7 ms·

I don't know the new context, but I will always be thankful to badmodems.com for highlighting the original Puma 6 issue. I was given a modem by my ISP that had

I don't know the new context, but I will always be thankful to badmodems.com for highlighting the original Puma 6 issue. I was given a modem by my ISP that had a Puma 6 chipset and it was a nightmare - it would completely cut out multiple times per day, latency was all over the place, and it was a truly terrible experience. Doing a bit of digging I was able to short-circuit a lot of troubleshooting and replace the modem, which immediately solved the problem. It truly was negligent how bad those chipsets work - even for basic tasks it was nearly unusable.

walrus01 4y ago
As an ISP anything that is a shared access, contended media like a copper coax segment (DOCSIS3) is a nightmare waiting to happen. The amount of problems that are caused by one person with a leaky/bad connector and line, or things that have gone screwed up at the RF modulation level of the cable plant between the cablemodems and the CMTS. Imagine hundreds, or thousands of houses out there all with 25+ year old coax jacks in walls, 4-way splitters jammed into ceilings, leaky outdoor connectors that have been chewed on by squirrels, etc. It's a miracle that DOCSIS3 works at all. I'm vaguely familiar with the issue that the axe-grindy guy in the original webpage referenced here is complaining about, specific to some series of chipsets used by a popular cheap cablemodem for a few years of manufacturing run... But what he's found is actually a tip of an iceberg of terrible about why maintaining last-mile copper last wireline infrastructure (POTS wiring/DSL or coax for cablemodems) is a losing bet in the long run.
- girvo 4y ago
  Copper needs to die. The Australian NBN is a mess because of it. Sigh, what could've been...
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Well, copper at least has the very nice property of only requiring electricity at the central phone node, and still have working communications. This makes it the best option by far for communication in hour-long blackouts when, for instance, cell phones and cellphone towers would have ran down their batteries.
    - girvo 4y ago
      Tell that to how my NBN seems to be setup. With a blackout, our internet is gone too even though my modem (and home server) are on a UPS. Wonder what causes that. And regardless, while that might be a useful property in certain circumstances, the copper-based NBN we've ended up with is so woeful, that they're basically declaring technical bankruptcy and moving to FTTP after all that in the end anyway. Just a decade late and with billions down the drain for sub-par expensive flaky internet.
    - oceanplexian 4y ago
      Actually the big ILECs like Verizon started deprecating copper loops, at least when I was in that industry 10 years ago. They would install a box in a neighborhood with fiber backhaul to the Central Office and a mini DSLAM, and then deliver shitty DSL from said box. The great thing about this was they could circumvent telecommunications law that requires them to rent out circuits at a competitive rate to small carriers, basically putting the nail in the coffin of small, independent DSL ISPs, since the copper loops are gone. And you, the customer, are now stuck with 6Mbps DSL from a single provider for $80 a month.
      - legalcorrection 4y ago
