We compete against Axxess on Frogfoot. It could be that we're in the same Frogfoot switch in Isando.
Unlike Access, we also own our own fibre that we sell directly to clients on.
https://bgp.he.net/ip/156.155.57.43 Click on Axxess' ASN and see how they route their traffic.
https://bgp.he.net/ip/154.66.88.18 If you click on our ASN, you can see how we route our traffic.
This is "internet" also known as layer3, referring to the third layer in the ISO model.
What's your next door neighbour's internet like? Which ISPs are they with? My one neighbour's on Vox. The other one's on Afrihost and the one over the road uses me. It's the same for all of us.
My LTE backup worked for 18 hours last month when there was simply no fibre connectivity to my house. Another ISP owner who's also active on myBB recently bought himself a game farm outside Bela Bela and also as his fair share of fun and games with connectivity. I suspect he and I are classic examples of everyone's car is always fixed, except the mechanic.
Planned maintenance happens during a window. They tell us when it starts and when it will end. Normally a couple of hours.
The problems we're experiencing aren't planned maintenance.
We're talking layer2 here. The second layer in the ISO model.
I agree with you about the your route, my route and FlashSA's routes being diverse. It's not "our" lines.
PON FTTH ISP Networking 101:
The device facing the client in the POP is called an OLT. Frogfoot use Calix. They are excellent. Other companies use Hauwei, Nokia, Ubiquiti or even unlabelled stuff from China. At one point Frogfoot bought Blitz fibre. Blitz and us were Ubiquiti's poster children for their ufiber product, once upon a time. I'm not sure if the Blitz network has been moved to Calix, or if it's still Ubiquiti. The ufiber kit's fantastic, but there are too many hardware locks for my liking. We once couldn't add clients to our ufibre network as there were no ONUs to be found anywhere in the world and Nokia, Calix etc ONUs can't authenticate to a ubiquiti OLT. This doesn't happen with other manufacturers. If the poo hits the fan, you can connect clients to a Hauwei OLT with a Nokia ONU. The OLT has a couple of client facing ports. Each one has a single fibre plugged into it. That fibre then runs into splitters until it reaches the end user.
Rule of thumb is no more than 64 end users per OLT port. Some guys push it to 128. We buy less expensive OLTs, stack them and try to keep it under 32 users per port.
PON - Passive Optical Network.
We've all had horrible ADSL at one point. We all know that ADSL suffered from congestion. Yet now, as network operators, we are plugging a 1.25Gb or 2.5Gb module into a OLT and connecting 64 end users to it. Even if you have a 200Mb connection to your ISP, chances of your streaming 4K during "netflix hour" are slim. It doesn't matter the ISP.
Before we go further, congestion on the port of the OLT could be a problem for you. If you're sharing a port in an OLT with five 1Gb users, each streaming two or three 4K streams, you've got a problem.
It's been a minute since I installed fibre in a client's home, but I receive feedback from field service techs daily. People actually do that. They say, they've bought a 100Mb, 500Mb or 1Gb product and the line must run in the red at all times. Once they've run out of storage for downloads, they just stream. Our techs are used to walking into houses and seeing a full HD stream on an integrated PC in the kitchen, another stream in the sitting room and a third on another TV. And nobody watching them, "because ISPs are crooks and must be punished" - burn the gigs. There's a chance you have near neighbours like this. Remember, it's you and 63 others on that 1,25 or 2.5Gb port in the OLT.
You have a distance limitation from the OLT to the end user. Normally about 20km. Which is why you see the FNO (Frogfoot, MFN, DNATel etc) containers popping up all over the place.
Let's say you are going to provide FTTH to 5000 houses in a part of town. If you are using 8 port OLTs with a 1:64 contention ratio, you will need 10 OLTs. Those 10 OLTs need to be connected to a switch. That switch is then connected to a fibre backhaul. Let's do some more math. 8 x 1.25Gb ports is about 10Gb. The OLT has one or two 10Gb links in a bond to the switch. (A bond is when two or more physical links are bound together to create a larger logical bond - fibre layer1, bond layer2) The switch has nine or 18 other 10Gb links connecting the other OLTs. If everyone hits their internet during netflix hour, there could be 80 - 100Gb of traffic in that POP. That traffic needs to get back to their data centre. If they only have a 10Gb or 20Gb uplink, you can say hello to even more contention / congestion / packet loss.
