10Gbps home fibre tested in South Africa
MyBroadband was recently provided with some astounding test results from one of the first 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connections in South Africa.
The fastest FTTH speed generally available in South Africa is 1Gbps, allowing for file downloads at up to 120 megabytes per second (MB/s).
Paul Butschi, co-owner of one of South Africa’s biggest Internet service providers, Cool Ideas, is testing a home connection ten times faster than that.
The 10Gbps Vumatel line at Butschi’s home has been in use since mid-2021.
It was installed in the lead-up to Vumatel’s planned commercial launch of a 10Gbps FTTH product.
However, numerous queries we sent to Vumatel for updates on the rollout have gone unanswered since then.
One possible explanation is that Vumatel has increasingly focused on its entry-level offerings rather than building out new options in the premium market.
The company has said the current FTTH market has become saturated and that the potential for growth in this segment is declining.
Instead, it is driving the rollout of its Vuma Key and Vuma Reach products in lower-income areas like townships and informal settlements.
Hamstrung by hardware
A 1Gbps package is already too fast for the needs of most households.
Benefitting from a 10Gbps would also require more powerful hardware than is installed in the average home to fully benefit from the high speeds.
When MyBroadband initially spoke with Butschi about testing the connection almost three years ago, we quickly concluded that we would struggle with hardware limitations at multiple points throughout the connection.
The router, cables, and PC would all require components supporting at least 10Gbps speeds.
For Butschi’s testing, he used an industrial-grade 36-core Mikrotik CCR 1036 router that supports up to 16Gbps throughput.
He connected the router to his Vumatel ONT using an SFP+ Direct Attach cable with support for up to 10Gbps speeds.
The tests were run on his PC, which was linked to the router via a CAT 6A cable, which can also support up to 10Gbps speeds.
In addition, the Presto Solo Ethernet port on his PC can handle up to 10Gbps speeds.
Lastly, speeds could also be limited by the processor, RAM, and the write speeds of the storage drive.
Fortunately, he had a 12-core AMD chip paired with 32GB RAM and a Samsung 980 Pro SSD, all of which were more than up to the task.
Speed tests
Butschi conducted speed tests on the 10Gbps via MyBroadband’s speedtest.co.za platform and Ookla’s Speedtest.net.
On speedtest.co.za, he achieved a download speed of 2.641Gbps and upload speed of 2.998Gbps, with a latency of 1ms.
It should be noted that the MyBroadband servers used to perform these speeds tests are not configured for such high-bandwidth connections.
Most South Africans — many of whom primarily access the Internet through a mobile device — have Mbps Internet speeds that often measure in just the double digits.
On Ookla’s platform, he recorded download and uploaded speeds in excess of 4.3Gbps, and the same 1ms ping.
The screenshots below show the results of the speed tests on the 10Gbps connection.
Large file downloads
Butschi also tested the connection’s speed for downloading large files.
Once again, it should be noted that providers of these platforms can limit bandwidth usage to ensure their servers keep up with demand.
Butschi initially downloaded a 9.8GB file through a popular browser, which saw him hit a ceiling of 17.5MB/s, equivalent to 150Mbps.
By switching to a download manager with support for multi-threading, he increased the download speed to 265MB/s, or about 2.22Gbps, when downloading from the Cool Ideas server hosted in London.
Completing the download would have taken about 37 seconds.
Downloading a Linux distribution’s ISO from a London server saw him hit a speed of 154MB/s, roughly 1.3Gbps.
At that speed, the 3.72GB file would have been fully downloaded in about 24 seconds.
These estimated completion times assume that Butschi’s SSD was able to write the data at a fast enough speed to prevent a bottleneck.
Game downloads
Gamers with slow Internet connections will know the pain of waiting hours in eager anticipation for the initial download of a much-awaited title or for a large patch to be applied. For Butschi, this is a non-issue.
The 10Gbps connection could download games from Steam at up to 1.4Gbps, or about 170MB/s.
Downloading a 34GB game like Smite would have taken about three minutes and 20 seconds, assuming Butschi’s SSD could keep up.
From the Cool Ideas’ on-net Blizzard cache, he was able to download Diablo IV at 267.55MB/s, roughly 2.24Gbps.
The 85GB game would have taken just over five minutes to complete its download at that speed.