Gotta Go Fast

2017-04-29 17:04

Gigabit fiber is finally available from Sonic in my neighborhood of San Francisco and it’s twenty times faster than our Comcast cable for half the price!

Speed test on Sonic fiber showing 2 millisecond latency, 946 mbps downstream, and 105 mbps upstream

Forget the speed; look at that latency!

There are a few downsides. Upstream is only (“only”, I know) 100 mbps, I can’t buy a static IP, and there’s no IPv6 support. Comcast Business gives me a static IP and (finally, after a few years) a v6 subnet, so I’m holding on to my old connection for the time being for hosting stuff on my home servers.

Sonic optical network terminal installed on my wall

Sonic is $50 per month plus $10 for renting their Pace WiFi router. My router is an Avoton FreeBSD server with four Intel PRO 1000 NICs, so I plan to send their Pace box back as soon as possible. Luckily their Adtran 411 optical network terminal provides a telephone port and a LAN port directly from the fiber line coming off the drop. I didn’t need to use their Pace router at all, just plug a Cat6 patch cable between the ONT and a free port on my router then configure dhclient.conf to set the default route from that interface.

/etc/dhclient.conf 
  1. interface "igb1" {

  2.     request routers;

  3. }

Then just ask for an address!

[root@curus#okeeblow] dhclient igb1 
  1. DHCPREQUEST on igb1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67

  2. DHCPACK from 50.0.79.96

  3. bound to 198.27.207.13 -- renewal in 302400 seconds.

The future is cool.