Our startup ( Time Atlas Labs ) has had more (physical) addresses than it really should - including pre-company forming era, we are now in our 3rd office in period of a year. The networking, in general, has been universally pretty bad, until today.
As this is a rant, and I don’t want to particularly blame any specific ISP, the ISPs are left anonymous.
Office 1: Landlord-provided internet
It was slow and unreliable (‘reset the router’) was the approach to deal with it.
Office 2: Mobile broadband
We shared office with another startup (being their tenant, technically), but unfortunately there was no decent physical internet access to the floor of the building where our office was. So we used 5G mobile broadband router of our own (after sharing the other startups access for a bit).
In general, it was ‘ok’ (hundreds of megabits of download, but only about 20-30 megabits of upload), but the mobile router started slowing down after uptime of days, and in some periods of time it seemed quite slow too.
Office 3: Mobile broadband + fiber
We moved at the start of May in search of better air conditioning and network connectivity. I expected that getting fiber connection up (that is already wired to the building, as well as our office) to be just a formality. It was not.
Offers, installation schedule
As it turns out, best offer I got after round of calls was ’14 business days’ (from the company that has the actual cable to the building) and bit more from two other providers.
Originally I asked for just ‘give us bits in the fiber plug’. That self-serve option didn’t really work with one (honest) ISP, who said they offer (to companies) combined fiber with cellular backup, which in hindsight sounds cool. They also apparently route same prefix to both, so even during network downtime, the connectivity just keeps ticking. Two other providers promised to sell us just the connection, so we said no to the honest ISP (by email). Afterwards, their technical product guy actually called me and explained their offering and wanted to know why we did not want it. In hindsight, we should have taken their offer.
We instead signed with the one our mobile backup connection was from (to simplify billing, the offering of two ISPs was pretty similar), and then we got our first nasty surprise: the ’16 business days’ turned out to be about exactly 5 weeks on the calendar. So instead of getting network connectivity early in May we got it today (3rd of June) instead.
As a workaround, it turns out that adding regular physical power off to the mobile router helped a lot, as our experience improved significantly (despite Ubiquiti telling that sometimes latency/throughput was bad, but it was not consistently so). Downtime between 03:30 and 04:00 was fine.
In-office fiber installation experience
Today then we got second surprise - it wasn’t really ‘just the pipe please’, but instead we got chinese router (and presumably firewall) box from them, with the fiber connected to it, and 8 gigabit ethernet ports, of which we use only one. So we get really large fiber->gigabit ethernet converter box in our wiring closet.
The installation took literally 3 hours(!), due to various issues with in-office wiring, and especially on ISPs side. But in the end bits flowed.
IPv6?
But then I played around, and it turns out that neither the office fiber, or the mobile broadband offer IPv6. I am not sure if the broadband could be configured somehow to have IPv6, but at least the office connectivity is IPv4 only unless specifically ordered otherwise, it seems.
Performance?
No complaints here, from Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test:
The year of (full) IPv6 in my life
.. seems to be still slipping away. While I run it at home, and in some VPSes in the cloud, the work network is pure IPv4. And even in the cloud, setting up AWS IPv6 with NAT gateways is actually more expensive at small scale so we mostly run IPv4 nodes in ECS, instead of IPv6 and NAT gateway.. sigh.