How does fiber internet work? 0ms ping!

I like to think that here at snazzy labs we have a pretty awesome networking setup we have 10 Gigabit Ethernet going to all of our computers and thanks to our 336 terabyte Margaret server not only can we share files across the network but we can actually edit all of our videos live off of the network check that video out if you haven't seen it more recently we upgraded to an LTO tape solution so that we could do off-site backups but there's still one thing about our networking that has really sucked and that's our internet connection we've been paying for an Xfinity business crappy 50 megabits per second down 20 megabits per second up plan for the last several years well today we're upgrading to fiber and it's going to be awesome to start our fiber adventures we have to start outside so let's go this has nothing to do with fiber internet I just wanted to open it for fun and what we got to talk about now is what we got to talk about is known as the last mile problem think of your internet service provider as a tree no internet service providers don't typically give life they suck it but we're gonna use it as a metaphor a tree has a trunk a bunch of smaller branches and then a bunch of tiny little twigs you the end user the customer are the twigs and that distance from that little branch to the end of the twig is what is known as the last mile this is the most numerous part of running an internet service and it's also the most expensive furthermore it uses the most antiquated technology most people have coaxial cable slams in their neighborhood or cable drops and then they are running into their house using old coaxial cable or twisted pairs old technology now fiber cable you might think fixes all of that now that's not necessarily true because here in the United States fiber is advertised a little bit differently than fiber elsewhere in the world let me show you why you see your ISP or telecom is most definitely using fiber even if you're not aware of it an example is you know those old school landline telephones ahoy those now in modern day typically have fiber backends so the question is not is my ISP using fiber because they are but where does it change from fiber to copper before it hits me the end customer and that's what's known as f TTX or fiber to the variable now that variable might be that the fiber terminates at the node or that it comes all the way to the curb or that it goes all the way to your building or that it goes all the way to your individual unit or home this is a box right here and I'm not gonna pretend to be a science man and know what's inside here I'm no engineer I'm certainly no network admin but what I do know is that this box was here before my isp had placed that and there is a fiber conduit going into that box then from this box they can go to buildings in the area luckily I was right next to this box and so they dug up the ground here you can see the grass looks a little sad it'll grow back don't worry landlord when it comes out of this little tube right here now this tube you'll see has one cable and that's because it goes to me snazzy labs I so far and the only customer of this fiber company in this specific building or unit now you might be thinking oh yeah sure there's a fiber to every individual person but that's not really the case at all even in fiber-to-the-home applications where every single customer would get their own cable that doesn't mean that the cables all have a direct line of sight from your building to the ISP let me explain why okay we're back inside and it is so hot it might even be hotter than outside we're in a brick building but that's okay because we've got fiber to the home you remember from earlier that doesn't mean we have twisted pair or coaxial cable we have right here an optical fiber that plugs right into here and there you go those little green lights mean that we have internet now in fiber-to-the-home deployments there are really two networks and methods that can be utilized there is passive optical networks and active optical networks now Pio ends passive ones are far more common because they're less expensive it takes a single optical fiber and then splits it up to 128 times which can go to 128 customers now what this means is that it's often more cost effective and this is why you see it in more fibre deployments but the downsides should be relatively obvious you're now sharing that optical fiber with up to 128 other people now generally it's okay because well fiber is pretty cool you can operate at different wavelengths and do packet switching on all this stuff but the more preferred method and the more expensive method and obviously as a consequence the last common method is an active optical network active optical networks are different in the sense that it uses active powered equipment to get from here back to the main office or my ISP so this line coming in this little cable right here doesn't share with anyone else it's just for snazzy labs and it can carry full duplex 1,000 megabits per second in either direction which is insane now this is not only an active optical network but it is an active II or active Ethernet network if you think about Ethernet it's pretty obvious you have a main router which you have inside your home and that routes traffic on your local area network active Ethernet fiber networks are not all that dissimilar the difference is rather than going to your computer or your printer it goes from building to building to building back to your ISP this box the juniper ax 2300 C merely takes that incoming optical Ethernet signal and then converts it to something that is more usable aka rj45 copper cabling but we're actually gonna go optical all the way over to our server rack there and let me explain why and how we're going to do it in most deployments like your home or your office you'll see one of these they call these wireless routers but they are actually four things they're a modem which receives the incoming cable over kalaxian and then converts it into something actually usable it is a router which in the name routes local and wide traffic so that you can access the internet and talk to devices on the same network it is a network switch which allows you to plug all of your devices in and then it is also an access point for a Wi-Fi hotspot because these are often cheap or free included with your contract they typically suck so you want to get something that's much better we have decided to opt for a unified dream machine Pro this thing is super cool and I am excited to use it luckily the unify warehouse is located here in town so I bought this on Friday and got it on Saturday and I paid for UPS ground shipping so that's nice anyway this box is a cool one for a couple of reasons number one unify has incredible system management and apps so it's very easy to set up and monitor it's also nice