Community Fibre performance

So Community Fibre finally went live after some delays and I've had the service installed. I'll update my other thread with details of the installation method, but for now here are some performance figures. In short, it seems to deliver as advertised.

Location: SW London, overhead/PIA served house. CF build completed July 2021.
Product: 1000/1000

Latency at 10am on a Thursday - min,average,max,std.dev:
bbc.co.uk (151.101.192.81) 1.7,1.8,2.2,0.1 - via Telehouse North it seems
1.1.1.1 (CF issue as secondary DNS) 2.6,2.7,3.0,0.1 - via THN / LINX LON1
9.9.9.9 (which is the primary DHCP DNS) 1.6,1.8,2.2,0.1 - also via THN
8.8.8.8 2.4,2.6,2.6,0.1
18.130.0.0 (AWS eu-west-2) 3.3,3.4,3.5,0.1
54.90.0.3 (AWS us-east-1) 77.6,77.7,77.8,0.1 - NTT on the transatlantic
A VPS in OVH London (Erith) 2.1,2.3,5.5, 0.2
No major change to the above at 2330 on a Friday.

TBB graph - the (small) spikes are the Samknows box testing.

Speed has been fairly consistently above 900 up and down using Speedtest.net to London servers. fast.com tells a similar story. TBB single thread is significantly lower, around 250Mbit.

The Samknows Whitebox reports a fairly consistent 940Mbit, which regularly drops to 910 at peak time. On one occasion 800 down was recorded in the evening peak. It has only been running a few days. Upload is a flat line at 940Mbit. My area does not yet have the 3Gbit package available - I have no need of it, but it's perhaps an indication that they're operating on limited backhaul in this early stage of deployment.

Interestingly when selecting speedtest.net servers further away (Manchester, Edinburgh, Dublin, Amsterdam) many are well connected enough to achieve >800Mbit download, but the upload always seems to max out around 500. I'm not sure why that might be.

It's straightforward to connect your own router - I've cloned the MAC address of the supplied router because it was easy and there's a report somewhere online of issues with requesting DHCP leases from multiple MAC addresses in a short period of time. The v4 lease time is 24h and the IP seems sticky enough.

IPv6 seems straightforward too - even if you request a /64 prefix you get a /48 on an 8 day lease. I've only carried out basic testing but can't see any issues.

In short there are very few reasons not to go for it if it's available. A static IP would be nice but I think they're trying to use this to differentiate the business service which is considerably more expensive. For me, between dynamic DNS and VPN'ing some static IPs from a datacentre I can cope with the dynamic IP.

I'll report back after a few months when more subscribers have signed up and load is higher. For now it's likely that I'm the only one on my PON.

A new thread today made me think of both your Community Fibre threads, and I'd meant to reply to this one but got side tracked and forgot!

How are you getting on with the service? Did you ever get to the bottom of the difference you saw with TBB single-thread DL performance vs multi-thread?

Otherwise hope its all going well and living up to expectations.

I had mine installed on the 9th July worked great on the supplied router, but wanted to use my own router like I do with BT.

I had that exact same issue where the router's DHCP Client was failing to connect for both IPv4 and IPv6, so I contacted them via Twitter and was given a number to phone and spoke to one of their Tech people who could see my Routers connection and its MAC and cleared the old ones and now it connects fine.

I am from east London about 4 or so miles from Telehouse, I just tried a speed on a Manchester Server and I got this: >> Result <<

Also going by my SamKnows White Box I am getting 940Mbps up and down with a minimum of 930Mbits 24/7 so very happy, works out cheaper than what we are paying for BT.

I also can confirm IPv4 (/25 so a 18 address and 126 being usable) has a 24 hour lease time and is in fact sticky, I can do a release and get a new IP if I wanted to.

I can also confirm IPv6 has a lease time of 8days but is very sticky, even release is having issues getting a new IP.

Paul

I'm also in East London (Newham for me) and on Gigafast 1000/1000. Do you notice packet loss on the v6 side of things? I'm having a very odd issue where v4 is almost spotless in terms of packet loss, but v6 has constant loss.

