 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rossell here. I want to do a video today about the exciting prospect if you are looking at upgrading your home internet connectivity from something like a DSL base connection to something like fiber optic. Now this is exactly the situation that I find myself in, in Daniel Rossell YouTube HQ. Currently the internet connection I have here is a VDSL2 base connection. Now that's the connectivity that the Bezek internet company where I'm based here in Israel uses. It's actually quite old. Now VDSL2 is a variant of DSL. You've also got ADSL, VDSL, and VDSL2. And that's a slowish form of internet. DSL is basically using old phone connectivity to carry internet into houses over the last mile. And that's important to understand that when you look at these sort of unusual connectivity like coaxial or DSL, you're basically talking about stuff that's really at the tail end of the internet. It's traveling through the oceans in these big sub-oceanic containers that are full of fiber optic cores and it's going at a very quick rate through the land-based infrastructure. But just at that last point where it branches out to homes and businesses, but particularly homes, you're getting into DSL wiring and that's going to really limit your internet speed. The theoretical limit of VDSL2 to the best of my knowledge is 200 megabits per second NBPS. That means you're never going to get a 400 megabit per second internet connection so long as your internet is based on VDSL2 for instance. Now what's happening at the moment where I'm based is that the companies are putting down fiber optic. Now I've done as much research as I can. There's three different providers laying fiber infrastructure in Israel to the best of my knowledge. I'm on every single list but there's no real way to know unless I've missed this. I've tried everything. There's no real way to know exactly when fiber is going to arrive at your doorstep and you're going to wake up one morning to see a construction crew putting down fiber optic cable on the ground and you say, wow, it's here. So what I'm doing instead is as any self-respecting home networking geek does, not just looking at the network I have now, I'm trying to make sure that I have everything in place so that when fiber optic connectivity comes, I'm going to be not found with my networking pants down. Now when we're talking about fiber optic, the first thing is it's probably going to be coming in as SFP you can actually see in the background and this side of me, it's reversed. That little wire, they did really ugly wiring the technician, that's the DSL coming in. So where that is, there's going to be a SFP laser point and probably an ISP router and I've already specced out the SFP to RJ45 adapter that I'm going to be getting to put that into load balancer. Anyway, what I want to talk about today is, I'll show you guys just all the various bottlenecks you could encounter just in case you're also, networking your home or planning your networking and you haven't really thought about what could slow down your connectivity. So let me just open up this diagram I've been working on here and I've called it fiber upgrade bottleneck avoidance. So here's my current route to internet and I'm just doing this to show the various parts of your network that can be a problem. So right, this is what I have currently I have my ISP router, that's a cellular router. This is the high availability failover system I've been doing a few videos on, really, really nice system and I've now sort of mildly obsessed with load balancing routers. They're amazing, amazing pieces of tech. So these two guys are coming into the load balancer the load balancer is doing the failover stuff. It's saying if you're down, bringing you up, et cetera. And from the load balancer into an ethernet switch and from an ethernet switch into my computer. Now this is just the networking in my room here. There's networking in the rest of the house as well. So even here, there's actually more points of bottleneck than you might think. So for instance, what we have here the first bottleneck is the load balancer and I'm gonna just show in a second two potential bottlenecks. If you're using something like a load balancer if you're using a switch or if you're just using a router these there are two potential bottlenecks you'll want to be aware of and look into upgrading. So I've already picked out my next load balancer. I thought I was gonna be going for a Miko trick. Unfortunately, I didn't deal with the best company here. Whatever, it's a source story. I'm getting another TP link gadget basically. But that's gonna have faster ports and then don't forget about the cabling itself. So every single cable on your network and that goes from whatever's bringing the so this is gonna be a fiber optic. It's gonna be the wall point then there's gonna be the transmitter up to now we're good but then there's gonna be a cable going from that into load balancer. Every single patch cable, every single ethernet cable even a 10 centimeter ethernet cable you could have in your server cabinet is a potential bottleneck if it doesn't support speeds up to what you're expecting to get with your fiber connectivity. So that's number one. All the hardware components are bottlenecks so our potential bottlenecks. So this guy I went for a very, very basic load balancer because this was kind of experimentry to see if I could figure out the networking. It's the TP link R470T plus and the ports there are 10 and 