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Thursday, August 15, 2013
Fourmilab Internet Connection Upgrade Complete
Today Fourmilab's fibre optic Internet connection was upgraded from 20 megabits/second symmetrical, at which speed it had run since it was installed in 2008 (which involved digging up the street), to 100 megabits/second symmetrical. This time no civil engineering was required—simply swapping out the router on my end of the fibre link and re-configuring the connections in La Neuveville and Neuchâtel.
The downtime estimated to do this was around twenty minutes, but in fact the site was down from around 13:30 to 15:57 UTC due to a misconfiguration at the Neuchâtel point of presence. Everything has been running smoothly since then, and the above run from speedtest.net indicates the results of the upgrade. The upload speed is slower than the download speed because the upload test is contending with traffic from the Web site outbound to requesters. Downloads need only contend with HTTP requests, which are small in size compared to the replies. This test was run from a client machine on the LAN, through the firewall. Most of the LAN infrastructure is 100 megabit/second Ethernet—I may upgrade some of this in the communication shack to gigabit Ethernet in order to have more headroom in switches and other network gear, but I have no plans to pull new cable to go gigabit on longer runs.
Posted at August 15, 2013 21:12