QUIC is not quick enough over fast internet

> We find that over fast Internet, the UDP+QUIC+HTTP/3 stack suffers a data rate reduction of up to 45.2% compared to the TCP+TLS+HTTP/2 counterpart.

Haven't read the whole paper yet, but below 600 Mbit/s is implied as being "Slow Internet" in the intro.

That is interesting though. 1gbit is becoming more common

Just as important is > we identify the root cause to be high receiver-side processing overhead, in particular, excessive data packets and QUIC's user-space ACKs

It doesn't sound like there's a fundamental issue with the protocol.

Internet access is only going to become faster. Switching to a slower transport just as Gigabit internet is proliferating would be a mistake, obviously.

In terms of maximum available throughput it will obviously become greater. What's less clear is if the median and worst throughput available throughout a nation or the world will continue to become substantially greater.

It's simply not economical enough to lay fibre and put 5G masts everywhere (5G LTE bands covers less area due to being higher frequency, and so are also limited to being deployed in areas with a higher enough density to be economically justifiable).

It's wild that 1gbit LAN has been "standard" for so long that the internet caught up.

Meanwhile, low-end computers ship with a dozen 10+Gbit class transceivers on USB, HDMI, Displayport, pretty much any external port except for ethernet, and twice that many on the PCIe backbone. But 10Gbit ethernet is still priced like it's made from unicorn blood.

Here in Australia there’s talk of upgrading the National Broadband Network to 2.5 Gbps to match modern consumer Ethernet and WiFi speeds.

I grew up with 2400 baud modems as the super fast upgrade, so talk of multiple gigabits for consumers is blowing my mind a bit.

2.5Gbps is becoming pretty common and fairly affordable, though

My understanding is right around 10Gbps you start to hit limitations with the shielding/type of cable and power needed to transmit/send over Ethernet.

When I was looking to upgrade at home, I had to get expensive PoE+ injectors and splitters to power the switch in the closet (where there's no outlet) and 10Gbps SFP+ transceivers are like $10 for fiber or $40 for Ethernet. The Ethernet transceivers hit like 40-50C

Is Australia's ISP infrastructure nationalized?

It depends on whether it’s meaningfully slower. QUIC is pretty optimized for standard web traffic, and more specifically for high-latency networks. Most websites also don’t send enough data for throughput to be a significant issue.

I’m not sure whether it’s possible, but could you theoretically offload large file downloads to HTTP/2 to get best of both worlds?

Those very fast consumer interconnects are distinguished from ethernet by very limited cable lengths though, none of them are going to push 10gbps over tens of meters nevermind a hundred. DisplayPort is up to 80gbps now but in that mode it can barely even cross 1.5m of heavily shielded copper before the signal dies.

In a perfect world we would start using fiber in consumer products that need to move that much bandwidth, but I think the standards bodies don't trust consumers with bend radiuses and dust management so instead we keep inventing new ways to torture copper wires.

Agree that a widespread faster ethernet is long overdue.

But bear in mind, standards like USB4 only support very short cables. It's impressive that USB4 can offer 40 Gbps - but it can only do so on 1m cables. On the other hand, 10 gigabit ethernet claims to go 100m on CAT6A.

They also mainly identified a throughput reduction due to latency issues caused by ineffective/too many syscalls in how browsers implement it.

But such a latency issue isn't majorly increasing battery usage (compared to a CPU usage issue which would make CPUs boost). Nor is it an issue for server-to-server communication.

It basically "only" slows down high bandwidth transmissions on end user devices with (for 2024 standards) very high speed connection (if you take effective speeds from device to server, not speeds you where advertised to have bough and at best can get when the server owner has a direct pairing agreement with you network provider and a server in your region.....).

Doesn't mean the paper is worthless, browser should improve their impl. and it highlights it.

But the title of the paper is basically 100% click bait.

Ironically.. 2.5 Gbps is created by taking a 10GBASE-T module and effectively underclocking it. I wonder if "automatic speed selection" is around the corner with modules that automatically connect at 100Mbps to 10Gbps based on available cable quality.

40-50C? What is the brand?

Mine were over 90C, resulting in thermal shutdowns. I had to add an improvised heat exchanger to lower it down to ~70C: https://pics.archie.alex.net/share/U0G1yiWzShqOGXulwe1AetDjR...

Meanwhile here in New Zealand we can get 10 Gbps FTTH already.

Sorry about your NBN!

My 10G modules automatically drop down to 2.5G or 1G if the cable is not good enough. There's also 5G, but I have never seen it work better than 2.5G.