        >And you, the customer, are now stuck with 6Mbps DSL from a single provider for $80 a month. Almost everywhere in the US you can get at least 25mbps for less than $80 a month. And within almost all cities and their suburbs, you can easily get 100mbps+ for less than that. Unbundled network elements was a stupid utopian idea to begin with. No one who knows a lick about broadband policy actually wants to go back to anything like that. The current model is essentially that you're responsible for building your own infrastructure if you want to be an ISP. That has actually spurred an incredible amount of investment in infrastructure across the country, since you know that if you spend a ton of money laying a thousand miles of fiber, you'll be able to reap the rewards of it, not have to rent it out at cost to your competitors. American internet service is the best or one of the best in the world for a large, populous country. Certainly, the major European powers don't come close (remember when Europe had to beg Netflix and others to reduce video quality to 720p early in the pandemic? US internet service held up perfectly without any throttling.). Only Japan and large parts of China are comparable (again, not counting small or lightly populated countries).
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    FTTx systems make copper almost non-existent. All copper in my city is replaced by fiber, and only copper is from the FTTx box in front of my apartment to my flat. Eeerything (landline, internet, IPTV, etc.) runs from a single, dark fiber. With cabling already in place and VDSL can reliably provide 5 units of bandwidth (where 4 units is used for download and 1 unit is used for upload, e.g. 32/8 mbps), with a theoretical ceiling of 350mbps, I'm pretty happy with what I have. While I'd love to have fiber at home, I definitely don't want to rerun cabling.
    - girvo 4y ago
      Yeah at my previous home, we had VDSL, Fibre to the Building, on a non-NBN fibre network. Was amazing, excellent performance, actually good upload bandwidth, and cheap. I can't wait until my HFC NBN service here goes the way of the dodo. While I have 1000mbps down, the 50mbps upload is just miserable. And the cost is painful, $130 AUD a month.
      - BrandoElFollito 4y ago
        Oh, that's expensive. I pay 40 EUR/month (~60 AUD) and I find it really high (planning to look for something cheaper). It is 1000/400 FFTH (the fiber terminates at my box). For the price I pay I should be able to have a shared 10000/1000 (in reality it will probably be 2500/1000). All of this for the swag, I am ,ot likely to use the bandwidth anytime soon (despite serving a few things from home)
        girvo 4y ago
        I pay it, because for my use-cases it was the only way to get more than 100mbps (which was more like 75mbps at any regular time of day) download without giving up my 50mbps upload. Now at least I can play my video games while my partner watches 4K shows on our TV. Interestingly, moving from 100mbps to 1000mbps has given me a 5ms lower ping: 31ms to 24-25ms with a decrease in jitter of 5ms too, in Valorant -- this is to the exact same server from the physical same PC. I'm guessing even on the same damned cable, the 1000mbps customers get some kind of routing priority or something.
- cillian64 4y ago
  Do you expect the same problems with GPON, which also has a shared medium? At least with fibre you don’t get reflection problems from other people’s dodgy terminations, but you are relying on them obeying the TDMA for upstream.
  - rsaxvc 4y ago
    Rogue ONTs either fire out of time slice and break other packets or just stick on and jam the OLT. The OLT can often pick out which ONT is doing it.
- cupofpython 4y ago
  >25+ year old coax jacks in walls, 4-way splitters jammed into ceilings, leaky outdoor connectors that have been chewed on by squirrels, etc all the above describes my apartment connection in Astoria. and the neighbors were DIY tapped into it too. At any given time I lived there there was an appointment scheduled or being scheduled to have a field worker try to fix the downtime issues. they never did and i moved out