Yes, there is contention on PON FTTH. Just like ADSL.
The only time you'll experience less of this is if you run active ethernet. I started running that in 2009. Vuma in 2012. We had to move to PON as Bank of Portcullis couldn't keep up with the cost of the switches. With active, every customer connects to a port on a switch. 5000 end users means 55 switches. You're talking increased heat, increased power budgets. And racks and racks for those 5000 end users to terminate. It's very nice, but not only is it expensive, but you also need very disciplined techs. An active POP with a couple of thousand fibre fly leads to switches becomes very messy, very quickly.
Now we've gone from the POP to the end user.
Let's say you have a Mikrotik router at home and I have a Mikrotik router at home. Why don't we see each other under IP Neighbors? The answer is vlans. Layer 2...
Here's the major difference between ADSL and FTTH. The port in your house is configured to a specific vlan that's been assigned to a specific ISP.
So, I have vlan1, Axxess have vlan2, Vox has vlan3. That vlan is configured on your ONT.
It's then configured from the OLT all the way back to where Access plugs into Frogfoot or where I plug into Frogfoot. All our users will share the same vlan. The same for Axxess or Vox.
When you change ISPs, Frogfoot has to redo the vlan to match the new ISP. That's why there aren't test accounts floating around.
So, the uplink ports on the switch in the POP will have 140 vlans on them. One for each ISP. Most of the POPs are connected back to the big data centres in Greater Johannesburg via third parties. In Nelspruit we have Liquid, DFA and Telkom. Each one of those companies offers Frogfoot a link from their POP to their main data centre in Johannesburg. These links run via different routes. The one goes via Polokwane. One goes along the N4. Another goes over the mountains. The theory is, if one goes down, the others are there for backup.
Once the traffic reaches the FNO's main data centre it runs to various other data centres, for example Teraco, ADC, IS / DiData. Here the ISP can connect. Some ISPs have longstanding relationships with IS, so they're not going to connect in Teraco. Other ISPs have been with Teraco since they were small room in the basement of Great Westerford in Rondebosch and wouldn't dream of leaving, so they connect to Frogfoot in Teraco.
For the rest of this post, I'm going to use Teraco as an example. It could just as easily by ADC or IS in Rosebank.
I don't know where Frogfoot's Johannesburg data centre is and assume it's in Teraco Isando. I can tell you their POP in Teraco Isando is 378 meters in fibre from our POP in Teraco Isando.
So from their data centre, they will run fibre (maybe their own, but probably dark fibre from DFA or Liquid) to their POPs. In this case, Teraco Isando. There they rent a some cabinets from Teraco and populate them with their switches.
This is where each ISP's vlan ends - on one of the fibre ports on that switch.
So, we could have switch 13, port 21 Cape Connect vlan1. Switch 13, port 22, Cool Ideas vlan2, Switch 13 port 30 Axxess vlan 3.
Because it's a vlan, neither you nor I have any idea how many switches or routers that link is running through. Educated guess for my link would be if Frogfoot's using DFA as their primay. FF switch in their local POP with 10km SFP modules to DFA's switch in their POP in Nelspruit. From there, 100km SFP module to a switch somewhere around what used to be Machadodorp, then another switch with 100km modules in Middelburg, another one around Delmas and then one in Isando that hands over to Frogfoot again. If you're in the "east" your traffic could join me here. Bear in mind other traffic can join the party in Middelburg, Delmas, etc. Add two or three switches in the Frogfoot DC and one or two switches in the Frogfoot POP in Teraco. We plug one of our switches in there. That switch is then connected to a router that handles the PPPOE and takes the client onto the internet.
As you can see, there's a huge cloud between the router in your home and the NAS / router you authenticate against at your ISP.
One last example. The owner of a FTTH ISP in Cape Town lives on a wine farm between Somerset West and Stellenbosch. I provide him with internet. There's a cross connect from his cabinet in Teraco Rondebosch to mine. I then have a vlan from my core switch incoming to him to a CoCT fibre going to Somerset West, where I have a switch that connects to my own fibre that runs from the town hall up a mountain called Helderberg, where I have a carrier grade radio that connects to his house. There's one vlan from the router in his house to a router in his cabinet. All he sees when he searches for neighbours is his own router, but there's a lot of stuff in between that's invisible to him.
You can see when his inverter ran out during last night's load shedding.
