4 ms·

This article has spawned a few questions. My apartment building is hooked up to a fiber optics line, and it enters my living room through a coax cable. I'm st

This article has spawned a few questions. My apartment building is hooked up to a fiber optics line, and it enters my living room through a coax cable. I'm still using the stock router, and the performance has been absolutely abysmal. In short, my connection gets dropped entirely for minutes at a time. I'll usually get 20 minutes of internet, and then 2-5 minutes of outage. Here's the rub: I have more devices than the normal person: - 1x home-built NAS, via ethernet - 1x desktop, via ethernet - 1x laptop, again via wifi - 1x mobile phone, via wifi Could the outages be due to having an under-powered router? Are there any simple tests I could run to diagnose the problem further? Off the top of my head, the usual internet speed-test battery indicates that my performance behaves as advertised, so it would seem that the problem isn't with the fiber line per se. A related question: the article here left me a bit confused. Did the author end up finding a router that could take a coaxial input?

mseebach 11y ago
Apparently (this is second hand knowledge), the thermal design of cheap consumer routers is really poor (because a sleek package + no fans is a priority, along with low cost), and this somehow causes the device to degrade over time. It's beyond my understanding exactly how this degradation works (I thought digital things either worked or not), but it appears to be a thing. FWIW, four devices might be slight more than a normal single person has, but it's definitely less than an average modern family reasonably has: 1 smartphone + 1 tablet per person, a smart TV (and/or AppleTV/Chromecast/Fire), a Sonos or two, a couple of laptops etc, plus whatever guests bring along.
- omginternets 11y ago
  I suspect there's a question of load as well. I quite certainly use more bandwidth than the average family: I average 2048 bps down.
  - maaarghk 11y ago
    600-odd meg a month then?
    - omginternets 11y ago
      Sounds about right.
      - vinw 11y ago
        Or do you mean 2048 mbps, which would be about 650 GB over a month?
        omginternets 11y ago
        Oh right... yes. That's what I get for not checking units and not doulbe-checking other people's math :|
- mlonkibjuyhv 11y ago
  Afaik the primary mechanisms behind hardware degradation are electromigration in semiconductors and evaporation of electrolyte from capacitors. Both of these are temperature dependent, and a golden rule is that an increase of 10deg C halves the lifetime of a component (at least for caps). A device may still work most of the time, but the analog electronics that implement the Boolean logic your digital device depends on are running outside design-spec, and the probability of a transient failure is increased. One can further fantasize of secondary effects for example caused by unclean voltage rails due to bad filtering on switching regulators, perhaps increasing the probability of transistors latching up, frying controllers, or directly injecting strong noise typically in the 100kHz range into IO devices fucking with touchscreens, Ethernet, WiFi, you name it. Take all of this with a grain of salt, I'm merely a university dropout struggling to make my boss understand why the 100's of decade old kiosks I service for a living don't work good like they used to. Edit: Apparently my mind-dump above merely scratches the surface. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_electronic_components https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_electronic_compon...
  - rashkov 11y ago
    That is super interesting, thanks
CyberDildonics 11y ago
I've been through this multiple times. First thing's first, your router's firmware is probably total shit. Flash DD-WRT or Tomato onto it if you can. If you want to really nail the problem down you can buy a router based on the processor and memory specs and flash the firmware or go the route from the article. Again, because most people have no idea how bad it really is, your router's firmware is probably absolute trash. It isn't an Asus is it?
- omginternets 11y ago
  DD-WRT or Tomato That was my first thought as well, but no such luck... It's a Netgear CG3700B, an EU DOCSIS model. EDIT: actually, I may have been wrong about DD-WRT (https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Netgear_WNDR3700 https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Netgear_WNDR3700). What's the relationship between the WNDR3700 and the CG3700B, I wonder... they certainly look the same, so I'm hoping that A) mine is the EU version of the above router and B) it uses a compatible firmware.
DKnoll 11y ago
You won't find any router that takes coax, that portion is handled by a DOCSIS modem. In your case, you're unlucky enough to have been given a combined modem/router by your ISP. You have 2 options to improve performance - 1. Use a third party DOCSIS modem, if allowed by your ISP, along with a seperate, dedicated router. 2. Put the modem/router abomination into gateway mode, and get yourself a seperate router. If the modem does not have a gateway mode, you can often use PPPoE to bypass the modems routing function. This often resolves the connectivity issues introduced by these devices.

