[eric_h]

> DE-CIX, our IXP, donated bandwidth to us, and we have transit also donated from Packet Host and WebAir.

What is the incentive for them to donate bandwidth/transit to you? Your non-profit status? Do they get something else in return?

[nycmesh]

We get a lot of support from the NYC networking community, and we have a lot of friends at the NYNOG meetups. Everyone is very helpful and they also want the big ISPs to have some competition, so we get donations from quite a few people. Some also join our network and get nodes on their own roofs and help with other installs!

DE-CIX is the biggest IXP and they measure their network in terabits/sec. It is not a big deal for them to donate us a 1 gig connection. (it's a big deal for us!) Eventually we may upgrade it to 10 gig.

[bigiain]

So you're sharing a 1G connection between 600-ish users - all presumably on 802.11ac 450Mbps (or 1.3Gbps if they've got three-stream?) connections?

How often do you see full saturation on that link? I'm guessing if all 600 of your users all tried to stream one stream of $TV-show-de-jour at once they'd barely get 16Mbps each? Can one user's home office full of Apple gear flood the bandwidth downloading a dozen Apple software updates simultaneously?

[StudentStuff]

That is a pretty low ratio in terms of over-subscription, on many cable networks you'd have 24 downstream Docsis channels @ 38Mbps usable per channel, for 912Mbps usable across all houses on said node. A single node often supports 500 homes, and that 912Mbps of capacity carries switched digital video, voice & data traffic.

Cable companies consider these high ratios to be quite embarrassing actually, as it shows how crummy their networks are: https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r31258251-Speed-Issues-Char...

[nycmesh]

Netflix standard streaming is 3Mbps, so even with your math (which isn't how bandwidth works) everyone is happy.

We've never come anywhere near saturating our gig connection. We monitor it. Each building is limited to their own rooftop connection which is an average 100Mbps, so they can't do more than that if they tried. The thing is not everyone is downloading a file at the same time, and streaming uses much less bandwidth than downloading. From Netflix site-

0.5 Megabits per second - Required broadband connection speed

1.5 Megabits per second - Recommended broadband connection speed

3.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for SD quality

5.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for HD quality

25 Megabits per second - Recommended for Ultra HD quality