[AusNOG] Cisco routers on NBN 100/40Mbps connection

[Mark ZZZ Smith]

>________________________________
> From: Bradley Amm <Bradley.Amm at homegroupwa.com.au>
>To: James Jazza <jjazza26 at gmail.com>; "ausnog at lists.ausnog.net" <ausnog at lists.ausnog.net> 
>Sent: Monday, 11 August 2014 12:04 AM
>Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Cisco routers on NBN 100/40Mbps connection
> 
>
>
>Oddly enough I am looking at this at the moment for our Internode IBC Network to connect all our display homes to our MPLS for the Cameras
> 

What is your application? 100Mbps or even 40Mbps is an quite a lot of bandwidth for (presumably) video security cameras. A general figure I remember for 'HD" tv is 6Mbps (which I think is 720p), 2Mbps for SD. If your application is security cameras I'd think you'd use quite a lot less than that per camera. As your 881s are software routers, I'd suggest trying out before you decide to replace them. You could ensure they're the bottleneck (or not) by monitoring CPU use while sending video through them ('show proc cpu'). If it is below 80% and you're having trouble with video, it is likely the problem isn't the 881s, so there is no need to replace them.



Somewhat related, I've recently looked a bit into bandwidth use of the new video codecs that are coming, H.265 (HEVC) and Google's VP9, as one of the goals both of them has is to reduce bandwidth use. (And I've been looking a bit into what a Chromecase supports.)

Apparently H.265 delivers superior 4K video quality right down to near 5Mbps. For other lower definitions e.g., 1080p, reduces bandwidth consumption significantly for the same video quality:

Netflix To Use HEVC To Solve Bandwidth Problem For HD, 4K
http://www.digital-digest.com/news-63823-Netflix-To-Use-HEVC-To-Solve-Bandwidth-Problem-For-HD-4K.html

Visual Test: HEVC Much Better Than H.264
http://www.digital-digest.com/news-63461-Visual-Test-HEVC-Much-Better-Than-H264.html


I haven't found similar reports/analysis of VP9, however the proof would be in the pudding. According to this presentation, Google are already using VP9 to serve videos to Youtube users because it reduces bandwidth consumption and therefore reduces buffering delays.

https://www.google.com/events/io/io14videos/9c13e10f-ceb9-e311-b297-00155d5066d7

If you watch it in Chrome, and right click in the video window, then select the 'Stats for nerds' menu option, you might find that you're watching it using VP9, according to the 'Mime Type' field.

A couple of other interesting things on 'Stats for nerds' display.

The 'Stream type' is probably 'https' which means that Google are streaming video over HTTPS. All of Google's 'visible' services (gmail, maps etc.) have been via HTTPS for a while now, however I didn't realise they were also using it to deliver the Youtube video itself. So this is both a large scale and high bandwidth service being delivered reliably and presumably cost effectively over HTTPS. While Google might have a lot of money in total to do these sorts of things, they wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't providing useful value to either them or their customers.

The Bandwidth field/graph seems to be showing what my Internet service is being capable of, rather than the codec video bandwidth. I found it didn't vary much whether I played very low or very high resolution video, including up to 4K, so it didn't answer my question of how much bandwidth VP9 uses.





>They have said that 881 probably won’t cut it on 100/40 NBNs
> 
>Kind Regards
> 
>Bradley Amm
>11 Delawney St Balcatta WA 6021
>P08 6241 4404 F 6241 4455 M 0448 815 710
>W www.homegroupwa.com.au
> 
> 
> 
>
>
>
>From:AusNOG [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of James Jazza
>Sent: Sunday, 10 August 2014 8:54 AM
>To: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
>Subject: [AusNOG] Cisco routers on NBN 100/40Mbps connection
> 
>Hi Guys,
> 
>We are hearing reports that Cisco 881 routers are not suitable for NBN 100/40Mbps connections, and that we need to use the next model up - a Cisco 1841 instead.
> 
>Can anyone comment on this? As the Cisco 881 has 100Mbps internal ports, so I would have thought it would be ok.
> 
>Thanks
> 
>James Ashdown
>
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