Eir 1Gb speed tests

[Sean]

While visiting friends that run a hostel and talking about broadband, they mentioned about having to get their road and footpath dug up to get a fibre cable in the building.  They mentioned they have Eir's Gigabit connection (1000Mbps down / 100Mbps up).  The only thing I had with was my phone, a HTC U11, so I tried a few speed tests, connected on their Wi-Fi 5GHz band:

 

 

From what I heard, Eir's F2000 router (Huawei HG659b) doesn't have great Wi-Fi performance, so I asked if I could borrow a laptop and a network cable to try some tests with.  The laptop looked new and was reasonably spec'd (Core i5 8250u) with an SSD.  Initially I ran into the 100Mbps issue until I looked closely at the cable and saw it was a Category 5 cable, so I asked if they have any other and got a chunkier Cat 6 cable and the full 1Gbps Ethernet connection. ?

 

From a handful of tests, the following are the fastest single thread tests I got, both in the Chrome browser:

 

 

 

Although the German server did better, it had a very slow ramp-up time, so this was after letting it go through progressive steps until it reached the 200MB block size.  With the UK server, it ramped up faster but kept ramping up even when progressing through each test stage. 

 

In multi-thread mode with the UK server, most tests were around the 500's and the second one is the fastest I got at the time:

 

 

Netflix's Fast.com doesn't seem to be able to handle a 1Gbps connection properly as it was constantly giving test results over 1Gbps, one as high as 1.6Gbps!  These results were obviously impossible when the physical network interface is only 1Gbps.   Ookla's speed test varied between 500 and 940Mbps, but as I demonstrated earlier it discards dips during the connection.

 

Anyway, as I was curious to see what the connection could sustain, I started by downloading a large Linux DVD ISO from Heanet (Ireland's National Research & Education Network).  The Heanet mirror site has at least 4 x 10Gbps backbone peers.

 

The following is with a single file transfer after waiting a minute for the network graph to fill:

37.8MB/s = 302.4Mbps.   The Ethernet graph is raw data and includes about 10% overhead.

 

The following is with 4 DVD ISOs simultaneously downloading from Heanet after allowing the network graph to fill:

That appears to around 750-950Mbps of sustained raw throughput or around 800Mbps of usable data throughput. ? 

 

As this was at a hostel with several guests, it's quite likely they were using a small portion of the throughput, such as streaming in their rooms.  On the other hand, it's quite impressive considering this hostel is in a coastal rural location surrounded by farmland and the sea. 

Edited May 27, 2019 by CA3LE
fixing broken images