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avenison
join:2009-12-10
90121

1 edit

avenison to JohnB15

Member

to JohnB15

Re: Sudbury ON - FibreOP FTTH - job fair Thursday 6pm

That's disappointing, particularily since the FibreOP site is (or at least was) frequently linking to the Bell Aliant site, which shows all the options - including those we apparently won't have access to for months.
said by BliZZardX:

there's no point running fibre just to replace POTS.

If VDSL was available I might agree with you, but on the other hand if there was a 5/768k fibre tier I would still switch. The decrease in latency would more than justify it for me.
said by BliZZardX:

The Bell options are triple play or nothing.

FTFY. I sympathize with FibreOP's rollout problems, but there's a vast difference between being unable to provide service to a potential customer, and choosing not to on the grounds that the customer only needs one of several services on offer. My subscription to an Internet-only service would still contribute to their bottom line, and it should be fair to assume they have sufficient capacity that it would not preclude someone else (who might want the whole package) from subscribing as well. Bell currently gets a large cut of my DSL subscription fees as well as the ridiculous amount I pay them for a landline - money they could continue to receive - if they're the first in line to offer me what I actually need.
Savillian
join:2003-11-22

Savillian

Member

said by avenison:

That's disappointing, particularily since the FibreOP site is (or at least was) frequently linking to the Bell Aliant site, which shows all the options - including those we apparently won't have access to for months.

Trust me this has been brought up and talked about and will continue to be talked about till it happens.

EDIT:
PS - If anyone wants to know when a specific area is supposed to be due to be lit up, please PM me. I can give you an approximate timeline and NO guarantees! Haha.
Riplin
join:2002-05-13
canada

Riplin

Member

I dunno maybe I'm just not a marketing guy (trying to get as many full bundles locked in as possible) in the initial push, but pushing this group (ones that only want some part of pkg) aside (and its so technically easy to do) just tends to piss us off a bit more and think twice even when you do.

avenison
join:2009-12-10
90121

avenison

Member

So anyway, shortly after my last post I found out Vianet already has my street lit up, so I have made the switch. Sorry Bell. I also did some networking for my friends using FibreOp, so I can present to you the following brief comparison.

Both services are a GPON-based (passive) fibre deployment. This means the layout is more similar to cable than DSL, in that their equipment (equivalent of DSLAM) sends and receives multiple subscribers' data down the same fibre, which eventually runs through an optical splitter and into X houses. Upload capacity is shared via TDMA, i.e. your-turn/my-turn/his-turn/etc., and is allotted based on demand and QOS rating. Both providers appear to be using VLANs to separate internet/voip/tv services as well as providing QOS for them. No idea if you can request higher priority for your own VOIP packets by tagging them or if that only works when the destination is the provider's server... I guess theoretically if it did work you could abuse it by making all of your traffic higher priority than your neighbours', but it's an interesting possibility. Likewise it would be nice to know if you can get basic TV channels without renting a box by setting up a device on a particular VLAN.

Hardware:

Vianet provides the Zhone model GPON-2424-NA modem, which has no wireless and no battery backup. I haven't logged in to poke around yet (supposedly it is locked?) but I have read some of the manual and it is pretty heavy material.

Bell Aliant is using the Actiontec R1000H, which does have integrated wireless but does not support IPv6. The current firmware version is very oddly laid-out - reminiscent of Thomson's Speedtouch modems, actually. Firmware seems to be developed on a custom basis and is therefore distributed only to the relevant provider (Bell's current version is apparently 33.00L.28) and there is no obvious way to upgrade it even if you had a file to flash. One nice feature is that if you don't know the username and password for the configuration pages, you can reset them by entering the unit's serial number - which hopefully is not visible from the network! Note that uPNP is disabled by default, so if you require any port forwarding you must log in. Strangely, the internal DHCP server does not support assigning specific IPs by MAC. If you prefer to manually forward ports instead of using uPNP, you will need to set each device to use a static IP outside of the modem's DHCP pool (which by default is 192.168.x.10-192.168.x.254) to prevent it from being assigned to a second device. This is not difficult, but of course if it's a mobile device and you bring it to another network, you'll probably need to remove the setting to get connected.

More info on the modem is available at:
»www.actiontec.com/produc ··· ?pid=212
»screenshots.portforward. ··· ault.htm
»forums.xbox.com/xbox_for ··· 793.aspx (requires a Microsoft login)

BliZZardX
Premium Member
join:2002-08-18
Toronto, ON
·Bell Fibe Internet

BliZZardX

Premium Member

Thanks for the elaborate post avenison, but you're teasing leaving out the goods! Post some vianet speedtests for us haha

Looks like they have some good connectivity, even with Bell. So you can play with your neighbour on Bell FTTH across town and it'll be like you're both in the same room »bgp.he.net/AS7091#_peers

avenison
join:2009-12-10
90121

1 edit

avenison

Member

Sorry about that BliZZardX, I'd love to post some speedtests but I wouldn't trust the results right now. My strong machine is down for maintenance so I'm stuck using an aging netbook with a 3400rpm hard drive, and it can't properly keep up with anything.

What I can tell you:
-I'm on the slowest rate, which is 10/1
-Downloads consistently hit >1.2MB/s 24 hours a day, with burst speeds quite a bit higher
-Upload is unconfirmed but when I did try Vianet's speedtest it appears to be as claimed (1mbit)
-Browsing appears to remain acceptable while DL bandwidth is saturated (using my initial attempt at router QOS rules)
-Average ping to google.ca is 8ms, but jitter is around 10-15ms...

What I can't tell you:
-If the jitter in the ping test is typical/accurate, it could well be my netbook or my router which hasn't been tuned yet
-How things act when UL is maxed out
-How things act when UL AND DL are maxed out