Googlefiber

While finishing up my holiday travel, I decided to stop in for a couple of days at the Kansas City Hacker House, a place for aspiring technology entrepreneurs to live and work on their projects while connected to the Google Fiber gigabit network. Unlike my previous Google Fiber experience, I had an opportunity to plug my laptop directly into the network via gigabit ethernet and run some more tests.

Legacy Tests

I first ran a few tests of legacy network usage -- uploading and downloading large files from various services.

It looks like Google Drive wasn't having a good day. Dropbox, on the other hand, really screamed. (Although not as much as you might expect on a gigabit connection.) It was nice to be able to download Ubuntu in 61 seconds from a well-connected server. Bittorrent didn't perform well, though -- I suspect you'd need to be downloading a much larger file from many more seeds before you'd see Bittorrent have time to ramp up the connections and compare favorably.

All tests were performed to and from a local ramdisk, to avoid any hard drive I/O bottlenecks. However, the remote servers are likely using spinning disks that are contending with many other users.

Speedtest.net tests

The Speedtest.net tests really aren't very useful for Google Fiber, since the servers aren't really set up for measuring high-bandwidth connections. You really end up measuring the server's capabilities and the throughput of various intermediate networks. Nevertheless, here are a couple of tests:

I tested with several other Speedtest.net servers, and all the results varied too much to be useful.

Google Fiber Speed Test

To provide users with a reliable way of measuring the bandwidth to their home, Google provides a Google Fiber Speed Test for testing the connection from the home to a server on the Google Fiber network. (Google Fiber customers can access the server, but it doesn't appear to be accessible from the outside.)

The primary differences between Google's speed tests and the other speed tests seem to be:

1. Google's server is located on the Google Fiber network in Kansas City, a mere 4 hops and 1.337ms of latency away from Google Fiber customers. This means that the Google Fiber Speed Test can more accurately measure the capability of a customer's last-mile link. (This also means it's perhaps less useful as a test for measuring access to resources outside of Kansas City.)
2. The server is presumably provisioned well enough to handle tests from gigabit customers.
3. Google's test opens a large number of simultaneous connections -- as many as 64 from my tcpdump observations. This may help with issues related to TCP window size, and possibly mitigate the negative effects of TCP congestion control should one of the connections miss a packet.

Network topology

Google Fiber has considerably increased their peering arrangements since my last visit. They seem to have good peering with the following networks that I noticed:

• Level 3 - Chicago
• XO - Chicago
• Facebook (Rackspace ORD1) - Chicago
• Inteliquent - Chicago
• Kansas Research and Education Network (KanREN) - Kansas City
• Level 3 - Dallas
• Level 3 - Denver
• Comcast (Equinix Great Oaks) - San Jose
• Level 3 - San Jose
• Amazon - San Francisco
• Google - various

(Who knew that Facebook even had their own nationwide network? If you see tfbnw.net addresses in your traceroutes, the tfbnw stands for "the facebook network".)

IPv6 seems to be functioning properly, according to various online testers. (I did have some issues reaching my 6to4-connected home network via IPv6, for some reason.)

Conclusions

The file transfer tests -- old-fashioned "move this big file from one hard drive on the network to some other hard drive" -- are probably not the best tests of a next-generation gigabit service such as Google Fiber. Nor are most other "download" applications. (What's the point of being able to download four seasons of Breaking Bad in 3 minutes, when it takes 30 hours to watch?) Ultimately, unlocking the true potential of home gigabit connections will rely on the development of new and interesting applications. I predict a lot of live media, immersive telepresence, and rich collaboration applications will arise from this experiment.

Thanks to Ben Barreth and the residents of the Hacker House for having me over!

While visiting Kansas City recently, I decided to investigate Google Fiber, Google's ambitious new residential gigabit Internet service they are building in Kansas City, Kansas, and central Kansas City, Missouri. While they haven't connected residential customers to the network yet, they have provisioned service at several local businesses. They also opened a showroom called "Fiber Space" to demonstrate the service to potential customers.