> Meanwhile, low-end computers ship with a dozen 10+Gbit class transceivers on USB, HDMI, Displayport, pretty much any external port except for ethernet, and twice that many on the PCIe backbone. But 10Gbit ethernet is still priced like it's made from unicorn blood.

You really can’t think of any major difference between 10G Ethernet and all of those other standards that might be responsible for the price difference?

Look at the supported lengths and cables. 10G Ethernet over copper can go an order of magnitude farther over relatively generic cables. Your USB-C or HDMI connections cannot go nearly as far and require significantly more tightly controlled cables and shielding.

That’s the difference. It’s not easy to accomplish what they did with 10G Ethernet over copper. They used a long list of tricks to squeeze every possible dB of SNR out of those cables. You pay for it with extremely complex transceivers that require significant die area and a laundry list of complex algorithms.

In Switzerland you get 25 Gbit/s for $60/month.

In 30 years it will be even faster. It would be silly to have to use older protocols to get line speed.

> could you theoretically offload large file downloads to HTTP/2

Yes, you can! You’d have your websites on servers that support HTTP/3 and your large files on HTTP/2 servers, similar to how people put certain files on CDNs. It might well be a great solution!

For local purposes that's certainly true. It seems that quic trades a faster connection establishment for lower throughput. I personally prefer tcp anyway.

Here in Spain too.

I don't see a need for it yet though. I'm a really heavy user (it specialist with more than a hundred devices in my networks) and I really don't need it.

Now do the same in Germany...

It's a long story featuring nasty partisan politics, corrupt incumbents, Rupert Murdoch, and agile upstarts doing stealth rollouts at the crack of dawn.

Basically, the old copper lines were replaced by the NBN, which is a government-owned corporation that sells wholesale networking to telcos. Essentially, the government has a monopoly, providing the last-mile fibre links. They use nested VLANs to provide layer-2 access to the consumer telcos.

Where it got complicated was that the right-wing government was in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch, who threatened them with negative press before an upcoming election. They bent over and grabbed their ankles like the good little Christian school boys they are, and torpedoed the NBN network technology to protect the incumbent Fox cable network. Instead of fibre going to all premises, the NBN ended up with a mix of technologies, most of which don't scale to gigabit. It also took longer and cost more, despite the government responsible saying they were making these cuts to "save taxpayer money".

Also for political reasons, they were rolling it out starting at the sparse rural areas and leaving the high-density CBD regions till last. This made it look bad, because if they spent $40K digging up the long rural dirt roads to every individual farmhouse, it obviously won't have much of a return on the taxpayer's investment... like it would have if deployed to areas with technology companies and their staff.

Some existing smaller telcos noticed that there was a loophole in the regulation that allowed them to connect the more lucrative tech-savvy customers to their own private fibre if it's within 2km of an existing line. Companies like TPG had the entire CBD and inner suburban regions of every major city already 100% covered by this radius, so they proceeded to leapfrog the NBN and roll out their own 100 Mbps fibre-to-the-building service half a decade ahead. I saw their unmarked white vans stealthily rolling out extra fibre at like 3am to extend their coverage area before anyone in the government noticed.

The funny part was that FttB uses VDSL2 boxes in the basement for the last 100m going up to apartments, but you can only have one per building because they use active cross-talk cancellation. So by the time the NBN eventually got around to wiring the CBD regions, they got to the apartments to discover that "oops, too late", private telcos had gotten there first!

There were lawsuits... which the government lost. After all, they wrote the legislation, they were just mad that they hadn't actually understood it.

Meanwhile, some other incumbent fibre providers that should have disappeared persisted like a stubborn cockroach infestation. I've just moved to an apartment serviced by OptiComm, which has 1.1 out of 5 stars on Google... which should tell you something. They even have a grey fibre box that looks identical to the NBNCo box except it's labelled LBNCo with the same font so that during a whirlwind apartment inspection you might not notice that you're not going to be on the same high-speed Internet as the rest of the country.

Sure you need fiber for long runs at ultra bandwidth, but short runs are common and fiber is not a good reason for DAC to be expensive. Not within an order of magnitude of where it is.

The main issue is switches, really. 5Gbps USB NICs are available for $30 on Amazon, or $20 on AliExpress. 10Gbps NICS are $60, so not exactly crazy expensive either.

