.

I'd say prioritise video over downloads for sure