walrus01 4y ago

As an ISP anything that is a shared access, contended media like a copper coax segment (DOCSIS3) is a nightmare waiting to happen. The amount of problems that are caused by one person with a leaky/bad connector and line, or things that have gone screwed up at the RF modulation level of the cable plant between the cablemodems and the CMTS. Imagine hundreds, or thousands of houses out there all with 25+ year old coax jacks in walls, 4-way splitters jammed into ceilings, leaky outdoor connectors that have been chewed on by squirrels, etc. It's a miracle that DOCSIS3 works at all. I'm vaguely familiar with the issue that the axe-grindy guy in the original webpage referenced here is complaining about, specific to some series of chipsets used by a popular cheap cablemodem for a few years of manufacturing run... But what he's found is actually a tip of an iceberg of terrible about why maintaining last-mile copper last wireline infrastructure (POTS wiring/DSL or coax for cablemodems) is a losing bet in the long run.

girvo 4y ago
Copper needs to die. The Australian NBN is a mess because of it. Sigh, what could've been...
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Well, copper at least has the very nice property of only requiring electricity at the central phone node, and still have working communications. This makes it the best option by far for communication in hour-long blackouts when, for instance, cell phones and cellphone towers would have ran down their batteries.
  - girvo 4y ago
    Tell that to how my NBN seems to be setup. With a blackout, our internet is gone too even though my modem (and home server) are on a UPS. Wonder what causes that. And regardless, while that might be a useful property in certain circumstances, the copper-based NBN we've ended up with is so woeful, that they're basically declaring technical bankruptcy and moving to FTTP after all that in the end anyway. Just a decade late and with billions down the drain for sub-par expensive flaky internet.
  - oceanplexian 4y ago
    Actually the big ILECs like Verizon started deprecating copper loops, at least when I was in that industry 10 years ago. They would install a box in a neighborhood with fiber backhaul to the Central Office and a mini DSLAM, and then deliver shitty DSL from said box. The great thing about this was they could circumvent telecommunications law that requires them to rent out circuits at a competitive rate to small carriers, basically putting the nail in the coffin of small, independent DSL ISPs, since the copper loops are gone. And you, the customer, are now stuck with 6Mbps DSL from a single provider for $80 a month.
    - legalcorrection 4y ago
      >And you, the customer, are now stuck with 6Mbps DSL from a single provider for $80 a month. Almost everywhere in the US you can get at least 25mbps for less than $80 a month. And within almost all cities and their suburbs, you can easily get 100mbps+ for less than that. Unbundled network elements was a stupid utopian idea to begin with. No one who knows a lick about broadband policy actually wants to go back to anything like that. The current model is essentially that you're responsible for building your own infrastructure if you want to be an ISP. That has actually spurred an incredible amount of investment in infrastructure across the country, since you know that if you spend a ton of money laying a thousand miles of fiber, you'll be able to reap the rewards of it, not have to rent it out at cost to your competitors. American internet service is the best or one of the best in the world for a large, populous country. Certainly, the major European powers don't come close (remember when Europe had to beg Netflix and others to reduce video quality to 720p early in the pandemic? US internet service held up perfectly without any throttling.). Only Japan and large parts of China are comparable (again, not counting small or lightly populated countries).
- bayindirh 4y ago
  FTTx systems make copper almost non-existent. All copper in my city is replaced by fiber, and only copper is from the FTTx box in front of my apartment to my flat. Eeerything (landline, internet, IPTV, etc.) runs from a single, dark fiber. With cabling already in place and VDSL can reliably provide 5 units of bandwidth (where 4 units is used for download and 1 unit is used for upload, e.g. 32/8 mbps), with a theoretical ceiling of 350mbps, I'm pretty happy with what I have. While I'd love to have fiber at home, I definitely don't want to rerun cabling.
  - girvo 4y ago
    Yeah at my previous home, we had VDSL, Fibre to the Building, on a non-NBN fibre network. Was amazing, excellent performance, actually good upload bandwidth, and cheap. I can't wait until my HFC NBN service here goes the way of the dodo. While I have 1000mbps down, the 50mbps upload is just miserable. And the cost is painful, $130 AUD a month.
    - BrandoElFollito 4y ago
      Oh, that's expensive. I pay 40 EUR/month (~60 AUD) and I find it really high (planning to look for something cheaper). It is 1000/400 FFTH (the fiber terminates at my box). For the price I pay I should be able to have a shared 10000/1000 (in reality it will probably be 2500/1000). All of this for the swag, I am ,ot likely to use the bandwidth anytime soon (despite serving a few things from home)
      - girvo 4y ago
        I pay it, because for my use-cases it was the only way to get more than 100mbps (which was more like 75mbps at any regular time of day) download without giving up my 50mbps upload. Now at least I can play my video games while my partner watches 4K shows on our TV. Interestingly, moving from 100mbps to 1000mbps has given me a 5ms lower ping: 31ms to 24-25ms with a decrease in jitter of 5ms too, in Valorant -- this is to the exact same server from the physical same PC. I'm guessing even on the same damned cable, the 1000mbps customers get some kind of routing priority or something.
cillian64 4y ago
Do you expect the same problems with GPON, which also has a shared medium? At least with fibre you don’t get reflection problems from other people’s dodgy terminations, but you are relying on them obeying the TDMA for upstream.
- rsaxvc 4y ago
  Rogue ONTs either fire out of time slice and break other packets or just stick on and jam the OLT. The OLT can often pick out which ONT is doing it.
cupofpython 4y ago
>25+ year old coax jacks in walls, 4-way splitters jammed into ceilings, leaky outdoor connectors that have been chewed on by squirrels, etc all the above describes my apartment connection in Astoria. and the neighbors were DIY tapped into it too. At any given time I lived there there was an appointment scheduled or being scheduled to have a field worker try to fix the downtime issues. they never did and i moved out