But switches haven't really kept up. A simple unmanaged 5-port or 8-port 2.5GigE isn't too bad, but anything beyond that gets tricky. 5GigE switches don't seem to exist, and you're already paying $500 for a budget-brand 10GigE switch with basic VLAN support. You want PoE? Forget it.

The irony is that at 10Gbps fiber suddenly becomes quite attractive. A brand-new SFP+ NIC can be found for $30, with DACs only $5 (per side) and transceivers $30 or so. You can get an actually-decent switch from Mikrotik for less than $300.

Heck, you can even get brand-new dualport SFP28 NICs for $100, or as little as $25 on Ebay! Switch-wise you can get 16 ports of 25Gbps out of a $800 Mikrotik switch: not exactly cheap, but definitely within range for a very enthusiastic homelabber.

The only issue is that wiring your home for fiber is stupidly expensive, and you can't exactly use it to power access points either.

In other words:

Enable http/3 + quic between client browser <> edge and restrict edge <> origin connections to http/2 or http/1

Cloudflare (as an example) only supports QUIC between client <> edge and doesn’t support it for connections to origin. Makes sense if the edge <> origin connection is reusable, stable, and “fast”.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/optimization/protoco...

There was a time when FFE, DFE, CTLE, and FEC could reasonably be considered an extremely complex bag of tricks by the standards of the competition. That time passed many years ago. They've been table stakes for a while in every other serial standard. Wifi is beating ethernet at the low end, ffs, and you can't tell me that air is a kinder channel. A low-end PC will ship with a dozen transceivers implementing all of these tricks sitting idle, while it'll be lucky to have a single 2.5Gbe port and you'll have to pay extra for the privilege.

No matter, eventually USB4NET will work out of the box. The USB-IF is a clown show and they have tripped over their shoelaces every step of the way, but consumer Ethernet hasn't moved in 20 years so this horse race still has a clear favorite, lol.

> In a perfect world we would start using fiber in consumer products that need to move that much bandwidth

We are already doing this. USB-C is explicitly designed to allow for cables with active electronics, including conversion to & from fiber. You could just buy an optical USB-C cable off Amazon, if you wanted to.

USB4 does support longer distances, but those cables need active electronics to guarantee signal integrity. That's how you end up with Apple's $160 3-meter cable.

Gigabit connections are widely available in urban areas. The problem is not theoretical, but definitely is pretty recent / nascent.

It passed it! Here there are offers up to 3gbit residential (Vancouver). I had 1.5 bit for a while. Downgraded to 1gbit because while I love fast internet, right now nobody in the home uses it enough to affect 1gbit speed

A gigabit connection is just one prerequisite. The server also has to be sending very big bursts of foreground/immediate data or you're very unlikely to notice anything.

How is it clickbait? The title implies that QUIC isn't as fast as other protocols over fast internet connections.

Fiber is the most economical solution, it's compact, cheap, not susceptible to electromagnetic interference from thunderstorms, not interesting for metal thieves, etc.

Most importantly, it can be heavily over-provisioned for peanuts, so your cable is future-proof, and you will never have dig the same trenches again.

Copper only makes sense if you already have it.

> below 600 Mbit/s is implied as being "Slow Internet" in the intro

Or rather, not "Fast Internet"

Because it's QUIC _implementations of browser_ not being as fast as the non quick impl of browsers on connections most people would not just call fast but very fast (in context of browser usage) while still being definitely 100% fast enough for all browser use case done today (sure it theoretically might reduce video bit rate, that is, if it isn't already capped to a anyway smaller rate, which AFIK it basically always is).

So "Not Quick Enough" is plain out wrong, it is fast enough.

The definition of "Fast Internet" misleading.

And even "QUIC" is misleading as it normally refers to the protocol while the benchmarked protocol is HTTP/3 over QUIC and the issue seem to be mainly in the implementations.

Oh man. I've been off the IT floor for too long. Time to change my rhetoric, ya'll have been around the corner for a while.

Aging has it's upsides and downsides I guess.

To clarify, NBN is a monopoly on the last mile infrastructure which is resold to private ISPs that sell internet services.

The history there is that Australia used to have a government run monopoly on telephone infrastructure and services (Telecom Australia), which was later privatised (and rebranded to Telstra). The privatisation left Telstra with a monopoly on the infrastructure, but also a requirement that they resell the last mile at a reasonable rate to allow for some competition.

So Australia already had an existing industry of ISPs that were already buying last mile access from someone else. The NBN was just a continuation of the existing status quo in that regard.

