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drake3
Premium Member
join:2015-03-09

drake3

Premium Member

Experience with FiOptics so far...

Well, I went ahead and signed up for a bundle. I figured I would share my experience so far as to help anyone looking for the information I was a few days earlier.

Late last year I saw guys boring orange duct into the ground in my neighborhood. I asked the HOA and they said it was CB bringing in fiber. I was pretty excited because at the time our best option was TWC. They worked through the winter. On a morning run, I stopped and talked to one of the techs who was working directly on the fiber and not the drilling crew. He said CB was installing FTTH for those that were signing up.

My home setup is pretty custom with a lot of open source running the backend. I have a good amount of experience with DVRs from the very first Tivo to MythTV to WMC and TWCs set top boxes. I also need to VPN in from work and vice versa. I wondered how it would affect what I currently had going, but after weighing the price/features and wanting to give TWC the bird I signed up.

So I actually went to a CB store and talked to the people there. They tried to answer my questions as best they could. This was a Tuesday, by Thursday the fiber was run above ground to the utilities section in the rear of the house. Friday a tech spliced the fiber from the ground run and installed the outside box. Sunday a crew came by and "spaded" the fiber into the ground. This was a surprise as the splice tech said they needed to complete an underground utility survey first as it was going in 8 inches deep. I figured they would plow it in. I definitely did not want them to cut my coax in the process. They did not cut the coax, but I am pretty sure they did not get it 8 inches deep with those shovels. It was done with minimal yard damage, but I am not going to aerate that portion of the yard anymore.

Monday the installer came out. He was on-time and I received two robocalls reminding me of the installation. He was good, but I was also helping him too. I removed all of TWCs boxes, got HDMI, power and coax ready. I isolated each coax from the rooms we were installing and tested them with my own Fluke networking equipment. The equipment he installed was the "push fiber" from the external box to the Calix ONT in my basement. Ethernet from the ONT to the Zyxel gateway and five total ZTE set top boxes, one being a DVR.

I asked him about going to the boxes over twisted pair as my house is wired for it, but he dismissed that as he said the boxes would need more bandwidth. So, he continued to install them via MoCA. I figured I would reconfigure it if I saw problems with the whole house DVR system. He said I was the first customer to ever use the word "MoCA" in conversation. He was really curious where I got my information from and he understood when he saw the 11Us of servers and 48 port switch in my basement.

I asked him about placing a switch after the ONT to run my own firewall along side the Zyxel. He said it was not going to work. Again, dismissed as I was ready to take over after he left.

We finished up. I was happy with the fiber placement. He siliconed the .25 inch hole in the house and zip tied all cables. All boxes came up fine and we were on-line. I ordered 100Mbs service and was getting 98 out of the back of the Zyxel and 20 up. After the installer left, I did install a switch between the ONT and gateway (Zyxel). My laptop received an external IP from CB, but when I ran the speed test it only went to 20Mbps down, ran it again, same thing. I quickly walked around to the Zyxel and immediately got 98 on the another test from behind it, same laptop. I was bummed. I figured that the reports of throttling when running outside of their gateway were true. Thoughts were running on how I could bridge the Zyxel or use the unit as the default route and static route my VPN, etc. However, I left for about 30 minutes, connected the same laptop to the same port and then got 98Mbps from an external IP. I have no idea what happened, but I connected my firewall and it was showing 88Mbps. I tried to isolate what happened in the first speed test, but still cannot figure it out. I started up other cable boxes on different channels maybe using bandwidth figuring maybe it was QoS kicking in and limiting me over the Zyxel, but that was not the case.

On the TV side, the ZTE boxes are working fine on MoCA. No pixelation or stuttering of the picture when playing recorded HD video on any of the units. The installer seemed pleased with all the coax terminations and quality of the cable. This may have something to do with it, but then again, my house is less than a decade old. I am pleased with the performance of the DVR. Seems much better than the TWC equipment I had and I expect I may not be using my MythTV backends much longer.

So far, I am very pleased with the FiOptics setup and installation.
CVGNet
join:2012-04-10
Cincinnati, OH

CVGNet

Member

Sounds like you had a fairly painless installation and good to hear that the pre-existing coax is supporting MoCA well - even if it isn't really faster than GigE....
Trogdor9000
join:2005-07-12
Cincinnati, OH

Trogdor9000 to drake3

Member

to drake3
When I had TV service, I was using my own firewall and a STB. But the STB was running via ethernet (not COAX). It worked great once I got my IGMP Proxy set up correctly. I recently canceled cable and got the gig. Works decently, cant max it yet but can get 60 to 70 MB/s when is pretty damn close.
drake3
Premium Member
join:2015-03-09

drake3 to CVGNet

Premium Member

to CVGNet
said by CVGNet:

Sounds like you had a fairly painless installation and good to hear that the pre-existing coax is supporting MoCA well - even if it isn't really faster than GigE....

Yeah, it went well and so far (knocking on wood) the coax is handling the internal video traffic just fine. I am of the thinking most of the times where if it "ain't broke, don't try to fix it" so I am going to leave it like that for now. Thanks for answering my questions before the installation. Your information was critical in my decision to go with FiOptics.