Port speeds and unmetered
Unmetered uplinks are what we are known for. Here is what that means in practice, and how to pick a port speed.
What unmetered means here
You buy a port and you may fill it. There is no counter running behind the scenes, no traffic allowance to blow through, and no invoice at the end of the month for terabytes you could not predict.
That only works because capacity is bought for what customers actually push instead of being oversold against the hope that nobody uses it. It is also why we talk about it honestly: an unmetered 10 Gbit port is a 10 Gbit port, not a 10 Gbit port that gets shaped at two.
Choosing a speed
Think in terms of how long moving your data takes, not in headline numbers. Fifty terabytes at line rate is roughly four and a half days on 1 Gbit, eleven hours on 10 Gbit, four and a half hours on 25 Gbit and just over an hour on 100 Gbit. The calculator on the infrastructure page does the arithmetic for your own numbers.
For most workloads the question is not the peak but the floor: what happens at your busiest hour. If your traffic is bursty, a bigger port costs less than the engineering needed to work around a small one.
Why you rarely see line rate
A single TCP stream across a long distance is limited by latency and window size
long before it is limited by your port. Test with several parallel streams
(iperf3 -P 8) before concluding something is wrong, and remember the far
end has a port too — often a smaller one.
Disks lie about this as well: copying from a spinning disk will never saturate 10 Gbit no matter how good the network is.
If it is genuinely slow
Tell us, with a traceroute in both directions and the times. We run our own routing and can move your traffic onto a different path.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base