ISP issued modem

[Raj]

So my ISP decided to reduce my monthly costs, but only if I switch to a fiber optic. The modem was made by a Chinese company named "richer link". I don't trust neither the manufacturer nor the ISP's custom firmware. The ISP also blocks a lot of websites, specially on phone, specially whenever there's even a slight political chaos in the country.
How bad could it be, to use ISP's modem? Also note that I can't afford a VPN.

and man... This is getting out of hand...I've already bought 2 modems in past 5 years. First to replace my ISP's adsl -wifi modem, then to replace it with VDSL...and now I have to buy again. Plus the speeds I'll be getting will be the same as what I had on VDSL. Why can't they let things be as is? really makes you suspicious that the modem is nothing but a spyware box


Also, can someone suggest me a better one. I can't seem to find any nokia modem in my country. I have no knowledge of these pon fiber optic modems. I do know how to configure my ADSL and VDSL modems.

[ve7xen]

How bad could it be, to use ISP's modem?

Your ISP has access to everything you transfer through them anyway, so I don't see much difference to your threat model whether you use your own modem or theirs. In either case, they can sniff / intercept / modify anything you transfer through them.

Why can't they let things be as is?

Clearly the PON system reduces costs for them, and probably greatly increases their ability to offer higher capacity services. Maybe not yet, or maybe they don't intend to upgrade existing customers coming over from DSL and just add new high speed plans, but it should give them the option.

PON CPE is generally not designed to be replaced by the user. Your ISP may offer to / provide an interface to configure it into bridge mode so you can supply your own router/WiFi, but the PON equipment itself they don't want you messing with. Sometimes the fibre is semi-permanently installed, very often the device needs to register with the subscriber system, etc. However I don't know the situation in your country, they may be more open to it. It's uncommon in Europe/North America to allow this though, so I suspect your options are slim. I would try to get it in bridge mode and supply my own standard Ethernet router.

[Raj]

How bad could it be, to use ISP's modem?

Your ISP has access to everything you transfer through them anyway, so I don't see much difference to your threat model whether you use your own modem or theirs. In either case, they can sniff / intercept / modify anything you transfer through them.

Why can't they let things be as is?

Clearly the PON system reduces costs for them, and probably greatly increases their ability to offer higher capacity services. Maybe not yet, or maybe they don't intend to upgrade existing customers coming over from DSL and just add new high speed plans, but it should give them the option.

PON CPE is generally not designed to be replaced by the user. Your ISP may offer to / provide an interface to configure it into bridge mode so you can supply your own router/WiFi, but the PON equipment itself they don't want you messing with. Sometimes the fibre is semi-permanently installed, very often the device needs to register with the subscriber system, etc. However I don't know the situation in your country, they may be more open to it. It's uncommon in Europe/North America to allow this though, so I suspect your options are slim. I would try to get it in bridge mode and supply my own standard Ethernet router.

So basically, I have to turn it into a bridge and use my old router with nat enabled.
Hopefully that doesn't add to much to my ping time cause I often game online.

[ve7xen]

How bad could it be, to use ISP's modem?

Your ISP has access to everything you transfer through them anyway, so I don't see much difference to your threat model whether you use your own modem or theirs. In either case, they can sniff / intercept / modify anything you transfer through them.

Why can't they let things be as is?

Clearly the PON system reduces costs for them, and probably greatly increases their ability to offer higher capacity services. Maybe not yet, or maybe they don't intend to upgrade existing customers coming over from DSL and just add new high speed plans, but it should give them the option.

PON CPE is generally not designed to be replaced by the user. Your ISP may offer to / provide an interface to configure it into bridge mode so you can supply your own router/WiFi, but the PON equipment itself they don't want you messing with. Sometimes the fibre is semi-permanently installed, very often the device needs to register with the subscriber system, etc. However I don't know the situation in your country, they may be more open to it. It's uncommon in Europe/North America to allow this though, so I suspect your options are slim. I would try to get it in bridge mode and supply my own standard Ethernet router.

So basically, I have to turn it into a bridge and use my old router with nat enabled.
Hopefully that doesn't add to much to my ping time cause I often game online.

Yeah, that'd be the way to go, IMO.

Considering PON is intrinsically much lower latency than DSL and that the router shouldn't add more than a couple hundred us, it should come out to still be a win vs. the DSL.

[BrokenYugo]

Depending on how they're implementing blocking owning your equipment won't help that.

How much is too much for VPN? I'm quite happy with the one I pay 30USD/year for.

I wouldn't think a bridged combo unit feeding a router will be any slower than the combo unit alone, in bridge mode it's acting like a modem would. Could even potentially be faster or at least more consistent since you can do things like SQM on an owned router.

[AntiProtonBoy]

The modem was made by a Chinese company named "richer link". I don't trust neither the manufacturer nor the ISP's custom firmware. The ISP also blocks a lot of websites, specially on phone, specially whenever there's even a slight political chaos in the country.

What is the exact model number of the modem? Perhaps we can ferret out a custom firmware for you. I did something similar with a Huawei LTE dongle.

Also, Firefox has a DNS-over-HTTPS feature that could potentially bypass some ISP level filtering.

[Raj]

So. The router is here, though it's newer than my old one. Download speeds and ping time is same as old one. It supports dual band wifi and faster upload speeds and faster lan and has heatsinks unlike my old one until I added and it did . But port forwarding seems tough on it. The configuration pages take ages to load...

