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From: Rich Brown <richb.hanover@gmail.com>
To: Jim Gettys <jg@freedesktop.org>
Cc: bloat <bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net>
Subject: Re: [Bloat] I wrote a blog entry about devices I know of out there...
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2017 14:33:30 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <C3FE15C7-86EC-4CB7-93A0-E24910F9449E@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAGhGL2Czg4viNC5BkKm=GF6YHn0bdM1oQY4Rc2_rLRXHuazURA@mail.gmail.com>

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> On Feb 3, 2017, at 2:00 PM, Jim Gettys <jg@freedesktop.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 1:55 PM, Rich Brown <richb.hanover@gmail.com <mailto:richb.hanover@gmail.com>> wrote:
> Friends in town say that Fairpoint recommends a Zyxel VMG4380-B10A modem for bonded pairs. They seem to have fairly good luck with it.
> 
> ​Unfortunately, the OpenWrt wiki says it has a Broadcom chip in it: no open source driver the last I knew for them...  While I believe Broadcom sold off its wifi business and the recipient vendor recently opened its driver (and there was a reverse engineered driver already available), I don't believe the DSL chips had a similar change.
> 
> ​                         - Jim

I'm a strong proponent of staying with vendor firmware on DSL equipment. DSL is such a dicey technology, running on crummy copper lines, with lots of odd protocol options, variations, etc (and ATM (?!)). 

It gets hard to defend an outage/trouble report when they ask, "What kind of modem do you have" and you start to tell them that you hot-rodded the modem to use some lunatic firmware with anti-buffer-what? :-)

So I stick to using their modem. That goes double for a Zyxel that's bonding two pairs: just plug the LEDE router's WAN Ethernet into it, and the bits go in and out. Don't peer too closely at the man behind the curtain/sausage being made. If they're not delivering anything close to their promised/estimated speed, then you have cause to complain.

In their defense, I will say that the Fairpoint techs on the support lines are halfway (or quite) knowledgeable, and are supportive of either of these cases:

- I run my own router.
- I put the DSL modem in bridge mode, and let the router supply PPPoE credentials

But letting Fairpoint-supplied equipment handle the physical link seems good to me.

My two cents...

Rich


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  reply	other threads:[~2017-02-03 19:33 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2017-02-03 18:55 Rich Brown
2017-02-03 19:00 ` Jim Gettys
2017-02-03 19:33   ` Rich Brown [this message]
2017-02-03 19:50 ` David Lang
2017-02-03 20:01   ` Rich Brown
2017-02-03 20:11     ` David Lang
2017-02-03 20:33       ` Jim Gettys
2017-02-03 21:15       ` Sebastian Moeller
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2017-02-02 21:53 Jim Gettys
2017-02-02 22:34 ` David Lang

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