because it does well a couple things it's not a modem so you're still gonna need a modem and if you have a modem and you want to use one of these you can put your crappy Comcast modem into what's called bridge mode and that basically just allows you to pass the internet over Gigabit rj45 copper to a device that acts as the router and the switch and the access point and everything else this also doesn't have Wi-Fi built in so you're going to need set to buy separate access points but you're generally going to want to do that anyway because built-in ones even router access point combos are not very good and then this has a network switch built in so they call this a managed switch but really what it is is it's a router and security gateway that has firewall settings we'll talk about all the cool security features of this device in a minute but basically what happens is you plug it into your wall or you put it in a rack you have a little hard drive here which allows you to use unified protect we'll talk about that probably at a later date because I actually think I'm gonna do something about it but basically it allows you to run webcams and record them in a PVR in this box so this does a lot more than just act as a router and then you have your network switch here but again I want to mention something pretty crucial the system we're paying for accounts for symmetrical gigabit fiber so 1,000 megabits per second down and 1,000 megabits per second hub and most rj45 copper cabling single gig cable cat 5e that's limited to about practically 900 ish 920 ish megabits per second so we're paying for speed that we can't actually utilize because we have a 10 gig network I want to keep it everywhere as long as we're going on like if we have to go couple copper go 10 gig the whole way so that we can get that full thousand megabits per second let's try it ok so as we discussed earlier fiber comes in from the street into this box I then decided to wire another 10 gig connection from this box over to the ubiquity dream machine Pro which rather than keep over here I thought it best to keep in well our server rack with all of her equipment and so that's what I spent the weekend doing running fiber cable across the top of the way house and right into here you can see the incoming fiber line it goes into the dream machine Pro and then we actually have another cable coming right back out that's a 10 gig SFP cable as well it's called a direct attached cable unlike this one it's not actually fiber optic it's just copper but it's a short cable that goes into here this is our Arista 70 50 T switch now this is an old piece of enterprise gear so I'm about twenty thirteen but because it's old enterprise gear you can get it for cheap about 400 bucks and the specs are incredible this thing has 48 rj45 10 gigabit ethernet connections and then for 40 gigabit quad SFP connections so we're going SFP 2 quad SFP so 10 gig connection basically and then 10 gig out into every single one of our computers which i have wired up through this patch panel here this allows us to have just a couple nice neat little cables and it looks and feels fantastic now I did a bunch of general maintenance to we keep this server in a shop and so I decided to pull all of the equipment out move this server rack back a couple inches so we could close the door successfully and then clean all of the equipment while it was in there now you might be wondering Quinn your wiring that buy a fiber but isn't fiber fragile and this is something that a lot of people have said yeah I wired fiber cable just across the top of my roof not too carefully I want to answer the question how fragile is this stuff so let's plug one end into here our ubiquity dream machine Pro the other end into our switch that is the switch we talked about earlier where our fiber connection comes in and we will head to the computer and see what it takes to break an optical fiber cable okay we are going to increasingly bend this cable to see how severe of a Bend we can get before the internet connection drops out this is the only connection that I have to my network and this is the only connection that we have to the internet so as soon as the fiber cable breaks so too does my internet so as you can see it works fine right now let's spend it to about right there which I had a bend way less severe than this and people were like gonna work you're gonna break it it's working fine I can load web pages just great okay let's go with a slightly tighter bend this one is pretty dang stressful you can see visual visual stressing on the top of the cable right here we're stretching the jacket and everything huh it does look like it's slowed down but it's not broken what happens if we straighten the cable back out Wow is that right does it stop working when we have a bend in it okay so here we go we've bent it pretty severely that's bananas so it works as long as the cable is flat but as soon as we put a really severe bend in the cable it stops working try that one more time and watch ready we straighten the cable out that is nuts okay so cable seems to be pretty durable it doesn't seem like it breaks it just cuts the connection until you straighten it back out what about that that's definitely not gonna work no way yeah completely dead no connection back to the Verge's website but if we undo that Bend does it restore itself to its full glory it does that is crazy sauce okay so we are connected on my Mac Pro I have a green status light which means the internet is working I mean you kind of saw that earlier with the fiber test but okay let's see how quick this actually is in real-world practice we're going to open Safari here and go to I don't know the verge just a web site oh wow that loes almost instantly that is crazy crazy crazy quick okay let's try something a little more difficult like youtube.com okay that was okay wasn't crazy fast let's let's load a video up though um the 8km marquez video that he did a couple years ago or whatever Oh 8k oh this one from five months ago is 8k okay let's watch this we are going to we're in Safari whoops so we're gonna need to open edge because Safari doesn't support higher than 1440p because of the vp9 codec okay Wow look at that it auto to eat cake wouldn't have you ever seen a video Auto to 8k that is bananas okay sure let's press play and that's kind of cheating because we've got a buffer already here you can see that there's a buffer here along the bottom but it's it's basically loading it real-time if we jump ahead look at that that is just blazing through that's 8k video and it looks like it's buffered more than my computer can keep inside of its volatile memory I mean look at that it's just instant you click anywhere in the video and we're advancing so it's not like this has been rendered yet oh this one's a little slower but still you can see márquez's pores that's nuts okay but let's talk