>(as of this writing, VZ was pricing 50Mbps commited @ $455/mo; 100Mbps @ $661/mo; 1Gbps @ $999/mo; 5Gbps @ $2,099/mo; and 10Gbps @ $3,099/mo).
Ten gigabit is not yet a common residential internet service in North America. If that's what you want, this would be the only way to get it.
I've occasionally daydreamed about buying a condominium near one of the Seattle Internet Exchange's PoPs, buying a 400 gigabit port, paying to run a fiber pair, arranging for transit, etc etc. https://www.seattleix.net/join As expensive and pointless as buying a yacht, but at least getting it online would require a lot of tedious work!
(Like OP, I also jumped through the hoops for a Comcast fiber drop years ago (but to a business location) for the same eyewatering price but dramatically fewer megabits per second. The only upside is that the pair traveled directly to a CO in the same office park, so we would routinely see 1-2ms pings to anycast IPs like 4.2.2.2, 8.8.8.8, etc)
> I've occasionally daydreamed about buying a condominium near one of the Seattle Internet Exchange's PoPs, buying a 400 gigabit port, paying to run a fiber pair, arranging for transit, etc etc
For what it's worth, this isn't the same as what the person who wrote the post did. They bought a DIA circuit to an ISP.
What you're seeking is a point-to-point fiber link or MPLS to a panel in KOMO Plaza or the Westin building. You don't need to be near either of those locations to do it and CenturyLink (Lumen, these days) will sell you the circuit but you're not going to like what it costs. We have three of these circuits where I work and they are juuuuust a bit higher than what the article's author says they're paying for the DIA.
(This, along with the eyewatering cross-connect fees that the operators of those two facilities charge, is why getting a SIX port is so expensive on retail colo. You're either paying for the privilege of running some strands of glass or you're paying to use someone's extension switch and the connection they're paying for to get back to the SIX core.)
It really depends on the metro area. Here in Chicago I can get a dark pair about 3 houses down the block from me (never quoted out how much it'd be to extend to my address) going back to 350 Cermak. This ran about $600-1200/mo or so depending on contract terms and who you know. If you have other gear in the facility (e.g. transit and routers with a spare port) you're looking at another $150-350/mo (again, depending on your contract) x-connect to get into your panel in your cage.
Given I have equipment already in the datacenter, it's pretty tempting to pull the trigger on a 100G link. I just have no idea what I'd do with it.
Completely agreed. Seattle and Portland seem to be high on the list of "places telcos think they can take complete advantage of." For what my employer pays for two (locked) racks of colocation here, we could get an entire small suite somewhere like LA or Chicago.
Wireline costs are similarly sky high, I think because CenturyLink has all of the cabling and no one has bothered to dig up the streets to run any more. When we connected a building in Eastlake to our old colo in Tukwila, CenturyLink was the only one who would quote us.
> The only upside is that the pair traveled directly to a CO in the same office park, so we would routinely see 1-2ms pings to anycast IPs like 4.2.2.2, 8.8.8.8, etc
Those are the pings I see on my residential connection, though?
> If that's what you want, this would be the only way to get it.
10Gbps PON is available from AT&T Fiber in some markets, and lower tiers (5Gbps) are coming online from Google Fiber in other markets. In SoCal, I've seen billboards for 10Gbps AT&T Fiber, for example. Obviously you don't get an SLA with a residential connection, though, and I highly doubt that many customers operating at full capacity will be problem-free.
This is how any larger business (e.g. a hospital, university, anyone doing any serious networking) gets their connectivity these days. Basically the modern equivalent of a T-1.
You get proper service: no random dropouts, and a clueful human on the phone and you could complain about QoS and they'd not laugh in your face.
The different thing here is that the service was provided to a residential building, but that's not entirely unheard of. I've done it myself for example.
If I had more money than sense, I’d do the same thing.
If I was filthy rich (which I’m not and probably never will be), I’d build a data centre in my mansion and buy a brand new IBM mainframe and stick it in there. Because I can. For the same reason other rich people build some huge garage with dozens of cars in it.
