New to the Threefold Mafia

#1

Greetings people from the internet! I’m new to the Threefold Mafia and I have some questions for you fine folks.

  1. Do all 2.1 nodes come certified or is there any additional steps we need to do to get certification for our node?
  2. I saw Scott post about other certifications such as having bandwidth certified, will there be guides for this later on?
  3. What tips and expertise can you guys shine my way in regards to providing maximum uptime? I’ll give an example. I woke up and logged on to my computer yesterday, and I noticed that my internet went to a screaming halt. I was getting about less than 2MB downstream, when I’m normally north of 300-400MB for my download speed. With certified nodes agreeing to have a max downtime of 1.44 hours/month, something like this can really hurt farming. I believe this is an ISP issue with Comcast. And it could also be the modem/router that I have from them. This is the first time it’s happened, and I just received this modem/router last month. So I’m not sure if this event an outlier or something that’s guaranteed to happen again.

My concern is that if I wake up, and some event like this happens, des that mean that I won’t be able to farm for the next 30 days? Or my rewards that I have built up for the last 30 days be unrewarded? What are your suggestions if you were in my situation? I’m not too sure if upgrading to gigabit internet will actually guarantee better service from my own ISP. And if you’re wondering, Comcast is the currently the best provider in my area.

Thank you for taking the time to read through my questions!

#2

Hi @meteor,

Short answers to your questions:

  1. The 2.1 nodes will be certified when they arrive. No additional steps identified so far.
  2. Throughput measurement is being worked on for v3 release. Stay tuned to get more info soon. However, so far, this does not have an influence on the monthly farming revenue, it will have an impact on the revenue for usage.
  3. For the moment there is no penalty for moving to smallband, under the condition that you stay connected. So in the short term, there is no impact but evidently, this is to be avoided and your ‘reputation’ for prividing good internet capacity will be recorded in the future, so these incidents might have consequences, both in terms of income and willingness of users to use your capacity.
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#3

To add a bit more, the uptime requirement is really still a work in progress and is much less strict that the suggested 99.8% for certified nodes. We are currently gathering data in order to generate a model that will be a good fit for the diversity of different situations that exist out there. Ultimately our goal is to find a fair balance between ensuring that deployers to the Grid have the stability they need while not penalizing farmers due to infrastructure limitations outside of their control.

Having had my fair share of Comcast connections in different locations with different levels of performance, I feel your pain. In some cases, they may be able to help troubleshoot your issue, although getting them to address problems happening outside of your house is generally not easy. If the problem persists, testing a different modem is a good place to start. I can’t say if upgrading to gigabit would help, but if it did, I’d hope they can provide you the same benefit without charging you more money.

#4

Thank you both Scott and Gert! I really appreciate you both for taking the time to respond.

Scott, your response made me feel a lot easier. For the most part, the internet where I live functions the way it should, but in the event some thing does occur, it’s good to know that events outside of a farmer’s control are being considered. I’m sure other farmers now and in the future appreciate that as well. This also got me more excited about the future that Threefold holds, because it shows that the Threefold team does care about the small guys like myself too. Cheers!