Re: [Bloat] I wrote a blog entry about devices I know of out there...

[Rich Brown <richb.hanover@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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