We’re looking at setting up a community Broadband network (along the lines of the B4RN model, if anyone knows it). One question I have that I’ve yet to have an explanation for is the sharing of a connection. I’d assumed that, say, 10 people sharing a Gigabit connection, all streaming at the same time, would have 100Mbits. I’ve been told that’s incorrect and that all the users can have a Gigabit connection. Is that correct, and how does that work then?

Not up on the sharing maths but our shared office had 100mb between about 18 of us, hammered hard some days and never really slowed down.

Just to check where are you getting the Gb internet connection from or is that just the speed of your wiring?

Just had a look at the B4RN website and it is 1000Mbps per household, the main fibre lines into the community will have massive bandwidth so having 10, 20 or more properties each with a gigabit connection isn’t unrealistic.

So, it is a gigabit connection per property, however if you’re then talking multiple users per single property then yes it would be shared, so if a house or office has 10 people using the internet that 1000mbps connection would be shared across those users. However, unless you’re got traffic management enabled there’s nothing to stop one user from using 500/600/900mbps of that bandwidth leaving the others with a lot less speed. That’s more of an issue with slower speeds as it’s unlikely someone would be using that amount of bandwidth for a long period, and of course connection speeds would be limited by your internal networking.

Whoever told you that all ‘users’ can have a gigabit connection simultaneously probably thought you were referring to individual properties using a gigibit connection at the same time, which is correct.

Thanks, Gigabit connection via a leased line.

Thought so, so yeah the connection will be shared by all users accessing that one connection, just like any other internet connection. If little Johhny is using 20mbps on his xbox, and mummy is using 20mbps on netflix and daddy is trying to download a game from steam he’ll realistically have 960mbps left to use, but it varies depending what is being downloaded and the application being used. Tbh though I wouldn’t worry, you’ll not notice any slowdown unless you’re regularly downloading gigabytes of data. Also remember that Mbps is different to MB/s (megabit per second vs megabyte per second), if you manage to get the full 1000mbps with wireless (wireless N is up to 900mbps, wireless AC is many times that!) or wired (gigabit Ethernet router/ports etc) then that will be 125 Megabytes per second download speed, that’s still a gigabyte every 9 seconds. 🙂

Oh and to add, if it’s a leased line the connection speed isn’t influenced by any other households – with normal broadband if demand in your neighborhood is high you’ll see the connection speed drop as the ‘area’ connection is hammered by multiple properties. A leased line has no sharing of the main connection, so you’ll have a guaranteed connection speed regardless of what others in the neighborhood are doing. A normal broadband speed might be 100mbps at quiet times but only 60mbps at busy times. Your 1000mbps leased line will be 1000mbps at all times.

along the lines of the B4RN model, if anyone knows it

The showrunner of B4RN is a friend of mine, if you need to ask any questions.

Many thanks for the replies. To be clear, there will only be one leased line shared by all users. Realistically, around 30-100 homes/small businesses.

@Cougar, thanks,  I went to a B4RN open day at Melling earlier this year, it was quite inspiring!

The devil is in the detail of this –

Each household/business could connect to the ‘system’ at a gigabit as in the router in each house would light up and say I have a gigabit connection. What happens further up the pipe could vary enormously.

The 30-100 homes will be sharing the leased line so you are theoretically correct in the way it will be divided out, but this will depend on the equipment that makes up your collective system, how its been configured and what the conenction is like at the other end of the leased line.

In practice it will vary enormously as to what speed you get at different times.

Just realised I maybe barking up the wrong tree, did you mean a theoretical 10 people within your household?

The pipe to the Internet is 1Gb so that’s the most bandwidth you’ll have, regardless of how many people are using it. It might display as a Gb connection on people’s household routers and without traffic-shaping in place potentially one household could use all that Gb – just not if anyone else was using it.

I would have thought you’d need a half decent traffic management device on the backbone (we use Blue Coats but would probably be overkill in your scenario), not just to cap an individual household’s bandwidth but maybe also to prioritise certain traffic (e.g. streaming services over P2P file sharing) but that would need more thought.

Thanks again for the replies, much appreciated.

@peterno51 In my theoretical scenario, it was 10 separate homes/routers.

@FuzzyWuzzy We’ll need someone to set up a suitable traffic management system, not least because we’ll probably be using an existing business’s leased line, and would need to protect their bandwith. I hadn’t thought about prioritising traffic, but that would make sense, and might reduce the need to increase the leased line’s bandwidth?

It depends what the traffic profile is really, e.g. if you have a lot of Netflix users then 6pm-11pm weekdays might be high demand but if the business is 9-5 then they might have enough capacity anyway. You could also filter the traffic and blacklist porn, would mean you’d probably only need 5% of the bandwidth of unrestricted connections 😉

You could also consider a caching proxy server but it’s effectiveness would depend on how many people visit the same sites (maybe allow a single porn site and cache that…).

Any idea what type of line it is? They’re now usually provisioned bigger than required (e.g. a 10Gb link but only 1Gb permitted by the provider if that’s what you pay for) but it means increasing bandwidth is a relatively painless affair (apart from in the wallet), vs the old days you’d need a new line installed with a 3-6 month wait.

@FuzzyWuzzy It’s a rural area, so business/daytime demand shouldn’t be massive. The leased line we intend to use was installed  couple of years ago, so I believe could be easily upgraded if necessary. I don’t see that there will be any need for any blacklisting…..

We’ll probably have to contract out the management and the admin of the network, so all the replies and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

It’s really going to be impossible to make an educated guess without knowing how the provider is going to manage traffic, but in reality – it’s probably not going to be an issue. Take Ta11Pau1’s example:

Thought so, so yeah the connection will be shared by all users accessing that one connection, just like any other internet connection. If little Johhny is using 20mbps on his xbox, and mummy is using 20mbps on netflix and daddy is trying to download a game from steam he’ll realistically have 960mbps left to use

I know this wasn’t the purpose of the example, but still.

Little Johnny won’t be using anywhere near 20Mbps – most games have dedicated servers, more like 40Mb per hour.

Mummy only needs 2Mbps for HD, but if she’s got a fancy 4k telly and the 4k subscription to go with it, she might get through 7Mpbs

So lucky Daddy had 992+MBps – great, he can download his 50GB game in about 7mins right? Not likely, if he’s lucky Steam (or worse a publisher site) will give him 100Mbps so it’ll take just over an hour, which most people would still consider pretty quick.

Anyway, the point is this, whilst more is more, you don’t really need it – 1000GB shared between 50 home/business for example – worst case is 20Mbps each, in theory if each one of those homes is downloading large files at the same time then yes you’ll top out of bandwidth, but that’s a very rare occurrence and even then, 20Mbps is pretty quick, in reality, if you’re ‘stuck’ with 20Mbps you could still have 2 kids hammering YT upstairs and be streaming netflix in the living room without a single buffering symbol.

Second all the above.

Another key component is, although much maybe made of the speed of connection, what really matters is the quality of the upstream connections and how the bandwidth is allocated to each downstream connection. Consideration should be given to what the minimum bandwidth allocation might be, e.g. ideally enough to allow for minimal visible buffering events of a typical streaming film service. Intelligent systems allow bandwidth allocations to each household, and also to the individual devices, to be flexed to cope with demand from others based on the type of content being consumed. Would strongly recommend getting the right kit and consultancy to start with (perhaps from B4RN?), which might get a bit spendy but will ensure you get good quality of service and buy in from the locals.

Just seen that FW has already mentioned this but going to post anyway cos I have typed out.

edit: Also Seen that P-Jay has mentioned it as well, I’ll get my coat..