My first stop was the Mud Pie Vegan Bakery and Coffeehouse, a neat coffee house in a historic area of Midtown Kansas City. Mud Pie has the Google Fiber hookup, which customers can use via Wi-Fi or the ethernet-attached Chromebooks which Google has provided. I tried to convince the barista to let me borrow the ethernet connection from a Chromebook so I could test the fast path, but he declined due to Google not wanting people to interfere with their hardware in such a way. However, I found I was able to accomplish most of my investigation goals using a combination of my laptop on Wi-Fi and the wired Chromebooks. I ended up hanging out at Mud Pie for several hours, running tests and chatting with the barista and customers.

Four blocks south of Mud Pie, Google has set up a showroom for Google Fiber called "Fiber Space." It's a very consumer-oriented experience aimed at selling the service to locals. Many Google Fiber employees are on hand to show people what hardware they'll need, and demonstrate the Internet and TV services in virtual living rooms. The "car roller coaster" set from the Google Fiber promotional video and free snacks were also on hand. In addition to the wired Chromebooks on display, people can bring their laptops to try out Google Fiber via the Wi-Fi. However, an employee told me that they didn't allow hooking up to the wire, citing a concern about piracy or illegal activities or some such. (Which sounds like a pretty weak excuse to me.)

Speed Tests

I don't always download big files. But when I do, I download half a gigabyte of pseudorandom bytes generated by /dev/urandom.

Naturally, the first thing people want to know about Google Fiber is how fast is it, really? Unfortunately, it's difficult to reliably measure the practical speed of the service due to the many other bottlenecks that exist once you remove the bottleneck of the last mile. Also, since others have performed plenty of speed tests, I decided to focus more on other characteristics of the network. However, I did run a few throughput tests for good measure.

Here is the result from speedtest.net, running on the wired Chromebook:

I tried running the test against servers in other locales, but the default Palo Alto server delivered the best result. I don't think these tests are great measures of throughput for such high speeds, since not only might the test servers be bottlenecked, but they may not run the tests long enough for the TCP window size to ramp up to the connection's true capacity.

A slightly better test was to download very large files full of random data from various cloud servers:

I don't know why the Linode download was so slow, although the outbound route to that server went out to California, and even across Comcast's network (!) before heading to Dallas. The download from a server at Forethought hit a much higher bottleneck somewhere, but it's difficult to say where.

Latency Tests

Going to town with the ping and traceroutes.

At Mud Pie, a couple of Chromebooks were hooked up to Google Fiber via ethernet.

I performed pings and traceroutes to a number of hosts, to get an idea of Google Fiber's positioning on the network and the available peering points for outbound packets. These tests were conducted from the Wi-Fi network at Mud Pie, so a few milliseconds can be attributed to local Wi-Fi latency (see the first item on the list).

The full ping/traceroute output is available.

Peering points

As far as I can tell, outbound packets exit Google Fiber's network via links to either San Jose, CA, or Dallas, TX. In San Jose, Google Fiber seems to be peering with Comcast and XO communications. (Presumably at Equinix's 11 Great Oaks facility.) In Dallas, Google Fiber seems to peer with Level 3 and Google's main network (which is a separate autonomous system from Google Fiber). As you might expect, access to Google services (such as Google Drive and YouTube) is quite snappy from the Google Fiber network.

Locally, Google Fiber has a short route to the University of Kansas Medical Center, but I'm not sure who else they peer with in Kansas City. They definitely do not peer with KC NAP.

IPv6

While on Mud Pie's network, my laptop was assigned an IPv6 address in the fc00::/7 block which is designated for unique local addresses. However, I'm not sure what the point of this is. I definitely could not reach the IPv6 internet via ping6.

Conclusion

Google Fiber is fast. If it was available in my neighborhood, I'd sign up.

UPDATE 2012-12-28: I've made another visit to Kansas City... see my post about plugging into the ethernet at the Hacker House.