10Gb servers question?

[ms2738 5]

Hey @Staff, new customer here!  I was looking at the server list from another provider who I won't name (but rhymes with "Nullvad") and noticed ALL their servers in my area (Los Angeles) are 10Gb while NONE of the AirVPN servers are 10Gb.  In fact, from what I can tell it looks like there are only a few 10Gb servers on the AirVPN network.

This is NOT a complaint, I understand that if the server isn't at capacity it may not even matter, but it made me wonder. Why doesn't AirVPN have more 10Gb servers.  Is it a financial issue or some other reason?

UPDATE:  Well, that didn't take long!  

 

[ScanFarer 7]

Would be nice to get an update, I previously inquired about 10 Gig servers and this was the response I got from AirVPN: 
 

Quote

Hello!

Yes, new 10 Gbit/s servers in the USA are planned according to userbase growth. If the current rhythm is maintained (but this is a big big if, in our business) you might see news on November.

Kind regards

Probably would be a very nice upgrade for those in the western US if they were to get at least one or more 10G servers. I'd say the reliability of speeds from 1G servers is often compromised, particularly as users with cable or fiber connections with gigabit speeds can fully saturate them. I wonder whether they would be willing to consolidate a few of their servers in locations where they have multiple ones into one 10G server and have at least two other ones with different providers for better redundancy in such areas.

It is also my understanding that Mullvad can likely afford better servers since they still have a lot of users and are partnered with Mozilla

I recently bought a 1-year subscription and the only servers that are usable for me are their 2 10G servers in New York and Canada
 

[ms2738 5]

1 hour ago, ScanFarer said:

I'd say the reliability of speeds from 1G servers is often compromised

I believe all AirVPN servers are 2Gb or 10 Gb.
 

1 hour ago, ScanFarer said:

I wonder whether they would be willing to consolidate a few of their servers in locations where they have multiple ones into one 10G server

I wondered this too, probably not for redundancy.
 

1 hour ago, ScanFarer said:

I recently bought a 1-year subscription and the only servers that are usable for me are their 2 10G servers in New York and Canada

It looks like Mullvad has 20+ 10Gb servers in New York alone!

https://mullvad.net/en/servers

[ScanFarer 7]

1 hour ago, ms2738 said:

I believe all AirVPN servers are 2Gb or 10 Gb.

They are 1Gbps full-duplex 1Gbps Upload and 1Gbps Download, essentially giving 2Gbps of bandwidth at the server. Despite the apparent 2Gbps potential, the effective total throughput remains at 1Gbps, since the server is being utilized as a VPN.

[cccthats3cs 9]

I am not AirVPN staff however I want to give a possible explanation of this situation with statistics and economics.

If you go to the search page, then search for members without any query, you can see (at the time I am writing this post) AirVPN has 676,088 registered members. Also at the top of every page, you can see how many users are connected. I believe this is actual connections, not unique accounts based on something else staff said recently on here. Currently there are 20,476 active users so that could be as many as 20,476 paid users, or as little as 4,096. A far cry from the 600,000+ registered members indicating that most accounts are most likely inactive, not paying, and not using the service.

Mullvad as of writing their FAQ (https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy) had 555,541 numbered accounts. As they specify there multiple people could have created one account, same as AirVPN (hint, I have 2 AirVPN accounts, one for the forums here and one for the actual service, to keep any postings separate from my VPN use). Some number of those same as AirVPN are inactive and not paid up to use their service.

Another insight is from Windscribe's status page (https://windscribe.com/status) where as of writing this post, their network utilization is 97 Gbps, 162,666 connected users, and 67 million (!) registered accounts. As they operate a freemium service the registered users are not directly comparable to AirVPN or Mullvad where the service is strictly paid. However, the network usage between Windscribe and AirVPN can be directly compared. AirVPN as above has 20,476 active users connected, and 211,599 Mbps bandwidth utilization.
For AirVPN - 211599 Mbps / 20476 users = 10.334 Mbps/user
For Windscribe - 97000 Mbps / 162666 users = 0.596 Mbps/user
Each AirVPN user is using 17x more bandwidth than a Windscribe user. Perhaps that is because AirVPN seems to be a more "technically inclined" VPN, with users who are going to get the most out of it, due to port forwarding, promotion of manual configs, and so on.