about something a little more practical for my use uploading videos because a lot of people can have really fast download speeds we have a for example at my house cable is about 650 megabits per second down but only about 15 megabits per second up we're used to about 20-25 on a good day upload speeds which means our videos which are usually I don't know six seven gigs take about two to four hours to upload it's pretty slow let's try this one let's get a here's a four gig file so this is yeah yeah well it's let's do a little smaller one let's do one point two four gigs right here we're happy this one two point five seven that's good we'll drop that in and oh my gosh seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen oh that is insanely 38 seconds left to upload a three gig video so a six kick video which is what we normally have will take what 45 seconds maybe a minute that is nuts I don't even know if we'll be able to like enter all of the metadata before the videos are done uploading that's insane Wow okay but we got to do the kind of like the creme de la creme of like flexing on your network speeds and that's a speed test we're gonna go to speedtest.net by Allah and we are going to press go okay it's probably getting our ping time I would guess I'm expecting a couple milliseconds because my internet at home was about 10 or 15 which was pretty good see that can't be right zero milliseconds oh my gosh tell what speed 936 and megabits per second I know 37 that's insane but this is where things get nuts is the upload speed because again we were used to kind of taking a couple minutes to air a couple of hours to upload our videos and now 918 917 915 the test is done that is awesome that is freaking sweet now I do think we can get a little faster we're supposed to be able to get true 1000 1000 now that might be some configuration issues on the ubiquity oh I'll look into that and kind of see if I can fine-tune that but that's pretty dang good now let's address that zero millisecond ping because I kind of don't believe that because generally you'll have like a one to two millisecond ping within your own home running from your computer to your router now granted we are running 10 gig everywhere and then our copper run the only copper we're using is from here to our switch which is not that long it's mostly optical all the way through another thing people under kind of misunderstand about ping is they think that it's just like some generic number it's like like a universal ping no it's not all ping is is the latency between your device and whichever server you're trying to communicate with and my case speedtest.net is selected utopia fiber which is my actual ISP so it should be pretty quick because I'm talking to the people who give me internet but let's send 10 little packets that we can ping and see what our latency time oh my goodness look at that so it looks like speedtest.net rounds to the nearest number which is true zero our slowest packet took point two milliseconds and our fastest packet 2.15 one with an average of 0.177 milliseconds that's about point two milliseconds to our ISP and the back what does this mean practically well in theory the faster you can get to your ISP the faster you can get to the greater internet so long as you're is is good and so in instances like online gaming this should be a massive advantage because like at my home I'm used to a 15 to 20 second millisecond ping just between my home and my own ISP and then going from them to the game servers is another 10 and 20 30 40 50 sometimes more milliseconds so let's try out a game and see how low we can get that ping okay here we are playing call of duty gunfight please try to ignore the insane graphical glitches that are present because of AMD and NVIDIA or AMD and apples terrible bootcamp drivers but basically what I want to show you here is that ping time is well let me put it this way when you have fiber internet you're only as good as the weakest link which can oftentimes be the server that you're requesting information from so my ping to this server is 50 milliseconds I'm actually a lot higher than some of the other players 36 and 40 and that's just because of Activision not having very good surfers to have this game played from here in Salt Lake City now there are other games like csgo which do a much better job let's load one of those games up I would say if I could play csgo but I can't so I am going to use this website which allows you to ping the csgo servers and I'm going to ping all of them you can see pretty quickly that the Northern California would probably be the one I'd default to at about 30 milliseconds and that's said that's pretty quick I can run these ping times again to get a second average yeah 30 32 that's much better than the Call of Duty servers but then someone like Mumbai India would be almost a quarter of a second really unplayable bad and that's really what it comes down to where are you located in the world relative to the service that you're trying to reach and how did the server send you data I think you'll find as I have that as soon as you have very very fast internet connection you'll notice that a lot of websites just aren't that fast I downloaded a Catalina update for my Mac Pro and it was only downloading at about 80 megabits per second I think that's just because that's how quickly Apple sent a download not that my internet connection wasn't fast enough because was other areas though especially game downloads Steam does an incredible job at pushing you almost full speed that your network connection can handle I was downloading games at 90 hundred megabyte per second which is bananas now there you have it it's rough living with fiber needless to say I think this fiber internet is going to be an excellent addition to snazzy laps it will make our lives easier it will make our jobs more fun and I mean come on who doesn't want fiber internet stay tuned because we do have a future episode of us actually visiting our ISP to do some facility tours it's gonna be great thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't well that other button seems to work okay to get subscribe for more awesome tech videos like this one but most importantly and as always stay static

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 855,271

Rating: 4.9042501 out of 5

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, fiber, google fiber, fios, fast internet, how to get faster internet, gigabit internet, gigabit, router, faster wifi, utopia, fortnite, ping, get lower ping, modern warfare, cod, ms, ping time, network speed, fastest internet, 10 gbe, rj45, ethernet, ethernet vs wifi, ubiquiti, udm, dream machine pro, dream machine, access point, modem, switch, passive switch, managed switch, networking, diy, mod, server, server rack, it, sys admin

Id: BHrBq1iuiI4

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020