[Cerowrt-devel] Verizon FIOS - How to use CeroWRT directly with interactive TV

Wed Mar 19 16:04:33 EDT 2014

Dave,

Thanks for your thoughts.  I am personally using a D-Link DXN-220, and have
used it for over three years.  I believe that the MoCA Alliance certifies
compliance with the standard and there is a newer higher speed standard MoCA
2.0, but the MoCA 1.1 products are plenty fast.

I am not bottlenecked on the wireless, as I am getting a 300 Mb/s link (raw
speed of connection) within about 30 ft of the router in my home using the 5
Ghz band, even through walls, and the Speedtest results are just as fast as
I get on a wired connection.  

At our office we have a 30 mb/s down 30 mb/s up Verizon FIOS and we
certainly get bufferbloat on the download of Speedtest using a Sonicwall
TZ200 per the results below.

Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=102ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=89ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=107ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=96ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=85ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=72ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=90ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=105ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=99ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=100ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=70ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=82ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=98ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=67ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=251
Reply from 74.125.226.78: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=251

On the Netalyzr results, while it only shows the speeds as greater than 20
mb/s, there are buffering results, and these are much better using CeroWRT
than using another router on this connection and as far as I can tell the
buffering numbers are valid and repeatable, so I do believe that bufferbloat
can be an issue even on 80 mb/s download connections.

If you add other heavy download traffic, like Netflix and Video on demand,
you can easily load up 10's of Mb/s even on a fast connection.  I haven't
even run tests with such traffic running, but we do have multiple of such
streams at times.  The Netflix in HD can use a lot of bandwidth when it is
available to it and it does.  (This is on wireless using a Logitech Review
(Google TV android device).

I would like to suggest that it would be great to get to a new "stable" as
there has been a lot of progress since the last stable and some of the
issues being worked on now may not be used by many users for a long time
(IPv6 for example).  My putting out a stable, you would have more users use
and benefit and get more feedback.

My other suggestion would be to consider simplifying the number of IP
subnets from like six or more with guest networks to a less intimidating
number.  The setup looks pretty daunting to even relatively knowledgeable
installers.  In my case, I needed to change the subnets and this was pretty
intense.  Is there now way to control the bufferbloat on wireless and
maintain a bridged network (maybe filter out multicasts?)

When you are ready for a wider test it would be advantageous to simplify the
configuration for a wider audience.

Thanks again for the great work!

Frits

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Taht [mailto:dave.taht at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 12:18 PM
To: Frits Riep
Cc: cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
Subject: Re: [Cerowrt-devel] Verizon FIOS - How to use CeroWRT directly with
interactive TV

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 5:37 AM, Frits Riep <riep at riepnet.com> wrote:
> I have a Verizon FIOS internet, and also use the interactive TV and 
> phone services using my WNDR-3800 with CeroWRT.
>
>
>
> .         I have a 75 Mb/s down / 25 Mb/s up residential service in
> Lexington MA
>
> .         I have an WNDR3800 running CeroWRT 3.10.24-8 and it is directly
> connected to the ONT (Optical Network Terminator), and no Verizon Router.

Oh, cool. I had figured the actiontec router was a hard requirement.

> .         To get the interactive TV (guide, multi room dvr, and video on
> demand) you need to bridge the ethernet LAN of the router to the TV 
> Coax in order to control the settop box and send the video content 
> from the internet to the settop box.
>
> .         The easiest way to bridge the Ethernet network to the Coax is to
> use a MoCA bridge (Media Over Coax Alliance).
>
> .         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_over_Coax_Alliance
>
> .         D-link, Actiontec, and Netgear offer these MoCA bridges and they
> are under $100.  You can run them with the factory defaults in this 
> mode (lan mode).  There is also a WAN mode if you want to use the COAX 
> to the WAN interface of the router which is useful if you only have 
> COAX wiring in your home and you want to locate your router in a 
> different location from the ONT Ethernet jack.

Can you point us at a specific one?

> .         You need one MoCA bridge to interconnect the Coax to the
standard
> twisted pair Lan connection on your router.
>
> .         The working topology is Verizon ONT Ethernet port to WAN
interface
> on CeroWRT router, Moca Bridge in one of the LAN interfaces.
>
> .         Verizon residential service provides one public IP via DHCP, and
> this IP is bound to the MAC address of the router (which is also 
> typical of residential services of cable providers such as Comcast).
>
> .         To successfully connect the new router (and get a DHCP address),
> you need to either clone the MAC address of the Verizon supplied 
> router or call Verizon and have them break the DHCP lease from their end.

Good information, thank you. I had no idea you could toss the supplied
router out the door in verizon's case. They are not doing a very good job of
maintaining the firmware.

> I have successfully been running versions of CeroWRT for about six 
> months, and very much appreciate the great work to conquer Bufferbloat.
>
>
>
> I have had no issues on the WNDR-3800 getting full throughput of up to 
> 80 mb/s down, 30 mb/s up using speedtest.net (with speed throttling 
> off. The throughput and latency results are excellent when I set the 
> speed throttling to 75 down / 25 up, per speedtest.net, pingtest.net 
> and  ICSI Netalyzr even on wireless.  Running a ping test in command 
> prompt also shows very low latency even when running a full speedtest 
> both up and down on both a wired or wireless connection.

Well, you are bottlenecked on the wireless side for speedtest. And netalyzr
can rarely achieve more than 20Mbit on anything. So some of your joy is
misplaced...

What I'd found from testing esr's verizon 25/25 connection was that only the
downlink needed some shaping. at 80/25 I imagine there's not a lot of
downlink buffering.

> Thanks for the great work being done.  I am using this for our home
network.
> Should I update to the latest version 3.10.32-10 or is there a new 
> stable in the near future?

3.10.32-9 is in the "happens to be pretty stable" catagory, rather than
"intended to be stable". :/

We started shooting for a long-term stable build last august, I'd hoped to
have one by december, and then by mid-feburary...

We seem to be getting close! There are no priority 1 or 2 bugs left, churn
upstream is settling down as barrier breaker gets closer to a freeze,
dnsmasq w/dnssec is nearing a release.

Aside from a couple features I really wanted to have (bcp38, babeld in
procd), and a protocol I wanted to obsolete (ahcp replaced by hncp), and a
daemon I wanted to replace (mdns hybrid proxy in place of avahi).

... it is long past time to draw a line and declare it done enough.

I think the biggest thing left to do is push the SQM system upstream to
openwrt for comment and revision.

I'd like to gateway a "stable" cerowrt 3.10 on barrier breaker itself going
into a freeze, but can live without that.

AFTER there's a stable release...

There is a ton of new work to do (if I care to think about it) with the new
hnetd (hncp) stuff, the mdnsproxy, hardening the OS further, getting source
specific routing to work better with vpns, finding a higher end platform
with more oomph, etc, but we have to go looking for grant money to do any of
that.