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Comment by StudentStuff | Hacker News Reader

Over IPv6 they have direct peering with Hurricane Electric in Seattle, which brings local latency down to 2 to 3ms. Performance for Youtube & Netflix is way better over IPv6 too, but in some edge cases I'll tunnel through a VPS in downtown to get close to filling my pipe when downloading stuff from overseas.

Reliability wise, I've had 1 outage in two years, which happened at 1am on a weekday for slightly under 2 hours due to a PPPoE Aggregator failing. Far better than Comcast or Wave ever were, and at our usage I don't think either of the cable providers would be viable. We hit 12TB last month iirc, not even a peep from Centurylink.

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Fair enough. I've only had personal experience with CenturyLink's DSL service which in comparison to their fiber is abysmal. I'm probably letting my anger towards CenturyLink's poor stewardship of rural copper and the gov't rewarding them with free CAF money cloud my judgment.

Centurylink needs to get their worthless trash (aka copper) off the poles, the only way they'll gain and retain customers is with modern infrastructure (not ADSL like they've stranded so many areas on) and reasonable billing practices. VDSL2 is moderately competitive where its deployed, but old non-serviced areas like my part of Seattle (which never saw DSL) or poorly serviced areas on ADSL need to see upgrades immediately if Centurylink is to retain profitability on its non-carrier services side of the business.

I am not hugely familiar with how wholesale traffic works on the internet but I am a bit suprised to hear about different routing between IPv4 and IPv6. Isn’t any network hardware manufactured in the past 10 or 15 years dual stack? Surely by now we must be close to 100% IPv6 ready on the backbones. Why would there be a different route for v6 packets?

12TB? Is this a business or a residential service? How do you use that much data?

That is on Residential service, mostly Sling & Netflix. When I was on Centurylink's Prism IPTV product (which is great BTW (besides pricing), best linear TV experience out there, instant channel switching and live view of the last 5 channels you watched) we would regularly use in excess of 15TB as the IPTV traffic was constant unless you turned the STB off on each TV.

Right, I mustn't have been thinking properly - that's only about 36 megabits per second sustained. If that's multicast or from a local-ish node (which IPTV probably is), it's nothing.

Well, it was UDP Multicast when we were with Centurylink's IPTV, but now all that bandwidth has to transit an IX or transit provider.

Speaking of UDP Multicast, PFSense dropped all support for it without warning before updating, which was the end of me using PFSense at home as it broke TV until I could replace it with OpenWRT.

I'm guessing he's downloading "Linux ISOs".

Nope, that is minor portion of my traffic, nearly all of it is Sling with a bit of Netflix. Turns out high quality streaming video being left on 24/7 on multiple screens burns a ton of bandwidth :P

It seems wasteful to just leave on something streaming, just because you can.

Bandwidth is ephemeral, if you don't use it now, its not as though it will pile up and be usable later. With Fiber, there is no good reason to moderate usage, I'd be more concerned with the few watts the endpoint burns (which costs sub-$10 a year) than an extra TB of usage.

I have this on occasions. Action Cam footage which I backup to the cloud. If you use 4k it is a lot :)

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