Now take into consideration the above (AirVPN is a more technical provider, less newbie friendly) and compare it to Mullvad, which while formerly had some of the same characteristics possibly as AirVPN's userbase before they removed port forwarding, had an easier to use GUI, mobile app and so on to make it a bit more newbie friendly and less technical, while retaining the technical options available for power users (again before port forwarding removal - a convenient way to ditch heavy users).
Mullvad's price - a flat €5/month/user
AirVPN's price - €7/month for a month not on sale, all the way down to €1.79/month for a 3 year plan on sale
Even if you assume the average revenue per user is somewhere in the middle, call it €2.50/month/user for simplicity, AirVPN is getting half the revenue per user as Mullvad. To expand servers "frivolously" (ie. without the number of users needed to rent another server due to existing ones in a location being maxed out) AirVPN would need more revenue.
Yes, the AirVPN sales are great, and I bought 3 years on my subscription during the last sale, so I am guilty of taking advantage of them.
But perhaps staff could clarify, if average revenue per user increases (ie. fewer people buy on sale and instead buy at the normal, 3 month, €5/month price) that would bring more money in per user and possibly allow staff to expand locations, servers, and bandwidth per server. Meaning, pay more than the absolute minimum to see the service grow beyond the strict needs of the userbase.

[ms2738 5]

53 minutes ago, ScanFarer said:

2 hours ago, ms2738 said:

I believe all AirVPN servers are 2Gb or 10 Gb.

They are 1Gbps full-duplex 1Gbps Upload and 1Gbps Download, essentially giving 2Gbps of bandwidth at the server. Despite the apparent 2Gbps potential, the effective total throughput remains at 1Gbps, since the server is being utilized as a VPN.

Wow, you're right.  That's less than I have at home.
 

41 minutes ago, cccthats3cs said:

I am not AirVPN staff however I want to give a possible explanation of this situation with statistics and economics...

Thanks for the insight.  As I said, I'm not complaining, my speeds are fine and so far I like AirVPN very much.  Just trying to understand why things work the way they do.  While I don't know what providers pay for hosting, like @ScanFarer I wondered about the economics of less servers with more bandwidth.  On the other hand, maybe having less bandwidth per server is the point, as it could serve to limit bandwidth hogs?

I'm still am surprised there's n to a 10Gb on both sides of the USA, but I'm good for now!  Oh and thanks for the info on Windscribe, wasn't familiar with them either!

[Staff 9771]

7 hours ago, ms2738 said:

Wow, you're right.  That's less than I have at home!

Hello!

Impossible, unless you have a dedicated line with a very high price. Nowadays residential ISPs sell 10 or 1 Gbit/s asymmetric lines where the peak bandwidth is "best effort", as the the broadband capacity is shared. That's why you don't pay 7-800+ USD/month for a Gigabit (1-10) unmetered line and that's why traffic "management" is widespread. In various European countries, and as far as we know this happens even on many USA ISPs infrastructure, the traffic gets shaped if you consume more than a dozen TB per month, according to a practice graciously renamed as "fair use", "acceptable use", "quality of service", and you never get the nominal peak bandwidth on peak hours. Your line is capable of, say, 1 or 2 or 10 Gbit/s, but your upstream can not provide the nominal peak to all the connected lines (and therefore customers). Overselling is perfectly normal and it's not a shady practice because the ISP never tells you that you have guaranteed allocated bandwidth with your contract (quite the opposite, in fact, with the "fair use" contract clauses).

On the contrary, on datacenters you can connect a dedicated server to dedicated lines with hundreds of TB per month and failover, or even unmetered. Those lines are connected to upstream devices which can guarantee 24/7 the nominal peak bandwidth for the dedicated server. A 1 Gbit/s full duplex line constantly at capacity will cause ~ 648000 GB (~632 TB) per month and for such usage the prices are not even remotely close to the prices offered by residential ISPs.
 

