Fiber Speeds in Paris – 4 Years Later

Time flies and I can hardly believe that I’ve had a fiber connection at my Paris flat for 4 years now and that fiber is still almost nowhere to be seen in Germany. O.k. I do have vectored VDSL and 100 Mbit/s down, 40 Mbit/s up is not so bad. But fiber is playing in an entirely different league. When I got my fiber Line in Paris four years ago, I measured 264 Mbit/s in the downlink direction and 48 Mbit/s in the uplink direction. So how are things today, i.e. 4 years down the road?

This time around I’ve used iperf3 in TCP mode to run the speed tests as shown below and to my great satisfaction, speeds are still the same as four years ago. iperf3 measured 287 Mbit/s in the downlink direction and 51 Mbit/s in the uplink direction even during busy hours in the evening. In other words, the overprovisioning in the network is still sufficient that data transfers of other uses that use the same beam of light have no impact on my instantaneous and sustained throughput. Very nice indeed!

And here are the detailed results in case you are interested. You might notice that while in the downlink direction, the achieved throughput is the same in every second, uplink throughput varies a bit. I’m not sure what the reason for that is, it could be many things.

martin@vm-host:~$ iperf3 -c ping-ams1.online.net -R -p 5206
Connecting to host ping-ams1.online.net, port 5206
Reverse mode, remote host ping-ams1.online.net is sending
[  4] local 192.168.1.74 port 56132 connected to 163.172.208.7 port 5206
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  33.1 MBytes   278 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  34.0 MBytes   285 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  34.0 MBytes   285 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  34.0 MBytes   285 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  34.0 MBytes   285 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  34.0 MBytes   285 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  34.0 MBytes   285 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  34.0 MBytes   285 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  34.0 MBytes   285 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  34.0 MBytes   285 Mbits/sec                  
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec   352 MBytes   295 Mbits/sec    1             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec   342 MBytes   287 Mbits/sec                  receiver


martin@vm-host:~$ iperf3 -c ping-ams1.online.net  -p 5206
Connecting to host ping-ams1.online.net, port 5206
[  4] local 192.168.1.74 port 56140 connected to 163.172.208.7 port 5206
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr  Cwnd
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  9.36 MBytes  78.5 Mbits/sec    5    253 KBytes       
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  8.51 MBytes  71.4 Mbits/sec  178   58.0 KBytes       
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  5.53 MBytes  46.4 Mbits/sec    2   56.6 KBytes       
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  4.54 MBytes  38.1 Mbits/sec    2   60.8 KBytes       
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  5.78 MBytes  48.5 Mbits/sec    1   87.7 KBytes       
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  7.15 MBytes  59.9 Mbits/sec   47   73.5 KBytes       
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  5.03 MBytes  42.2 Mbits/sec   13   55.1 KBytes       
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  4.35 MBytes  36.5 Mbits/sec    2   63.6 KBytes       
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  6.71 MBytes  56.3 Mbits/sec    0    119 KBytes       
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  6.21 MBytes  52.1 Mbits/sec   75   32.5 KBytes       
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  63.2 MBytes  53.0 Mbits/sec  325             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  61.6 MBytes  51.7 Mbits/sec                  receiver