Re: FIOS Router

[Brielle Bruns <bruns () 2mbit com>]

On 5/27/10 8:21 AM, Chris Burwell wrote:
> I'm doing some research for a group that has a 100Mb FIOS Internet
> connection at their site. I was surprised to learn that Verizon
> supplied them with the same Actiontec router that they provided me
> with on my 10Mb connection at home. Needless to say the Actiontec
> router is not up to the task of moving all of that traffic (they are
> using about 80Mb now and sometimes max out their connection). Verizon
> has been good about replacing the router multiple time when they
> finally fail, however  having to power-cycle the router multiple times
> per day is not acceptable.


Which Actiontec did they give your client?  There's like 3 different 
revisions of the Actiontec MoCA/Ethernet routers, and I know some of the 
earliest ones have some odd issues.  The Actiontec MI424WR is actually a 
fairly beefy and nice router - but its hampered by two major things in 
terms of performance:

1) The ethernet hand-off from the ONT to the Actiontec is only 100BT. 
As we all know, 100mbit != actual 100mbit transfer.  I believe MoCA can 
do better then 100mbit, so you'd have to use the MoCA port to get closer.

2) Jungo OpenRG is a pile, and buggy.  My parents have FiOS and their 
MI424WR won't hand out any IP addresses for DNS other then itself no 
matter how I configure it.  There's a bizarre slowdown when DNS is 
handled by the MI424WR, that I have yet to figure out.

Yay for closed source crap bolted on top of open source stuff to 
'replace' non-broken functionality with something that a company can 
restrict.


> What I would like to do is set them up with a router/firewall that is
> capable of handling their current bandwidth needs as well as their
> anticipated future growth. My concern is terminating the FIOS
> connection from the ONT directly to something like a Cisco 3900
> (Output from the ONT is CAT5 terminating to RJ-45). I have been
> searching around the Internet and found one discussion where someone
> claims to have been able to accomplish just this using a Cisco 871
> router. Based on the loose discussions that I have read it seems that
> the FIOS connection configuration can vary from area to area.
>
> I am also aware that we can configure the Actiontec router as a
> bridge, but I would much rather remove it altogether particularly with
> the amount of traffic this group is moving.
>
> Has anyone been able to accomplish this or something similar with any
> hardware other then the router Verizon provides? Any insight on
> Verizon's official stance on this would be helpful. If there is
> someone from Verizon out there that can contact me about the technical
> aspects of doing this, that would be much appreciated as well.


Like I said, your going to be hampered by the fact that the ethernet 
handoff from the ONT is 100BT.  Don't forget, there's all this overhead 
between ethernet, TCP/IP, the ATM network, etc that will even further 
limit your performance.

If you call up and badger Verizon, you should be able to get them to 
switch between MoCA and ethernet handoffs if needed - I've only 
personally managed to get them to switch to ethernet once without faking 
a problem on our end to get a tech to come out and do it.


--
Brielle Bruns
The Summit Open Source Development Group
http://www.sosdg.org    /     http://www.ahbl.org