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coryw
join:2013-12-22
Flagstaff, AZ

coryw

Member

[Qwest] Yet Another Thread About how Terrible the C1000a is.

None of the other threads in the immediately recent past are really good fits for this, but the TL;DR of this is that I tried a C1000a for troubleshooting and was quite disappointed.

I mention it a lot, but just for the background, I'm on a 1.5 megabit plain ADSL line, my distance is probably 2000-3000 feet from the DSLAM, and my normal device is an ActionTec Q1000, which I bought outright from CL when I first started with them at my previous house. I like the Q1000 because it has 802.11N wireless networking and four gigabit ethernet switches. I only have like three or four wired computers running most of the time, so it meets my needs efficiently and in a single device.

While troubleshooting some line issues last year, CL sent me a PK5001z, which proved useful for its logging functionality, and "officially supported on your type of circuit" status. (Odd, but whatever.) I put it back away as soon as the line issues were straightened out.

Between then and now, I also picked up a C1000a and configured it with my credentials and port forwards just to have on hand. I figured it had to have picked up some new firmware functionality and that it was probably otherwise about the same as my Q1000.

Under good line conditions, I actually suspect that it would be fine, but I'm both trying to monitor my stats (works fine), and log device retrains, at which the C1000a-D I have on hand is completely useless.

For starters, the log never realized it was any time other than 1970. It logs wireless and ethernet connections, but not DSL retrains, and in fact, even the stats page never acknowledges a retrain, even though the device experienced several. (My actual issue is that my upstream SNR is sitting at 6.0DB, so I'm trained at 1536/700 and I'm experiencing frequent retrains. Just shy of 20/day -- which makes an already painful connection that much worse.)

Anyway, that was painful. I'm also trying to track my usage. I typically don't bother, but I figured, if I need to troubleshoot some other things, why not track usage too. The C1000a shows values for incoming and outgoing traffic, but it turns out rather than actual "usage" meters that count how many megabytes you have transferred, they are speedometers, that show that because of the nature of some number of customers sharing the throughput of a T1, it's literally impossible for me to transfer above one megabit per second from the greater Internet. (Accounting rather generously for ATM overhead.)

To add to all of that, the C1000a was even less stable on the line than the PK5001z and Q1000a were.

The PK5001z is great because as long as it has power, it will retain the log, and you can even tell it to keep the log through reboots of the device, and although I'm losing out on my gigabit Ethernet switch ports, I could get those back by using a consumer router as a WAP, buying a regular range extender like my favorite mention the Netgear EX6200 or by adding a gigabit switch.

I did not run it long enough to come up against any errors with the wireless (or even long enough to join any clients to wireless) or heat (even after about two days with it on) but wow, is it terrible for troubleshooting, and even worse for low SNR margin situations. I don't have any other ADSL devices on hand at the moment, but while I wait to hear back from CL about my line, I'm just pleased at the logs this thing produces.

Here's a quick example:

05/23/2014      01:34:46 AM     NTP                  Time initialized by NTP server
05/23/2014      02:43:40 AM     DSL                  WAN Physical Link Down
05/23/2014      02:45:12 AM     DSL                  WAN Physical Link Up. Upstream 704 kbps Downstream 1536 kbps, DSL Type is ADSL_G.dmt
 

It doesn't say why the link failed, but I really like that it shows the speeds and exactly when it happened. The only thing I think could improve the logs is a measurement of the DSL Power stats right when it trained up.

The C1000a wouldn't have bothered me nearly as much as it did if the functionality to measure this stuff simply wasn't present in the interface, but I can now see what in particular makes the C1000a so much maligned among the most technical users.

If they were possible to find, I would be pretty interested in trying out the C2000a, C2000t (I wish I'd picked up the one that gapmn See Profile did when I saw it on eBay) and PK5001A to see what the other devices (both liked and maligned) are like on this front.

One more feature request, in case CenturyLink See Profile looks at this, would be for the system logs on these devices to record total and daily usage at 23:59:59, and ideally per-session usage each time the link drops. It the device ever gained the ability to e-mail the contents of yesterday's logs at 00:00:01, I would be absolutely over the moon, but as long as the log gets saved, I can go in every few days and pull out the data I need or want. Even though my Q1000 works perfectly well, if I were told that there were a new modem that had this functionality and it all worked properly, I would go buy it.
gapmn
join:2013-11-10
Saint Paul, MN

gapmn

Member

I think you may have more luck if you telnet into the modem. There is usually a wealth of more information available by telnet.
brad152
join:2006-07-27
Chicago, IL

brad152

Member

The C1000A is still a terrible modem, no matter how you slice it.

Honestly they just need to shove what's left in the warehouse out in a pile, burn them and pretend they never happened
gapmn
join:2013-11-10
Saint Paul, MN

gapmn

Member

I am not saying it is good or bad. I am just trying to help you get the info you are looking for. Does your Q1000 do everything that you have listed the C1000a as not doing?
coryw
join:2013-12-22
Flagstaff, AZ

coryw to gapmn

Member

to gapmn
To be honest, I didn't look at telnet. What I was after in particular (which the Q1000 doesn't do either) was a log of when it retrained and the speed it got when it retrained.

I remain sure that the C1000A is just fine as a device on a reasonably good line for a customer who really just wants a network connection on one or two machines.

At this point, I'm just using the PK5001z and dealing with only having 10/100 Ethernet on the LAN side of things. When the line is stable again, I'll go back to the Q1000.

BimmerE38FN
join:2002-09-15
Boise, ID

BimmerE38FN to coryw

Member

to coryw
Phone lines and phone line boxes should be checked for good condition phone cabling and the lines should be filtered correctly. Modems depend on having a good signal from the ISP service.

Some users of these modems bridge them and use external routers and let them handle the PPPoE connection. Most external routers are better built and designed and have more features then modems.
gapmn
join:2013-11-10
Saint Paul, MN

gapmn to coryw

Member

to coryw
Hey Coryw,

You could probably write a script to get the modem to do what you want. However, I am no expert on script writing. Taz might have some insight.
coryw
join:2013-12-22
Flagstaff, AZ

coryw to BimmerE38FN

Member

to BimmerE38FN
Under normal circumstances, my line is just fine. It's not like the PK5001z is any better at actually holding a connection than the C1000a, but it is providing better troubleshooting information.

The Q1000 doesn't provide this information either, but it's not in the interface, so I wasn't expecting it.

I'm also fully aware that another router will be better at routing, but what I need right now is really good information about the line, which a regular Ethernet router won't be able to provide. (If the firmware on third party devices like the Netgear DGN D3700 were any better, I'd be on that device like a hawk, but that device was just as poor at logging physical aspects of the line.)
coryw

coryw to gapmn

Member

to gapmn
I'm actually not sure that the Q1000 or C1000a have logs at all. I could pretty easily set up a shell script on my local Linux box to log into the modem, pull a few stats with xdslctl, and then write them to a local file, but that isn't quite what I want either.
coryw

coryw

Member

Just as a follow-up to this. I have a C1000A-D, and it occurred to me, that since I bought it in February or so, and never really did anything with it, and then just started using it briefly when this OP was made, there might be firmware updates for it that fix some of these issues.

I'll look into that as a potential issue, because if they've amended the way the logging and usage functions work, I would switch from the PK5001z (mine still has broken port forwarding) back to the C1000A pretty quickly. I'll investigate further.