This is IPv4 where the red loss is me fiddling with my router, and this is v6...

If I use something like Google Meet, which defaults to v6 when available, the thing is a stuttery mess. pfSense is also giving me packet loss warnings too. So far, have had silence from CF after sending Pingplotter data suggesting it's something going awry on their side.

A traceroute from outside your network would probably be more useful. If it's on the ISP's side you should notice packet loss on the router the hop before yours that's carried forward to your router. If their router shows no packet loss but your router does then that suggests the problem is with your router.

A traceroute to a device inside your network would probably be useful too. If you see loss on your ISP's router (the hop before yours) and loss on the pfSense router but no loss on the device inside your network then the loss isn't a problem, it's just the router prioritising other things higher than ICMPv6.

Thanks - super useful. I'll bug someone at work to run a trace from their side to mine and send over the results to observe.

Granted, IPv6 isn't super high on the priority list but nice to have so not complaining as the service is rock solid. https://ibb.co/6mrRvv4 is what I have sent CF already alongside another example showing identical behavior - it seems that loss starts occurring at hop 2 (first hop outside my network) and then throughout *.as201838.net (CFs routers). Was curious if I was the only one with this or I'd screwed something up on my side.

In reply to a post by branflakes:

I'm also in East London (Newham for me) and on Gigafast 1000/1000. Do you notice packet loss on the v6 side of things? I'm having a very odd issue where v4 is almost spotless in terms of packet loss, but v6 has constant loss.

Same, I am in Newham, I am in Manor Park to be exact.
I have the exact same issue with IPv6 when doing teh BQM, I don't think I am getting packet loss when using the actual connection via IPv6.

In reply to a post by branflakes:

This is IPv4 where the red loss is me fiddling with my router, and this is v6...

These are my current BQM's BQM Image (DDNS domain), BQM Image (IPv4), BQM Image (IPv6)
Basically the DDNS one is setup to only have IPv4, which is why it matches the IPv4 one and then there is IPv6 that is showing the packet loss.
I did a traceroute from my router to TBB BQM, to my current BT Connection, to our Rack Server along with from my current BT Connection, Rack Server and TBB back to my CFL connection and I am seeing loads of drops via IPv6, where as IPv4 is fine.

I did at first think it was my firewall on my router, but I was still having all the drops when the firewall was temp removed.

In reply to a post by branflakes:

If I use something like Google Meet, which defaults to v6 when available, the thing is a stuttery mess. pfSense is also giving me packet loss warnings too. So far, have had silence from CF after sending Pingplotter data suggesting it's something going awry on their side.

I was due a phone call a day or so ago back which they have failed to do, so I will be calling them over the next few days.

Paul

In reply to a post by aidanh:

A traceroute from outside your network would probably be more useful. If it's on the ISP's side you should notice packet loss on the router the hop before yours that's carried forward to your router. If their router shows no packet loss but your router does then that suggests the problem is with your router.

A traceroute to a device inside your network would probably be useful too. If you see loss on your ISP's router (the hop before yours) and loss on the pfSense router but no loss on the device inside your network then the loss isn't a problem, it's just the router prioritising other things higher than ICMPv6.

I am seeing the exact same issue over IPv6, here is what I got routing to TBB BQM Service last week:

