That is surprising. If anything, I would expect the toslink signal to be superior as it is completely galvanically isolated. Is it possible that there is dirt affecting the signal, either in the sockets or on the plugs?
Possibly. Another thing that could be is that I damaged the cable (somehow) when disconnecting it. Or, the Realtek TOSLINK has some design/implementation flaws.
As someone who just switched from an IPoE internet service to PPPoE, just make sure your device can cope. I have been using a trusty Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite 3 for many years without issue. Unfortunately, the Cavium cpu does not support hardware offload for both ipv6 vlan and ipv6 pppoe at the same time.
If you do go down the general-purpose cpu (x64/arm) route and your ISP uses PPPoE, you may need to tweak so that the rx queue is handled by multiple cpu cores as they will default to the first core by default.
According to their advanced pricing calculator at https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing you can get about 16GB for $10 per year. The price for 1000GB would be $376.65.
$210.40 for storage, $4.00 in account fees, $112.89 for received email, $2.77 for received email bandwidth (GB), $46.53 for sent emails, $0.00 for sent email bandwidth (GB), and $0.05 in username fees.
In the UK, we are tending towards separating the FNO (fiber network owner) and the ISP. The larger FNO's will provide wholesale access to multiple ISP's. There are some smaller operators that are both FNO and ISP, but I am not aware of any provider that combines the ONT and CPE, so they could wholesale without having to replace hardware.
In a typical passive optical network, one PON port is connected to 128 clients through the use of PLC splitters - unlike a WDM splitter which will insert or remove a specific wavelength, these simply split the whole signal. Where I work, that is a 4-4-8 configuration using 3 layers of splitters.
The OLT (optical line terminal, head-end) will tell each ONU/ONT (optical network unit/terminal) how much airtime they can use to transmit - each ONT will take their turn in transmitting so as not to interrupt others. Part of this calculation is the distance the ONT is from the OLT - each ONT will be a different distance depending on the geographic location, which means each ONT will have a different latency. The ONU can request additional airtime if it has a large amound of data to transmit. The amount of airtime the OLT will allocate depends upon the CIR (committed information rate i.e. what will the ISP guarantee at a minimum) and the PIR (peak information rate - the maximum rate based on the subscribers service).
I am pleased to see support for OpenTelemetry on the way. As a heavy user of AWS Lambda, the observability provided by X-Ray is invaluable for troubleshooting and improving performance.
I imagine re-ordering is a big problem. The only application I can think of that would require a single flow is media streaming, but you only need ~4Mbs for a decent quality stream anyway. Other applications like file transfer can be split into multiple concurrent flow, at which point you might as well just let the local router nat each flow to each internet connection in turn.
They have posted several screenshots of discussions among people affected on various channels, including Mastodon and the official #tor-relays channel on IRC.
