Author Topic: Can my PC stop holding me back so I can be free to wander to super-highway?  (Read 5459 times)

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Offline madires

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Then the demarc is the ONT's LAN port or WiFi interface. But it can be in a grey area based on local regulations.
 

Online NiHaoMike

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What cables already exist in the walls between the room with the PC and the room with the router? If it's a relatively new house, the phone lines might be run with CAT5 and would be trivial to convert to Ethernet. Coax can be used with MOCA adapters and old phone lines can be used with hacked Homeplug adapters. (Or use a pair of VDSL modems that can be programmed to connect to each other in adhoc mode, but that's basically a more expensive version of hacking Homeplug to run over phone lines.)

In the off chance there's conduit between the rooms, installing cable is super easy!
Cryptocurrency has taught me to love math and at the same time be baffled by it.

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Offline fordem

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Then the demarc is the ONT's LAN port or WiFi interface. But it can be in a grey area based on local regulations.

This does not change the fact that it is still the provider's responsibility to deal with the customer's complaint that they are not getting the speed they are paying for - I'm actually watching this play out right now, between my daughter and her provider - she knows the sort of throughput she can get in my house, and is going to push them until they deliver it in hers.

So far they have instructed her to change the WiFi password, claiming that she's been hacked and has her neighbors mooching off of her WiFi, which, given the fact that she lives in a single family home several hundred feet from her closest neighbor is unlikely, they have installed additional access points in some sort of mesh WiFi system, and as of yesterday, disabled the ONT's internal access point on the pretext that it was causing "wireless interference".
 

Online wraper

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This does not change the fact that it is still the provider's responsibility to deal with the customer's complaint that they are not getting the speed they are paying for - I'm actually watching this play out right now, between my daughter and her provider - she knows the sort of throughput she can get in my house, and is going to push them until they deliver it in hers.
Claimed speed is there, checked on ipad. Not their problem.
 

Offline Berni

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This does not change the fact that it is still the provider's responsibility to deal with the customer's complaint that they are not getting the speed they are paying for - I'm actually watching this play out right now, between my daughter and her provider - she knows the sort of throughput she can get in my house, and is going to push them until they deliver it in hers.

Since his iPad shown good speed test results means they are getting the speeds they pay for. So the ISP fulfilled their responsibility perfectly well. Unless the contract you signed with your ISP specifically mentions that they will provide networking infrastructure to all the computers in your house then they don't have to. Their responsibility is bringing the internet inside your house (and they might also charge an installation fee to do that).

That being said if the ISP is trying to be seen in a good light against the competition they will generaly try to asist with some of the home networking. The technician might configure some of your existing routers and accesspoints if you ask them nicely, they will also generally provide advice on network upgrades to help you figure out what you need in order to get your network performing the way you want. But they will most certainly never give you free routers, access points, network cards or run ethernet cables all through the house for free.

Maintaining a LAN network is a separate job for an IT technician. There are other companies that provide such services. This is typically used by small businesses that don't have their own IT technican or someone who knows enugh to do the work of one. They pay them monthly or per service call for them to come and fix any IT related issues for them and assist in buying new IT equipment.
 

Offline madires

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Regarding WiFi, no sane telco will give you any SLA for ISM bands. ISM bands have to be considered unreliable. If your WiFi works fine, be happy. There's no guarantee it will stay that way. Access points, WiFi routers, bluetooth, remote controls, video bridges and what have you share the same ISM bands. It's similar to CB radio in its heyday. For a reliable wireless service you need a licensed frequency, i.e. only used by your telco in your area.
 

Offline TomS_

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Regarding WiFi, no sane telco will give you any SLA for ISM bands.
Except that this is the latest customer grabbing craze in the UK at the moment it seems.

The likes of sky and BT are guaranteeing speed or they'll give you a refund.

It's clearly a loss maker for some customers, but it'll bring in more than a few extras to cover those losses.
 

Offline Ranayna

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Do they *really* guarantee a speed to your (wireless) end user device? Any device?
I would be very surprised if that is really the case.