Which means you'd need a IBM mainframe, since IBM mainframes require enterprise storage arrays which come with special software for emulating the old mainframe hard disks (ECKD), and if you are going to buy one of those, you'd need a mainframe to drive it.
Yes, they do use Fibre Channel (FC), but the protocol they run on top of FC is very different from the usual FC protocols. FC has four layers, from FC-0 (the physical layer) through to FC-4 (the application layer). At level FC-4, Linux/Unix/Windows/etc servers mostly speak "Fibre Channel Protocol for SCSI" aka SCSI-FCP, which transmits SCSI commands over FC. However, while IBM mainframes do use SCSI-over-FC, they also use something else called "FICON", which instead of transmitting SCSI commands, uses the same command set as IBM's legacy non-SCSI mainframe hard drives (such as the IBM 3390, which was IBM's last non-SAN mainframe hard disk line from the late 80s / early 90s).
Mainstream platforms have what IBM calls FBA (Fixed Block Array) disks, in which the disk is an array of sectors which all have the same size. While the IBM mainframe hardware supports that, most IBM mainframe operating systems don't support those, however; Linux and VSEn are the exceptions, and z/VM is a partial exception.
As well as FBA, IBM has ECKD (Extended Count Key Data) disks, like the IBM 3390 was. (ECKD was preceded by CKD, which is conceptually the same – the same sector format, etc – but had a less efficient command set.) With ECKD, sectors can have variable sizes – each disk track can have different sized sectors, you can even mix different sector sizes within the same disk track. Also, sectors optionally have keys, and the disk has commands to search for sectors based on their keys. Originally, these variable sized sectors actually physically existed on disk; nowadays, the SAN only has standard hard disks (or SSDs), but ECKD disks are emulated in the SAN software on top of them. z/OS, the most popular IBM mainframe OS, only supports ECKD disks, not FBA ones. Linux and VSEn support both ECKD and FBA. For ECKD disks, you can't use the standard SCSI command set, you have to use IBM's DASD command set.
Many high-end enterprise arrays do support ECKD and FICON, but you usually have to pay significant extra license fees to enable the software that supports that.
Hearing people talk about IBM mainframes makes me realize what I sound like talking about my job to my mom. IBM could have 90% of the home computer and server market if they didn't charge so much for their stuff. They always had the best technology.
It sounds like they wanted 2 separate network paths but they still end up with only 1 where they can use BGP. Maybe they can still use their residential connection as failover, with a VPN to a VPS where they can use BGP?
They all likey traverse the same physical path and would all be taken out by the same gravel truck hitting a pole. The two connection thing was I think more about defense against random retail connectivity flaps (someone decides to upgrade a router's firmware and just takes the town offline, meanwhile nobody answers support calls, that sort of thing).
Yeah true multihoming is expensive and involves things like hiring people to actually inspect the physical lines and Make sure they don’t run down the same street at some point (and be subject to the same backhoe of fiber death)
In the event that there are issues at the primary location, internet routing protocols will re-route the relevant network prefixes to the secondary location.
The public /24 that was previously routed to their NYC datacenter now goes to that Connecticut house.
>(as of this writing, VZ was pricing 50Mbps commited @ $455/mo; 100Mbps @ $661/mo; 1Gbps @ $999/mo; 5Gbps @ $2,099/mo; and 10Gbps @ $3,099/mo).
Ten gigabit is not yet a common residential internet service in North America. If that's what you want, this would be the only way to get it.
I've occasionally daydreamed about buying a condominium near one of the Seattle Internet Exchange's PoPs, buying a 400 gigabit port, paying to run a fiber pair, arranging for transit, etc etc. https://www.seattleix.net/join As expensive and pointless as buying a yacht, but at least getting it online would require a lot of tedious work!
(Like OP, I also jumped through the hoops for a Comcast fiber drop years ago (but to a business location) for the same eyewatering price but dramatically fewer megabits per second. The only upside is that the pair traveled directly to a CO in the same office park, so we would routinely see 1-2ms pings to anycast IPs like 4.2.2.2, 8.8.8.8, etc)