Using the Huawei HG612 on Digital Region instead of the Cellpipe

[LeJimster]

Totally agree, you want to be able to see what your connection is doing and that you are getting what you paid for. I was at my friends house yesterday and he is with o2 like myself, but had just switched packages for something *much* faster for less money according to the o2 sales pitch. Anyway, I logged in to check his line stats with the Administrator user. And it doesn't tell you anything other than he was connected.

I had to login as a SuperUser and then it revealed the line stats to me. I found out his SNR was 12, he was syncing at 7Mb with a max possible sync of 12Mb.. The problem is that you can't tweak the SNR on o2's dumbed down box. And what was worse is that they got Thomson to remove that functionality from the latest firmware so if you were using the DMT app it just won't work anymore.

So I kinda feel sorry for my friend.. If he was using my router he'd be connected stable at 11Mb I have no doubt. But instead he's effectively losing 4-5Mb because of an ISP's incompetence.

[alexatkin]

Indeed.

That is why I stuck with Be instead of switching to O2 when they took over and offered it cheaper. Because I was on a 3dB SNRM profile as it got me about 100-200Kbit higher upstream speed, then I uses the Netgear DG834GT with DGTeam firmware on it to tweak the downstream SNR to around 6dB.

Was quite clever really as upstream SNR was always very stable, it was downstream which would vary by about 3-6 dB. A few times though I found it on 0.5dB and still running fine which was pretty insane for a 2Km line of which some of it is aluminium.

I wonder why NOBODY ever uses seamless rate adaptation instead of forcing line parameters which may or may not be stable? I know when I talked to someone at Digital Region about it they said the network was compatible with SRA but it wasn't switched on. What is it latency problems? Packet loss? There must be a reason.

[aceado]

i use to be with Be/O2 aswell and i asked for snr of 3 db and still forced to line down much lower to 0.2-0.5 db and it was still stable to use also i was also using the Netgear DG834GT with DGTeam firmware but am guessing my line must well over 3 km or more to the exchange

[LeJimster]

(07-05-2012 04:41 PM)aceado Wrote:  i use to be with Be/O2 aswell and i asked for snr of 3 db and still forced to line down much lower to 0.2-0.5 db and it was still stable to use also i was also using the Netgear DG834GT with DGTeam firmware but am guessing my line must well over 3 km or more to the exchange

Heard good things about that router and a Speedtouch I believe at the time, but I decided on the Belkin because I do believe it has the same hardware. But software does account for a lot. My line isn't capable of being stable at 3dB for very long as the SNR fluctuates especially during bad weather. I do believe my line is also 3Km from the Exchange. So 500m from the cabinet sounds like a huge improvement for me, although I did believe for awhile that there was going to be a cab at the end of my road, so I'm a little disappointed it isn't closer to 100M. But that doesn't look likely now since the big old junction box that used to be there is gone since somebody ran into it with their car one icey winter, lol.

[aceado]

(07-05-2012 06:57 PM)LeJimster Wrote:   I do believe my line is also 3Km from the Exchange. So 500m from the cabinet sounds like a huge improvement for me

so you know the cabinet am connected to is only 400 meters away from me the speed checker will show i can get a nice speed which is incorrect as i've found out my phoneline is about 1.2 km so be warn about this and take it with a grain of salt !!

[LeJimster]

Well based on my attenuation my line length is about 3km to the exchange. But I'm actually 2.7km by road (not adding anything for the bends etc). So I can say with certainty my line is no more than 800M worst case. But I'm not expecting all the crappy routing to me on my side of the cabinet. I'll take a guess and say my max sync rate will be 65/25 . But if I'm at all honest I'll be very happy with 24/10 (the ignition package) and if I can't reach much more than that, big deal. It'll be light years ahead of my current connection either way.

[alexatkin]

You can see what mine was:


What is interesting about the Huawei is that for all intents and purposes its very much like a VDSL version of the DG834GT minus the WiFi (which of course was disabled anyway).

DG834GT: Broadcom BCM6348@255MHz, 16MiB RAM, 4MiB FLASH
HG612: Broadcom BCM6368@400Mhz, 32MiB RAM, 16MiB FLASH

[SpencerUk]

(07-05-2012 11:10 AM)LeJimster Wrote:  I still think unlocking the Cellpipe is the way forward. I'm curious as to how "locked" the device truly is. My guess is it's just had it's passwords changed from default.

Pushing this thread back into topic, its not impossible to unlock the Cellpipe..just need that illusive level 16 access.

Not even DR on site engineers have access to it, just the NOC guys from what I know.

[LeJimster]

I've got a level 80 barbarian on Diablo 2.. Will that work? :-p

Any idea when you receive your Huawei Alex? Looking forward to seeing your line stats.

[alexatkin]

No idea, might have been today if it wasn't for the bank holiday.

Just spoke to Henry (I think) at Origin and he seemed somewhat less optimistic about getting this working. He said he would try asking Thales for the settings, but that is far from the impression I had gotten previous which was that they already knew the settings. I must have misunderstood something they said casually about plans for the future and thought it was already in place. I know either Henry or Oliver said they WOULD work something out to enable greater than 100Mbit speeds (which would mean they HAD to replace the Cellpipe) if I were to sync at a speed which required it.

What is puzzling me though is if they don't already know the settings, how else did they test the 120Mbit line reported on the Max page?

Ah well, I will try guessing even if Thales don't tell him anything useful. Perhaps I will get lucky and it being identical to Infinity.

I love the optimism of Origin, but I think its causing some things they said to be misunderstood.