100 ports. So that's a bottleneck. Finally, the switch is a bottleneck. Ethernet switches come in various grades. You have 10, 100 ethernet switches and you have gigabit capable ethernet switches and I'm sure you probably have 10 gigabit and 100 gigabit ethernet switches. Now the connectivity that I'm hearing from people is like 300 megabits per second. So gigabit is what I have in my mind as that'll be enough. So I'm not looking for beyond that. And finally, if you're using internet and getting it into your desktop then your network interface card, your NIC, is potentially but unlikely to be a bottleneck. Now the reason it's very unlikely is because from what I understand and what I've been told by more knowledgeable PC people the vast majority of ethernet cards on the market today even if the wifi throughput is something like 300 megabits per second it's very likely that the maximum speed on the actual RJ45 ethernet ports going to be 1,000, going to be a gigabit port. So those spec out your network I would recommend diagramming it. I'm using this as diagram draw.io. I really, really love this little program here. And just plot out your network. Now I could go further, I could say right in addition to coming off the load balancer there is also a, there's also a wifi access point and there is a cable going between the load balancer and that wifi access point. So we have two more things to check out here. So you can easily make a list from this and go component by component and investigate every switch on your network investigate every single cable. Look up the cabling and see is it cat5e or cat5e or worse, have you got cat4 on your network? It's possible. And then look at the wifi. So the wifi here is going to be a 300 megabit per second bottleneck for me. I don't really care about that because I don't use wifi and 300 is good enough for Netflix and all that kind of stuff. So, but anyway, just make a, construct a good diagram of your network and write down, this is my recommendation, write down every single component that fails to meet the throughput. Now, another good thing to do is when you're looking at components, so there's two things I've been looking at. Now this is what I've ended up going for as my next load balancer. Now it's actually described as a VPN router, but you can use, this is a load balancer and the reason I've gone for this is because it's a compact little thing, five switches. I was looking at ubiquities and looking at what's called Mico trick as well. Anyway, I'm sure this will be just fine if not super relatively wonderful, but it's one of TP-Link's smaller little boxes and the networking I'm doing here is not sophisticated and all they need is basically two one ports to do my load balancing, my failover between the two. Anyway, the data sheets are basically the places you want to go and TP-Link and most companies do good jobs and making these pretty accessible and get past all the marketing stuff. Usually it's at the tail end, that's kind of the industry convention is you'll have a few nice pages of look at all the wonderful things this product can do and finally you'll get to the cold hard tech facts here, specifications. Now TP-Link also have specs listed here. I think it's a lot nicer in this format. Now what you're looking for number one in any piece of hardware, whether it's a router, whether it's a switch, whether it's a load balancing VPN router, SMB router, wired router, whatever the category name may be. First thing to do is check out the port. So you can see this thing has one fixed one port. It's got three interchangeable LAN slash one ports and it's got one LAN port and somewhere here it should give us the speed of the port. It does, sorry, it's right in front of me. One gigabit. So in internet ports you have basically three types of ports. You have 10, theoretically you're not going to find any hardware on the market that has 10 ports but you will see is 10 100 which means that the ports are capable of supporting basically up to 100 megabits per second. That means technically they're 10 ports and they're also 100 ports. They can do up to 10 and they can also do up to 100 but networking nowadays nothing is so slow that 10 wouldn't be a bottleneck so realistically it's 10 100 and 100 is what matters and then you have these gigabit ports. Sometimes you see it written like this. I've seen this in a couple of spec sheets, GBE which stands for Gigabit Ethernet but basically those are your kind of two main ports. As I said, you can get faster but for people looking at home networking in this kind of a territory, you're probably most interested to see that it's one capable. Cat7 Ethernet for instance I believe is now capable of 10 gigabit throughput. So really what you're looking for depends upon how fast your connectivity is going to be and really how long you need out of this hardware. So my thinking is that for, this is like a two year upgrade. So if I get two years out of this load balancer and two years out of these Ethernet cables while we're still renting, that's perfectly fine. And then if my wife and I buy a property then we'll probably look at well, what's going to be 15 years future proof but I have a strong feeling we're not gonna be getting more than given that it took until 2021 or probably 2022 to just get out of DSL. It's probably gonna be a while before we're looking at Ethernet that's in the above the one gigabyte speed bracket. So that's number one in the spec sheet is check the ports, what type of speed they support. Now