In our Nijmegen area glassfibre has recently been installed. Last weekend the new connection to our home was activated. According to the specification the speed should be 100Mbps both ways, i.e. up and down. That is the same speed that I (and most people probably) have on my desk at the university. I have done some preliminary tests that I want to report on.
According to http://speedtest.net, the down speed is ~95Mbps and the up speed is ~60Mbps. I have repeated that a couple of times, and the throughput varies over the day. These numbers are the best ones observed.
I have also tested using ftp, sending/receiving a 100MB file to/from the ftp server of the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. This results in 7.22MB/s or 60Mbps upstream and 7.77MB/s or 65Mbps downstream (see below for details).
The same test from my PowerBook G4, which is connected over 802.11g wireless to an Airport Extreme router, resulted in 2.5MB/s or ~20Mbps upstream and 1.56MB/s or 13Mbps downstream. The bottleneck here clearly is the wireless connection, and not the glassfibre.
ftp> put testfile.bin
local: testfile.bin remote: testfile.bin
200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
150 Ok to send data.
100% |*************************************| 100 MB 7.23 MB/s 00:00 ETA
226 File receive OK.
104857600 bytes sent in 00:13 (7.22 MB/s)
ftp> get testfile.bin
local: testfile.bin remote: testfile.bin
200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for testfile.bin (104857600 bytes).
100% |*************************************| 100 MB 7.79 MB/s 00:00 ETA
226 File send OK.
104857600 bytes received in 00:12 (7.77 MB/s)
Overall I am pretty happy with these initial results of 60Mbps up and downstream in a realistic test, i.e. 60% of the theoretical throughput. I am not sure whether I have been able to connect to a server that does not introduce a bottleneck itself, and there is some variance in the tests itself that is due to other traffic over the network. I might post some more tests later.
More information can be found on http://www.glazenkamp.nl