Quote

For AirVPN - 211599 Mbps / 20476 users = 10.334 Mbps/user
For Windscribe - 97000 Mbps / 162666 users = 0.596 Mbps/user

@cccthats3cs

Exactly. Our infrastructure must respect the minimum allocated bandwidth according to the binding advertisement on the home page. 4+4 Mbit/s might look not much to the untrained eye, but it's huge, much higher than what most residential ISPs offer through broadband global sharing, and higher than most VPN competitors. However, all of this has a price and your considerations are indeed correct. Express, one of the biggest VPN in the world (maybe the biggest ever since it was acquired by Kape) publicly declare (compare Yahoo Finance or Forbes) more than 4 million customers, of which 1/4 connect at the same time, and each customer has 8 connection slots. That VPN offers about 3000 dedicated servers with shared or dedicated lines, for a total of ~40000 Gbit/s, therefore it guarantess "only" ~2.5+2.5 Mbit/s per connection (not binding, as they are not mentioned or advertised anywhere), which is less than AirVPN's 4+4. Even 2.5+2.5 is anyway good (especially if you compare it with that Windscribe's 0.596 Mbit/s), but it must be mentioned that AirVPN's prices are lower than Express' prices, with or without promotions.

As a curiosity calculation, our infrastructure offers 612000 Mbit/s and at any given time 22000 connection slots are used at most, so assuming that the connections were ideally, evenly divided into all world areas and that all the users asked for maximum bandwidth at the same time (worst case scenario!) and that they had no peering, routing or any other type of problem (yes, a very ideal world), they would get 27 Mbit/s (up + down), which is very remarkable and higher than what advertised. To offer more, we think that a price increase would be mandatory.

Kind regards
 

[ScanFarer 7]

3 hours ago, Staff said:

Nowadays residential ISPs sell 10 or 1 Gbit/s asymmetric lines where the peak bandwidth is "best effort", as the the broadband capacity is shared. That's why you don't pay 7-800+ USD/month for a Gigabit (1-10) unmetered line and that's why traffic "management" is widespread. In various European countries, and as far as we know this happens even on many USA ISPs infrastructure, the traffic gets shaped if you consume more than a dozen TB per month, according to a practice graciously renamed as "fair use", "acceptable use", "quality of service", and you never get the nominal peak bandwidth on peak hours. Your line is capable of, say, 1 or 2 or 10 Gbit/s, but your upstream can not provide the nominal peak to all the connected lines (and therefore customers). Overselling is perfectly normal and it's not a shady practice because the ISP never tells you that you have guaranteed allocated bandwidth with your contract (quite the opposite, in fact, with the "fair use" contract clauses).

Agree with what was said here. I do, however, get 1Gbps full-duplex through my ISP on a residential line; it's about 1.25Gbps up and down. There have been points where I've used more than 100TB a month, and I still get peak speeds 24/7. I'm sure that in some areas where a PON is oversubscribed, you will see dips in speeds, but I guess I am pretty lucky, considering I've used petabytes of data within a year. I'm sure my ISP has some kind of traffic shaping in place, but I guess there aren't as many bandwidth-hungry users in my area. The funny thing is that I am using one of the biggest ISPs in the US, and they don't explicitly say anything about fair use as far as traffic and bandwidth consumption.

[Staff 9771]

9 minutes ago, ScanFarer said:

3 hours ago, Staff said:

 

Agree with what was said here. I do, however, get 1Gbps full-duplex through my ISP on a residential line; it's about 1.25Gbps up and down. There have been points where I've used more than 100TB a month, and I still get peak speeds 24/7. I'm sure that in some areas where a PON is oversubscribed, you will see dips in speeds, but I guess I am pretty lucky, considering I've used petabytes of data within a year. I'm sure my ISP has some kind of traffic shaping in place, but I guess there aren't as many bandwidth-hungry users in my area. The funny thing is that I am using one of the biggest ISPs in the US, and they don't explicitly say anything about fair use as far as traffic and bandwidth consumption.

Hello!

Sounds great. With a dedicated IP address, it would be suitable for a full featured dedicated server, extremely competitive against any datacenter! 
How much do you pay per month, out of curiosity?

Kind regards
 

[ScanFarer 7]

4 hours ago, Staff said:

Hello!

Sounds great. With a dedicated IP address, it would be suitable for a full featured dedicated server, extremely competitive against any datacenter! 
How much do you pay per month, out of curiosity?

Kind regards
 

Unfortunately, it's not a dedicated or a fixed IP; they use DHCP for IPv4 addresses. If my Opnsense firewall is disconnected for an extended period of time, I will be assigned a new IP corresponding with it's MAC address. Fortunately, it's only happened once since I've had their service, and that was due to a power outage. I pay about $70 USD monthly for their residential gigabit service.