mseebach 11y ago

Apparently (this is second hand knowledge), the thermal design of cheap consumer routers is really poor (because a sleek package + no fans is a priority, along with low cost), and this somehow causes the device to degrade over time. It's beyond my understanding exactly how this degradation works (I thought digital things either worked or not), but it appears to be a thing. FWIW, four devices might be slight more than a normal single person has, but it's definitely less than an average modern family reasonably has: 1 smartphone + 1 tablet per person, a smart TV (and/or AppleTV/Chromecast/Fire), a Sonos or two, a couple of laptops etc, plus whatever guests bring along.

omginternets 11y ago
I suspect there's a question of load as well. I quite certainly use more bandwidth than the average family: I average 2048 bps down.
- maaarghk 11y ago
  600-odd meg a month then?
  - omginternets 11y ago
    Sounds about right.
    - vinw 11y ago
      Or do you mean 2048 mbps, which would be about 650 GB over a month?
      - omginternets 11y ago
        Oh right... yes. That's what I get for not checking units and not doulbe-checking other people's math :|
mlonkibjuyhv 11y ago
Afaik the primary mechanisms behind hardware degradation are electromigration in semiconductors and evaporation of electrolyte from capacitors. Both of these are temperature dependent, and a golden rule is that an increase of 10deg C halves the lifetime of a component (at least for caps). A device may still work most of the time, but the analog electronics that implement the Boolean logic your digital device depends on are running outside design-spec, and the probability of a transient failure is increased. One can further fantasize of secondary effects for example caused by unclean voltage rails due to bad filtering on switching regulators, perhaps increasing the probability of transistors latching up, frying controllers, or directly injecting strong noise typically in the 100kHz range into IO devices fucking with touchscreens, Ethernet, WiFi, you name it. Take all of this with a grain of salt, I'm merely a university dropout struggling to make my boss understand why the 100's of decade old kiosks I service for a living don't work good like they used to. Edit: Apparently my mind-dump above merely scratches the surface. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_electronic_components https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_electronic_compon...
- rashkov 11y ago
  That is super interesting, thanks

CyberDildonics 11y ago

I've been through this multiple times. First thing's first, your router's firmware is probably total shit. Flash DD-WRT or Tomato onto it if you can. If you want to really nail the problem down you can buy a router based on the processor and memory specs and flash the firmware or go the route from the article. Again, because most people have no idea how bad it really is, your router's firmware is probably absolute trash. It isn't an Asus is it?

omginternets 11y ago
DD-WRT or Tomato That was my first thought as well, but no such luck... It's a Netgear CG3700B, an EU DOCSIS model. EDIT: actually, I may have been wrong about DD-WRT (https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Netgear_WNDR3700 https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Netgear_WNDR3700). What's the relationship between the WNDR3700 and the CG3700B, I wonder... they certainly look the same, so I'm hoping that A) mine is the EU version of the above router and B) it uses a compatible firmware.

DKnoll 11y ago

You won't find any router that takes coax, that portion is handled by a DOCSIS modem. In your case, you're unlucky enough to have been given a combined modem/router by your ISP. You have 2 options to improve performance - 1. Use a third party DOCSIS modem, if allowed by your ISP, along with a seperate, dedicated router. 2. Put the modem/router abomination into gateway mode, and get yourself a seperate router. If the modem does not have a gateway mode, you can often use PPPoE to bypass the modems routing function. This often resolves the connectivity issues introduced by these devices.