The wan connection types are as image attached.

It's so awful, it does not have wall mount holes, and doesn't use standard European plug like other routers but used an Indian variant. Transformer made by sunun. It also sinks of cheap plastic Built down to a price.

What's good is, like all Airtel modems, I could extract the password, ISP users on your modem, just by removing the 'type=password' attribute for password text box.
So maybe I can use 3rd party router. (They've never stopped me from using one before)

The modem was made by a Chinese company named "richer link". I don't trust neither the manufacturer nor the ISP's custom firmware. The ISP also blocks a lot of websites, specially on phone, specially whenever there's even a slight political chaos in the country.

What is the exact model number of the modem? Perhaps we can ferret out a custom firmware for you. I did something similar with a Huawei LTE dongle.

Also, Firefox has a DNS-over-HTTPS feature that could potentially bypass some ISP level filtering.

it
s this one-http://www.richerlink.com/product/rl841gwv-dgbh/
But not worth it...I'll try to return the modem to the company after wiping it.
What's interesting is, it apparently has a (serial (debug?)port in the lower side of the photo)

[Raj]

Is this -https://service-provider.tp-link.com/gpon/archer-xr500v/#specifications
a valid replacement for this-http://www.richerlink.com/product/rl841gwv-dgbh/
?
 The tp link modem doesn't list G.988 in it's supported protocol.

[David Hess]

So basically, I have to turn it into a bridge and use my old router with nat enabled.

I use my external NAT router no matter what hardware the ISP provides.  None of their hardware can be trusted.

Hopefully that doesn't add to much to my ping time cause I often game online.

It will not have any significant effect.  The added latency should be less than 1 millisecond.

[Raj]

So basically, I have to turn it into a bridge and use my old router with nat enabled.

I use my external NAT router no matter what hardware the ISP provides.  None of their hardware can be trusted.

Hopefully that doesn't add to much to my ping time cause I often game online.

It will not have any significant effect.  The added latency should be less than 1 millisecond.

So, today, after going through all the manuals and network lingos, I reused my old router. Things are better now with no measurable difference of lag

[MrMobodies]

Does that that ISP provided router has a wan or vdsl port?

[Cerebus]

How much is too much for VPN? I'm quite happy with the one I pay 30USD/year for.

Median household income for the US is about 13.75 times that of an Indian household. So that $30USD/year has just become the equivalent of $413USD/year.

[NiHaoMike]

Tor and ProtonVPN are both free. They do have their limitations so best to set up subnets using additional routers (physical hardware or VMs) to make it easy to pick what to route over them.

[Raj]

Does that that ISP provided router has a wan or vdsl port?

it takes a gpon port from isp side, and gives you a telephone port and ethernet port.
when you connect a standard phone to it, it acts like a voip phone

Tor and ProtonVPN are both free. They do have their limitations so best to set up subnets using additional routers (physical hardware or VMs) to make it easy to pick what to route over them.

Indeed. I use tor.
will look into proton vpn

any way...their modem is just a bridge now.
What really made me do this was that you can't disable tr69 on it.
With this setup, I have no tr69

[AntiProtonBoy]

Tor and ProtonVPN are both free.

Have you used ProtonVPN? What's your verdict?

[NiHaoMike]

Works pretty well, biggest disadvantage is that P2P is not officially supported on free accounts, but my experience is that Tribler can work around it.

[MrMobodies]

it takes a gpon port from isp side, and gives you a telephone port and ethernet port.

Oh good, some UK ISP seem to be selling VDSL routers to FTTP customers by using a switch port as a wan port (I believing using Vlans) to connect to their fibre transceiver/nte and from what I remembered in the past the performance wasn't great doing that.

Zen recently doing this with with a FRITZ!Box 7530 and some time ago Plusnet using Zzyxel VMG1312-B10D both with no dedicated ethernet wan port or Fibre interface on those.

[David Hess]

Oh good, some UK ISP seem to be selling VDSL routers to FTTP customers by using a switch port as a wan port (I believing using Vlans) to connect to their fibre transceiver/nte and from what I remembered in the past the performance wasn't great doing that.

I remember reading the datasheet for a common switch ASIC that described how it was possible to support separate operation of the ports by routing them through the associated external microcontroller, which would of course would impact performance.

[David Hess]

Works pretty well, biggest disadvantage is that P2P is not officially supported on free accounts, but my experience is that Tribler can work around it.

I was looking through their website and could not figure out what "supported" means.  Does that mean they actively block P2P, streaming, and TOR on their free account?  Or does "not supported" mean for instance that the free account does not forward a port or ports for incoming connections?

The lack of information is primarily responsible for why I do not use ProtonVPN.  It is not clear what they are providing.

[NiHaoMike]

They seem to block some common forms of P2P like Bittorrent but some other forms like Tribler's anonymization protocol are not recognized as P2P and still work.

An alternative just for Bittorrent is to connect to VPNbook from Tor. VPNbook does not require an account and allows P2P but isn't trustworthy with hiding your IP, so use Tor for that purpose and VPNbook is only to work around Tor not supporting UDP. Don't expect particularly good performance (but not that bad either, about 100-200kB/s download) but it seems to work better on torrents that have few other Tribler users.