> They even have a grey fibre box that looks identical to the NBNCo box except it's labelled LBNCo with the same font

Early in my career I worked for one of those smaller telcos trying to race to get services into buildings before the NBN. I left around the time they were talking about introducing an LBNCo brand (only one of the reasons I left). At the time, they weren't part of Opticomm, but did partner with them in a few locations. If the brand is still around, I guess they must have been acquired at some point.

> The only issue is that wiring your home for fiber is stupidly expensive

What do you mean by that? My home isnt wired for ethernet. I can buy 30m of CAT6 cable for £7, or 30m of fibre for £17. For a home use, that's a decent amount of cable, and even spending £100 on cabling will likely run cables to even the biggest of houses.

When you make the cable do the conversion, you go from two expensive transceivers to six expensive transceivers. And if the cable breaks you need to throw out four of them. It's a poor replacement for direct fiber use.

Yeah.

These days, passive cables that support ultra bandwidth are down to like .5 meters.

For anything that wants 10Gbps lanes or less, copper is fine.

For ultra bandwidth, going fiber-only is a tempting idea.

> My understanding is right around 10Gbps you start to hit limitations with the shielding/type of cable and power needed to transmit/send over Ethernet.

If you decide you only need 50 meters, that reduces both power and cable requirements by a lot. Did we decide to ignore the easy solution in favor of stagnation?

There is an argument to be made that gigabit ethernet is "good enough" for Joe Average.

Gigabit ethernet is ~100MB/s transfer speed over copper wire or ~30MB/s over wireless accounting for overhead and degradation. That is more than fast enough for most people.

10gbit is seemingly made from unicorn blood and 2.5gbit is seeing limited adoption because there simply isn't demand for them outside of enterprise who have lots of unicorn blood in their banks.

You explained why 10G Ethernet cables are expensive, but why should it be so expensive to put a 10G-capable port on the computer compared to the other ports?

Did you completely misunderstand OP? The 10G Ethernet cables are not expensive. In a pinch, even your Cat 5e cable is capable of 10G Ethernet albeit at a shorter distance than Cat 6 cable. Even then, it can be at least a dozen times longer than a similar USB or HDMI or DisplayPort cable.

Apparently there is the https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/us-xg-6poe from Ubiquity. It only has 4 10GbE ports but they all have PoE.

High-latency networks are going away, too, with Cloudflare eating the web alive and all the other major clouds adding PoPs like crazy.

These things are nice-to-have until they become sufficiently widespread that typical consumer applications start to require the bandwidth. That comes much later.

E.g.: 8K 60 fps video streaming benefits from data rates up to about 1 Gbps in a noticeable way, but that's at least a decade away form mainstream availability.

I heard from several sources that what they do is give the apartment builder a paper bag of cash in exchange for the right to use their wires instead of the NBN. Then they gouge the users with higher monthly fees.

Isn't the expensive part more the assembly aspect? For Cat 6 the plugs and keystone jacks add up to a few dollars per port, and the crimper is like $20. I understand building your own fibre cables-- if you don't want to thread them through walls without the heads pre-attached, for example-- involves more sophisticated glass-fusion tools that are fairly expensive.

A rental service might help there, or a call-in service-- the 6 hours of drilling holes and pulling fibre can be done by yourself, and once it's all cut to rough length, bring out a guy who can fuse on 10 plugs in an hour for $150.

Cloudflare tunnels work over quic so this is not entirely correct

When I was there NBNCo hadn't really moved into the inner city yet. We did have some kind of financial agreement with the building developer/management to install our VDSL DSLAMs in their comms room. It wouldn't surprise me if those payments got shadier and more aggressive as the NBN coverage increased.

Then why isn't it everywhere, it's been practical for over 40 years now.

If you particularly want to use a raw spool, then yes that's an annoying cost. If you buy premade cables for an extra $5 each then it's fine.

I did misunderstand it, because looking at it again now, they spent the entire post talking about how difficult it is to make the cables, except for the very last sentence where they mention die area one time, and it’s still not clear that they’re talking about die area for something that’s inside the computer rather than a chip that goes in the cable.

> Look at the supported lengths and cables. … relatively generic cables. Your USB-C or HDMI connections cannot go nearly as far and require significantly more tightly controlled cables and shielding. … They used a long list of tricks to squeeze every possible dB of SNR out of those cables.

A practical drawback to premade cables is the need for a larger hole to accommodate the pre-attached connector. There's also a larger gap that needs to be plugged around the cable to prevent leaks into he wall.

