The Need for Speed (Part #1)

The Past

For the past 20 years, Swisscom was my ISP at home, and I had a (now) Swisscom blue Internet L subscription for Residential Customers.

The bandwidth that gave me for the last couple of years was 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps). One day when I logged in to my ISP to pay a bill, there was a message:

“Technology upgrade: With a change to the new fiber optic standard, you can achieve a speed of up to 10 Gbit/s without a monthly fee and extra cost.”

All right! Nobody can refuse a free upgrade? 😄

The Present

I initiated that upgrade process, and they sent me some other kind of Fibre Optic cable. Cool, except… well, there were 2 problems to really use the advertised 10 Gbps:

• #1: My Internet router now gets 10 Gbps from the ISP, but actually only has a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet plug?!
• #2: I didn’t actually have any computer that could use 10 instead of 1 Gbps networking!

The first problem is fixed with a moment of “friendly whining” on the ISP’s tech support hotline; they eventually replaced my Internet-Box 3 (which has 1×2.5 Gbit/s und 4×1 Gbit/s Ethernet ports) with their new Internet-Box 4 (which has 1×10 Gbit/s und 4×1 Gbit/s Ethernet ports).

The second problem lead to a “fun” (long) night of researching what network interface controller / card (NIC) to upgrade to for my home server. Many of the options were surprisingly expensive, and clearly targeting more of “data center” (DC) market! I eventually settled on using an ASUS XG-C100. It didn’t immediately just work out of the box (on my distro), but after a big of digging and learning that its chip is based on the (now Marvell, acquired) Aquantia AQtion AQC107 controller which requires the atlantic Linux Kernel Module (GitHub Aquantia/AQtion), an sudo modprobe atlantic of course did the trick, and the Kernel log showed atlantic: Detect ATL2FW 1030012. Fun fact: Apparently Kernel versions before 4.16.6 and 5.15 before 5.15.4 had issues with it (#199177).

The Future

Init 7 was mentioned by a number of my friends as an alternative ISP to Swisscom in the past. They offer 25 Gbps with their Fiber7-X2 subscription - wow!

I am currently looking into how to go from 10 Gbps to 25 Gbps, as this would mean a few more changes in the setup at home - the family still has to be able to watch 🎥 Netflix! 😸 Current thinking is leaning towards sticking a MikroTik CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe “Smart NIC” (whoa!) running Microtik RouterOS on-board into the home server and use that as my new ISP inbound “router”. Then going out to an Ethernet Switch, with a new WiFi Access Point (AP) for wireless, perhaps a hAP ac³ or (?) a hAP ax³. I will post another blog about all that in the future.

PS: Yeah, I know what you’re going to ask… 🕵️ Strange and surprising as it may sound, and in addition to all this just being a lot of fun, I actually do have an idea how to put this bandwidth to use… stay tuned!