In germany, we recently (some years ago) got some legislations battling the always advertised "Up to" speeds. Now you can terminate your contract if the provider cannot at least deliver half of the promised "up to" speed to the router. But again, this is to the router. You can (or at least are supposed to be able to) use your own router, and already there this half speed clause does not apply anymore. This is only aplicable with the router you get from the provider.

The unpredictable ISM bands are just one aspect here. How about an old PC with just an 100 MBit/s Ethernet card on a 500 Mbit/s connection? Or a single broken strand in your ethernet cabling causing it to fall back to 100 Mbit/s?
 

Offline madires

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You can (or at least are supposed to be able to) use your own router, and already there this half speed clause does not apply anymore. This is only aplicable with the router you get from the provider.

Isn't that just what the bad telcos are trying to claim? Of course your router needs to be able to route/NAT with sufficient throughput, but it shouldn't matter if you have your own router or a Zwangsrouter (router forced upon you by the telco as part of the service).
 

Offline Berni

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Isn't that just what the bad telcos are trying to claim? Of course your router needs to be able to route/NAT with sufficient throughput, but it shouldn't matter if you have your own router or a Zwangsrouter (router forced upon you by the telco as part of the service).

Thing is that the NAT performance of a router is not simply X number of Mbits. Its common for a router to show great full link speed throughput in easy to route scenarios, but outright crash when presented with a particularly difficult routing scenario.

An easy routing scenario is no firewall rules and 1 client, sending back and forth max sized packets at 1 server. Lots of cheep junk routers will do full max link speed on that. When you have 10 clients on a network talking to 1000s of different servers, constantly opening and closing TCP connections while sending large bursts of tiny packets will generally bring most non professional routers to there knees, making them drop to something like 10% of the max link throughput.

One particularly nasty thing to do to a router is use a high throughput port scanner software like nmap and just let it rip without any speed limits. It can send millions of TCP requests trough a 1Gbit link. This is so violent on cheep routers that it causes some to crash and not recover until a reboot. I heard of a guy with a fast internet connection getting a call from there ISP when using it. He told them that he is port scanning and the IT tech on the other side was fine with it, but asked him to turn down the packet rate because he overloaded the ISPs backend networking equipment.

And this is the problem with a lot of routers that ISPs give out. They work fine in the ideal scenario but often fall on there face in a more demanding one. Luckily my ISP is nice enough to flash my modem with a special "dumb modem only" firmware with all of the routing functionality stripped out, while i use my own more enterprise-ish grade MikroTik router to do my routing. It survives the worst case nmap scenario just fine with web browsing remaining functional for all the other clients, but the CPU and memory usage graphs on that router show that it is really really working hard(as in >100x typical resource usage)
 

Offline madires

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Maybe US telcos have to change their "up to" marketing speak too. Frontier lied about internet speed, FTC says in post-net neutrality case: https://www.reuters.com/article/ftc-frontier-communications-speed/update-1-u-s-sues-frontier-communications-regarding-internet-speeds-filing-idUSL2N2N62E4
 

Offline madires

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Thing is that the NAT performance of a router is not simply X number of Mbits. Its common for a router to show great full link speed
throughput in easy to route scenarios, but outright crash when presented with a particularly difficult routing scenario.

We can discuss router architecture if you like. :) It's not hard to achieve 200 - 300 Mbps with a single core CPU around 600 - 800 MHz. And more and more SOHO router SoCs include hardware NAT, even inexpensive ones for 50 bucks. What do you mean by a "particularly difficult routing scenario"? A typical SOHO router has one gateway, maybe a few local networks and a few VPNs. Add IPv6 and you might have 10 or 20 routes. These can be easily handled by a software based router. For 200 bucks you get router with a dual-core ARM running at 1.x GHz. Plenty of performance for more complex firewall rules and high speed internet access. Much more than old and expensive CPU-based Cisco routers two decades ago, handling 150k routes with a few hundred MHz fast MIPS CPU.
 

