[Cerowrt-devel] [Bloat] Feb 12th: FCC virtual roundtable to gather public input on how to structure the new Emergency Broadband Benefit Program

[Jonathan Foulkes]

> OpenWRT rocks if you're technologically clued.  What would really help
> adoption is if it sprouted a more Joe Sixpack-friendly UI 

Not to toot my own horn (disclosure: I’m the CEO of Evenroute), but the IQrouter is exactly that and more, as it handles the crazy dynamically varying lines of todays overburdened infrastructure with zero end-user involvement.
It has a UI designed for non-techies, even retired grandmothers deploy this successfully.

Best part is all of the goodness of the OpenWRT platform is there in the advanced menus (and via ssh), you can even add packages through the opkg system. We base our firmware on tagged releases, matter fact, testing an upcoming release based on OpenWrt 19.07.6 + the latest dnsmasq update. 

For rural customers, it is the only hope of getting some improvements in the short-term.
I have a rural ISP in North Georgia who buys them in bulk as the only ‘fix’ for their DSL customers.

But even my DOCSIS 3.1 gigabit line is improved with automatically tuned CAKE on the upload (download is set to 0). Here is my home line:
https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/67140120

Without the IQrouter, it scores a C and occasional D due to bufferbloat on the 35Mps uplink, and my download is limited to 600 or so.

So it’s baked, just need to get them into more peoples hands.

Cheers,

Jonathan Foulkes


> On Jan 31, 2021, at 10:18 AM, Valdis Klētnieks <valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:14:36 -0800, Dave Taht said:
>> I have already asked for a chance to question or speak, but if others
>> here would like a shot at getting into the roundtable, send an email
>> to the contact asking whether you can either ask a question or speak.
>> That's christian.hoefly at fcc.gov
> 
>> established an Emergency Broadband Connectivity Fund of $3.2 billion
>> and directed the Federal Communications Commission to use that fund to
>> establish an Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, through which
>> eligible households may receive a discount off the cost of broadband
>> service and certain connected devices during an emergency period
>> relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, and participating providers can be
>> reimbursed for such discounts.
> 
> Amen.  I'm personally doing OK here, but I know there's a lot of
> children in Montgomery County here in southwest Virginia who are
> struggling to afford enough bandwidth for Zoom for classes.  A lot of
> them live outside the town limits of the two big towns, so they're out
> of luck for both DSL and cable - and though there's cellphone coverage,
> if you have 2-3 kids all doing Zoom for several hour a day, you get
> data-cap throttled pretty early in the month.
> 
> I suspect, but don't have hard data, that the majority of them would
> be managing just fine as long as their account didn't have a monthly
> data cap.
> 
> 
>>> It might be useful for some of us to crash this. I've always kind of
>>> thought that having a "router reclamation center" where users could
>>> drop off old, but reflashable routers, and get theirs reflashed with
>>> openwrt, might be a useful government program.
> 
> OpenWRT rocks if you're technologically clued.  What would really help
> adoption is if it sprouted a more Joe Sixpack-friendly UI that made it
> easy to configure stuff like "Turn off Danny's access at his bedtime at 10,
> and Joanie's turns off at midnight". I'd volunteer to help, but I know something
> between diddly and squat about writing UI code - I'm basically a kernel
> hacker who did a lot of server sysadmin.
> 
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