On 2020-08-09 5:35 p.m., Jonathan Morton wrote:
Most CPE devices these days rely on hardware accelerated packet forwarding to
achieve their published specs. That's all about taking packets in one side and
pushing them out the other as quickly as possible, with only minimal support
from the CPU (likely, new connections get a NAT/firewall lookup, that's all).
It has the advantages of speed and power efficiency, but unfortunately it is
also incompatible with our debloating efforts. So debloated CPE will tend to
run hotter and with lower peak throughput, which may be noticeable to cable and
fibre users; VDSL (FTTC) users might have service of 80Mbps or less where this
effect is less likely to matter.
I have an interest in the next step up from mass-market routers, and
this description made my ears prick up.
At work we have a decent network, carefully designed about 15 years ago
to get work from Akamai, distribute it over mostly-in-the-same-DC
service providers, then return it to the end-user customer. The IT folks
don't know how it works, but are confident that it does (;-))
The nets we use for WFH are a little newer, but we had no idea if we
were going to be able to work from home or hold conference calls with
400-odd people. So we had to send everyone home on a Monday to try the
experiment. Fortunately it worked.
That makes me curious about the customer-premises equipment we and
others have, and to what degree it can be de-bloated. I know the
datacenter vendors were being resistant when the problem was first
solved, but I've not heard anything positive to date. Cisco makes
vaguely hand-wavey statements about DOCSIS 3.1 and PIE, but doesn't seem
to answer customer questions,
What do we know about large-home and small-office devices these days?
--dave
--
David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
[email protected] | -- Mark Twain
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