the second thing is actually what's called the NAT throughput. Now the network address translation or NAT is sort of a topic for another day but basically translating on the fly between your local IPs and the public IP that's assigned to every device coming off your router. So that has a throughput as well and typically as you can see that throughput's a little bit less than the actual speed of any one port. So that's sort of important but the difference is not very huge. You can see here the static IP NAT throughput is listed as 930 on the upload speed and 940 on the download and you've also got NAT throughputs listed for different protocols here as well and you can take a look at those. Now basically there sometimes is sort of controversy between what people get when they test their own NAT throughput using testing tools and what the manufacturer in this case TP-Link says their NAT throughput is and TP-Link did a sort of answer on this here and they basically pinned the blame on the testing tool that people are using. They say, you know, some customers give us feedback that their tested throughputs are different from our NAT throughput. There are many throughput measuring tools such as iPerf, Charlotte, SmartBits. We use SmartBits and it's pretty expensive and it's industry-grade. So this to me is not a whole area that's very interesting because looking at those NAT throughputs, 500 megabits per second would be just about the most I would ever be expecting to put through the forthcoming load balancing router by all means do more digging into this area but it is definitely worth checking on the spec sheet but if you don't see a dramatic difference I personally wouldn't worry about it but you will see some difference typically between what anyone port is capable of and what the machine is capable of as a networking device between the one and the LAN and that's basically what we're talking about when we're talking about the aggregate connectivity on the LAN site, moving through the load balancer and going out to the LAN interfaces how, what's the maximum throughput that it is capable of as a hardware device and that is basically, that's it for the most part. Oh yeah, I wanted to show this one as well. This is just a quick reference from how to geek and they're showing you here, I need to just zoom out of it to get myself out of the picture. So you can see cat five, these are the various categories of ethernet cabling cat five, cat five e, cat six and cat six a now, what's significant is if you see here between cat five and cat five e that's where I would say for people getting your fiber connectivity if you see cat five there it's got a maximum, it's a 10 100 capable rating for ethernet cabling that means it can go up to 100 megabits per second that's not that fast that means if you have 300 megabits per second fiber and your entire house is laid with category five etherness you're not going to get anything better than 100 in either direction through your computers that's a problem, that basically means you're wasting two thirds of your connectivity when once you get up to cat five e now I've checked all my ethernet cables in the last couple of days as part of this planning process I do have quite a bit of cat five e cabling but I'm not worried really because of the fact that that's rated up to one gigabyte one gigabit per second and I don't foresee that being a problem for quite a number of years but again, if you're building a home now, let's say and you're putting down ethernet cabling and you want this, you know you don't want to have to run ethernet through the interior walls and you don't have to do this process so often so go for cat six or above because you'll be getting 10 gigabit per second speed or better, I'm not even sure what cat seven does it's not even listed on this chart they all do power over ethernet now so cat five is something you'd probably want to avoid if you're networking for is something you'd want to avoid if you're networking for a fiber capable home if you're future proofing you'd probably want to go for cat six or above I was just looking out of interest what cat four can do cat four on below because I never see them on these comparison charts I think it's something like 10 megabits per second so effectively for today's networking cat four is unusable cat five is where it starts to get into gigabit capable transfer speeds you're looking at cat five E or above not cat five, cat five E and if you want to get 10 and above you're looking for cat six basically to summarize this if you are going from a slow internet connectivity setup like DSL and you're getting fiber next week great news right well just before the fiber guy comes do a bit of research on your home network map out every network interface card look up every NIC on every ethernet device on your network and double check what the maximum speed from the RJ45 is check every single cable inspect every single cable it's typically written on the sheath if this is five E or five or six or seven check every single ethernet cable check every single switch just Google the name and you'll be able to find the spec sheet on the internet in about two seconds and that's basically it and then once you know that there's no bottlenecks you'll be able to enjoy the full speed that your upgraded connectivity can provide thank you guys very much for watching this YouTube video this is me Daniel Rossell if you want to get more videos about tech, Linux and networking and other such topics feel free to subscribe