/tool traceroute tool traceroute ipv6.pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com (2a02:68:1::164)
 # ADDRESS                                          LOSS SENT    LAST     AVG    BEST   WORST STD-DEV STATUS
 1 2a02:####:#:##::#                                93..  170 timeout       1     0.8     1.2     0.1
 2 lag-6.acc1.med.lon.network.as201838.net          90..  170 timeout     2.8     1.2    14.7     3.3
 3 2a02:6b60:0:1:1::59                              91..  169 timeout     3.7       1      26     6.1
 4 xge-0-0-0-25.edge1.ld8.lon.network.as201838.net  96..  169 timeout     1.9     1.8       2     0.1
 5 xge-0-0-0-5.edge1.thn.lon.network.as201838.net   89..  169 timeout     1.7     1.1     2.1     0.2
 6 2a02:6b60:0:1:2::45                              1.2%  167   1.5ms     5.4     0.7   121.4    18.8
 7 2a02:68:0:13::4                                  1.8%  167   0.7ms     3.5     0.7   149.8    14.7
 8 po4-31.core-rs4.thdo.ncuk.net                    0.6%  167   0.9ms     1.3     0.8      20     1.7
 9 ipv6.pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com                 4.2%  167   1.3ms     1.4     0.6     4.9     0.4

This is today:

/tool traceroute tool traceroute ipv6.pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com (2a02:68:1::164)
 # ADDRESS                                          LOSS SENT    LAST     AVG    BEST   WORST STD-DEV STATUS
 1 2a02:####:#:##::#                                1.7%  121   0.9ms       1     0.8     1.9     0.2
 2 lag-6.acc1.med.lon.network.as201838.net          5.8%  121   1.9ms     1.8     1.6     2.2     0.1
 3 2a02:6b60:0:1:1::59                              47..  121 timeout     1.9     1.7     2.3     0.1
 4 xge-0-0-0-25.edge1.ld8.lon.network.as201838.net   85%  120 timeout     1.8     1.7     2.1     0.1
 5 xge-0-0-0-5.edge1.thn.lon.network.as201838.net   80..  120 timeout     1.8     1.7       2     0.1
 6 2a02:6b60:0:1:2::45                              1.7%  120   1.6ms       4     1.4   126.1    14.7
 7 2a02:68:0:13::4                                  1.7%  120   0.9ms     3.7     0.7   130.6    17.7
 8 po4-31.core-rs4.thdo.ncuk.net                      0%  120  12.4ms     1.4     0.8    12.4     1.6
 9 ipv6.pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com                 2.5%  120   1.6ms     1.4     1.3     1.6     0.1

Hop 1 is my routers Gateway, as you can see there is a lot of loss, but that could be due to them prioritizing packets.
Todays routing back to our connection from TBB its a lot better:

#	Host							Sent	Recvd	Best	Avg	Worst
1 	ffff.tbb.core-rs4.thdo.ncuk.net				15	15	0ms	0ms	1ms
2 	po4-31.bdr-rt3.thdo.ncuk.net				15	15	0ms	2ms	30ms
3 	2a02:68:0:13::7						15	15	0ms	4ms	53ms
4 	lag-11.edge1.thn.lon.network.as201838.net		1	15	1ms	1ms	1ms
5 	xge-0-0-0-0.edge1.ld8.lon.network.as201838.net		4	15	1ms	1ms	1ms
6 	xge-0-0-1-0.edge-rr1.ld8.lon.network.as201838.net	11	15	1ms	1ms	1ms
7 	lag-1.acc1.med.lon.network.as201838.net			15	15	1ms	1ms	1ms
8 	lag-4.acc1.nw17.lon.network.as201838.net		15	15	1ms	1ms	1ms
9 	2a02:#:#:#:#:#:#:#					15	15	1ms	1ms	2ms

I haven needed to use IPv6 as yet so I haven't noticed any issue, I will try and use some time this week and see if anything happens.

Paul

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

Same, I am in Newham, I am in Manor Park to be exact.
I have the exact same issue with IPv6 when doing teh BQM, I don't think I am getting packet loss when using the actual connection via IPv6.

I'm also Manor Park - E12 6 - it's a small world!

Thanks for confirming, I was worried it was just my connection but seems like it's not. My Google Meet experience could've been a bad VPN so will review again now sans VPN. I ended up switching v6 off my main LAN subnet but keeping it on the lab subnet so all the homelab kit has functioning v6 connectivity. Work has kept me far too busy so haven't extensively tested on that as of yet.

Do let us know what CF say!

Crikey you're probably neighbours, just shout out the window! 😀