My ordinary home-centre electric drill and an affordable ~7mm masonry bit lets me drill a hole in stucco large enough to accept bare cables with a very narrow gap to worry about.

Where are you finding them for that cheap? OP is talking about 20GBP for a run of fiber. If I look at, for instance, Ubiquiti their direct attach cables start at $13 for 0.5 meter cables.

The other side of this particular coin is, when such bandwidth is widely available, suddenly a lot of apps that have worked just fine are now eating it up. I'm not looking forward to 9 gigabyte Webpack 2036 bundles everywhere :V

I was looking at patch cables. Ubiquiti's start at $4.80

It is everywhere in new development. I remember Google buying tons of "dark fiber" capacity from telcos like 15 years ago; that fiber was likely laid for future needs 20-25 years ago. New apartment buildings in NYC just get fiber, with everything, including traditional "cable TV" with BNC connectors, powered by it.

But telcos have colossal copper networks, and they want to milk the last dollars from it before it has to be replaced, with digging and all. Hence price segmenting, with slower "copper" plans and premium "fiber" plans, obviously no matter if the building has fiber already.

Also, passive fiber interconnects have much higher losses than copper with RJ45s. This means you want to have no more than 2-3 connectors between pieces of active equipment, including from ISP to a building. This requires more careful planning, and this is why wiring past the apartment (or even office floor or a single-family house) level is usually copper Ethernet.

Their point was those systems like hdmi, bits of usb-c etc put the complexity is very expensive very short cables.

Meanwhile a 10g port on my home router will run over copper for far longer. Not that I’m a fan given the power use, fibre is much easier to deal with and will run for miles.

A 3m 100g dac is 1/3 the price

My single mode keystones pass through were about the same price as cat5, and pre-made cables were no harder to run than un terminated cat5.

I don’t think my 10g coppers will drop to 10m. 100m sure, but 10m rings a bell.

Thanks - I genuinely didn't know. I assumed that you could "just" crimp it like CAT6, but a quick google leads me to spending quite a few hundred pounds on something like this[0].

That said;

> A rental service might help there, or a call-in service-- the 6 hours of drilling holes and pulling fibre can be done by yourself, and once it's all cut to rough length, bring out a guy who can fuse on 10 plugs in an hour for $150.

If you were paying someone to do it (rather than DIY) I'd wager the cost would be similar, as you're paying them for 6 hours of labour either way.

[0] https://www.cablemonkey.co.uk/fibre-optic-tool-kits-accessor...

Thanks for the response! Very interesting. Unfortunately the USA is a tumor on this planet. Born and Raised, this place is fucked and slowly fucking the whole world.

This is about Australia, not the USA.

Yeah for me it's mostly ollama models lol. It is nice to see it go fast. But even on my 1gbit it feels fast enough.

Yeah the problem here is also that I don't have the router setup to actually distribute that kind of bandwidth. 2.5Gbit max..

And internal network is 1 Gbit too. So it'll take ) and cost) more than just changing my subscription.

Also my TV is still 1080p lol

I think our phone lines (the only buried cable here that can do data) are probably >40 years old. They're still selling DSL over it.

Coaxial "cable TV" cables, also sometimes buried, can carry data all right, at pretty high speeds, given right electronics.

I think 10GTek. However there were only 2 of them in the uplink ports on a 24x1Gbps switch in a server cabinet with decent airflow. They might have been getting up to 60C but I don't think they were hitting as high as you were saying. I've since replaced with a 8x10Gbps Hasivo switch so I can't check anymore.

I'm not sure what you're saying. The cable length is largely fixed/determined by the building you're running cable in. I'd rather spend an extra $100 on cable than start ripping open walls/floors/ceilings to get a slightly more optimal run length.

If it's new construction or you already have everything ripped open it's less of an issue.

I'm not saying 10gig itself should have been range-limited. I'm saying if the reason it was expensive was cable limits and transmit power, both of those can be solved by cutting the range. And if cutting the range could have given us cheap fast connections 15 years ago we should have made it a variant. It could have become the default network port, and anyone that wanted full distance could have bought a card for it.

Instead we waited and waited before making slower versions of 10gig, and those are still very slow to roll out. Also 2.5gig and 5gig seem especially consumer-oriented, so for those users a cheap but half range 10gig would be all upside.

And 40gig can't reach 100m on any version of copper, so it's not like 100m is a sacred requirement.

I'm aware of that, but here there's no coaxial cable TV lines either. The only lines in our area that can provide data service are the copper phone lines.