Jeff Geerlinggeerlingguy@mastodon.social
Oct 1, 2026, 6:58 PMAAAAH FIBER!!! After four years of pestering AT&T, it is finally here!
(And I can finally join the NTP Pool... eventually, it'll be a video of course!)
Replies
Oct 1, 2026, 7:02 PM@geerlingguy quality of life 👍
Nickstormii@darmstadt.socialOct 1, 2026, 7:03 PM@geerlingguy Wow, thats fast! My homelab is stuck behind a 50Mbps upload :blobcatdizzy:
Anderson SilvaUnderEu@mas.toOct 1, 2026, 7:04 PM@geerlingguy Would be nice to add probes for RIPE Atlas, ISP.Tools, Orb.net and/or OONI, for Internet measurements ;)
Oct 1, 2026, 7:08 PM@geerlingguy But do you even have a time source that is exact enough for the NTP pool? 😂
- Jeff Geerlinggeerlingguy@mastodon.socialOct 1, 2026, 7:38 PM
@chris Technhically you don't even need a time source for the pool - just having an NTP-based time server is good enough. It's more about sharing the global load :)
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPETimWardCam@c.imOct 1, 2026, 7:09 PM@geerlingguy OK, so you're quite likely find it useful for moving large quantities of raw video around, but I've been puzzled as to why "normal" households need high bandwidth.
So I've currently got around 130 Mb/s (this was billed as 512 kb/s when I bought it, but that was a lie because it was actually 600 kb/s from day one, and it's been upgraded from time to time ever since) which is, surely, orders of magnitude more than the household needs for a couple of simultaneous video meetings or telly shows or whatever. Even when we had teenage boys in the house they weren't (AFAIK) downloading gigabytes of stolen porn in multiple parallel streams on a regular basis.
So what am I missing? What do people use all this bandwidth for? Sure, downloading a software package in ten seconds rather than a couple of minutes is nice, but it's hardly necessary.
(OK, so when I was doing contract work from home it was a bit of a pain to *up*load 1Gb software deliveries to my client, but that was liveable with - after all, they were paying for my time.)
- Jeff Geerlinggeerlingguy@mastodon.socialOct 1, 2026, 7:39 PM
@TimWardCam For me, I want to move more of my services here, instead of hosting them on VPSes. I still run about 12 VPSes for various things. I will still have offsite data replica/backup, but once I have power figured out, I'm going to move everything in house that I can!
rapha3lrapha3l@not-x.g2od.chOct 1, 2026, 7:34 PM
Oct 1, 2026, 7:56 PM@geerlingguy
In germany they have already resorted to old tricks and made it asymmetrical again with no reason whatsoever! 🤬
MartiniusMartinius@social.tchncs.deOct 1, 2026, 9:36 PM- Jeff Geerlinggeerlingguy@mastodon.socialOct 2, 2026, 2:14 AM
@Martinius Heh, that's how I think when some of my EU friends show me there 8 or 10 Gbps residential connections!
Jeff Langejefftml@toot.ioOct 2, 2026, 2:21 AM@geerlingguy I think I'm equally jealous of the ping being so low.
Oct 2, 2026, 5:29 AM@geerlingguy congrats! 🥳
Karl Eglydekarl@bahn.socialOct 2, 2026, 8:23 AM@geerlingguy how is latency under load? aka https://test.libreqos.com/advanced/
Edit: just ran the Ookla Test myself and noticed the latency under load is in the screenshot... +7ms down and +5ms up, quite good
Oct 2, 2026, 10:15 AM@geerlingguy I can see the AT&T networking building from the front window of my job, I can walk there in two minutes and one minute of that is waiting for the crosswalk. We still can’t get Fiber from AT&T.
No idea how but we got them to run us a Fiber connection earlier this year at South County Mall though. Wasn’t even offered, we just asked and got it a month later. Couldn’t get it at any other STL mall, but SoCo… no problem.
- Alex Markleyalex@mbe.tvOct 2, 2026, 10:51 PM
@geerlingguy I wasn't able to successfully host NTP over AT&T Fiber! They seemed to be blocking inbound packets on UDP port 123. Hope you have better luck
- Jeff Geerlinggeerlingguy@mastodon.socialOct 3, 2026, 2:13 AM
@alex We'll see!
- Alex Markleyalex@mbe.tvOct 3, 2026, 1:27 PM
@geerlingguy just curious, did you get the business or residential version of the service?
Mine is residential and I'm still using the AT&T-provided gateway in passthrough mode. I spent hours on the phone with their techs and never got it figured out.
I understand it is possible (albeit unsupported) to set up an SFP+ module to terminate the service directly to my gateway, but I haven't pursued that yet. Not sure if the blocked ports are a defect in the AT&T gateway or a "feature" of their network management.
I went to the trouble of mounting a GPS antenna on my house specifically to join the NTP pool, so I definitely want to get it working at some point.
jccallme_jc@mastodon.scotOct 3, 2026, 10:40 PM@geerlingguy Synchronous to boot! Most UK FTTP consumers are stuck connected to older asynchronous GPON hardware, and the upgrade to symmetric XGS-PON hardware will take years…