Offline Berni

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We can discuss router architecture if you like. :) It's not hard to achieve 200 - 300 Mbps with a single core CPU around 600 - 800 MHz. And more and more SOHO router SoCs include hardware NAT, even inexpensive ones for 50 bucks. What do you mean by a "particularly difficult routing scenario"? A typical SOHO router has one gateway, maybe a few local networks and a few VPNs. Add IPv6 and you might have 10 or 20 routes. These can be easily handled by a software based router. For 200 bucks you get router with a dual-core ARM running at 1.x GHz. Plenty of performance for more complex firewall rules and high speed internet access. Much more than old and expensive CPU-based Cisco routers two decades ago, handling 150k routes with a few hundred MHz fast MIPS CPU.

The particularly difficult scenario is the high speed port scanning task. This is because a NAT has to keep track of who opened a connection to who. But there are routers that can't even keep up with simply having a lot of clients on the network. Routing happens on a packet by packet basis, so 100Mbit/s of 100 byte packets puts a way way more strain on a NAT than 100Mbit/s of 1500 byte packets.

And yes you can get great throughput using just SoC chips, this is what pretty much all of the MikroTik routers use and they are bulletproof. More of the issue are the cheep consumer home networking solutions. The gear from people like Asus, TPLink, Dlink, Netgear.. etc tends to not handle more demanding routing scenarios while at the same time the firmware in general tends to be a crappy unstable mess that for some reason starts acting up after 3 months of uptime (I solved networking issues so many times by simply rebooting a cheap crappy router). But the routers that you get built into the modems, those tend to be even a step below those home solutions as they are the cheapest off brand piece of crap that the ISP could find on the market, since if they are giving them out for free they might as well spend as little money as possible on them. At least that is what i see ISPs giving out over here. Perhaps the ISPs from your area spend more money on quality modems.

I convinced quite a few friends to spend the extra money on a SOHO grade router and they quickly noticed a big difference in how much more performant and stable there internet has become (before they blamed the ISP for crappy service).
« Last Edit: May 20, 2021, 05:19:50 am by Berni »
 

Offline madires

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The particularly difficult scenario is the high speed port scanning task. This is because a NAT has to keep track of who opened a connection to who. But there are routers that can't even keep up with simply having a lot of clients on the network. Routing happens on a packet by packet basis, so 100Mbit/s of 100 byte packets puts a way way more strain on a NAT than 100Mbit/s of 1500 byte packets.

I agree, if you're doing such things then you'll need a SOHO router with more performance. Cheap plastic boxes (slow CPU, not much RAM) won't hold up with that. BTW, a proper datasheet for a router will tell you also the maximum "packets per second" rating.

More of the issue are the cheep consumer home networking solutions. The gear from people like Asus, TPLink, Dlink, Netgear.. etc tends to not handle more demanding routing scenarios while at the same time the firmware in general tends to be a crappy unstable mess that for some reason starts acting up after 3 months of uptime (I solved networking issues so many times by simply rebooting a cheap crappy router).

Yep, the original firmwares of those are usually crappy. But in many cases you can crossgrade to an alternative firmware like OpenWRT which runs quite stable and also provides much better IPv6 support.

But the routers that you get built into the modems, those tend to be even a step below those home solutions as they are the cheapest off brand piece of crap that the ISP could find on the market, since if they are giving them out for free they might as well spend as little money as possible on them. At least that is what i see ISPs giving out over here. Perhaps the ISPs from your area spend more money on quality modems.

Over here the routers with built-in modem offered by telcos are the more expensive types. For DSL routers the standard feature set is VDSL super vectoring, DECT base station, VoIP ATA (2 FXO ports), WLAN, and capable of more than 250Mbps in any case. More or less a middle class FritzBox.
 

Offline Marco

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Don't forget the FTTP end... For max speed, ditch the domestic router and get youself a lot of gaming wifi bandwidth...
Occasionally the provider hardware is pretty good, if it's already 802.11ax buying an expensive wireless router won't necessarily get you much.
 


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