Performance within a fiber-to-the-home network

Abstract

Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) networks are on the brink of bringing significantly higher capacity to residential users compared to today's commercial residential options. There are several burgeoning FTTH networks that provide capacities of up to 1 Gbps. We have been monitoring one such operational network---the Case Connection Zone---for 23 months. In this paper we seek to understand the extent to which the users in this network are in fact making use of the provided bi-directional 1 Gbps capacity. We find that even when given virtually unlimited capacity the majority of the time users do not retrieve information from the Internet in excess of commercially available data rates and transmit at only modestly higher rates than commodity networks support. Further, we find that end host issues---most prominently buffering at both end points---are often the cause of the lower-than-expected performance.