Everything Else

Floodgap runs off a T1. The adventure in getting that was something ridiculous and six weeks of downtime I do not want to go through again, mostly due to the d*ckheads at Time Worthless. AT&T is of course the ILEC but I buy it through DSLExtreme who has always treated me right even when I was an ADSL customer back at my old apartment. It has a great SLA (<24h to fix anything) and stable, low-latency bandwidth with 13 static IPs of which I'm actively using 5 and have 8 reserved. Of course, it costs an arm and a leg, and download is fixed at 1.5Mbps. But that was the only hardline I could get when I moved in three years ago -- no ADSL/SDSL (the T1 is provisioned over HDSL, interestingly), I ended up making a complaint to the FCC about Time Wanker, and no other service providers.

By coincidence the local pedestal is in my backyard. I'd heard rumours of a fiber hut being built about a year ago but as late as January this year, AT&T said no U-verse service to my address. The AT&T tech was over the other day to look at one of the cross-connects and I asked him if that had changed, and he said the hut should get to my address now. DSLExtreme resells U-verse as trueStream and lo and behold, my address is listed as operational.

U-verse is FTTN so there's no fiber from my pedestal to the house, I think. I have two copper pairs, both buried. When the T1 was installed they took both existing copper pairs (no trenching was required) and the tech put in a new terminal with a standard 8-pin smartjack as the demarc. This terminal is outside on the back porch and I did the wiring myself from there with two Cat 5 cables, with each pair in a separate jacket (the other wires are unused). The run is about 60' and the T1 router is in the server room, where it pops out RJ-45 Ethernet into my external switch.

I've got about 8 more months on my T1 contract and then I'm going to strongly consider this, keeping in mind I may not get the same level of service or reliability, and I have to verify how many static IPs I can get (it appears five, which will just fit, but gives me no expansion ability). What I don't want is another colossal mess during the transition, because the T1 will probably have to be taken off the pairs at the CO prior to setting up (what I imagine is) ADSL from the hut to my house. That's unavoidable. What I hope to avoid is d*cking around with the wiring. Does anyone know what goes from the NID to the router? Is it also T1? I'm told it's "RJ45" but I don't think it's regular Ethernet. I imagine I could rewire my existing wire run, but I don't know how many pairs it takes or anything about the pinout, and I'd rather do it myself than fight with the tech.

the cheap one-chip router boxes that the ISPs supply to their customers just don't have the hardware for anything but ethernet. so it's safe to say that the WAN connection is via ethernet.

I've got FTTH, so I've got an actual glass fibre coming into the house. It terminates in a 'modem' with several ports on it for radio/TV, telephone, IPTV, and one is ethernet. It's 'raw', it has a non-private IP, and I can/must attach the router of my choice. In my case that's an aging EnGenius ESR9850 and it can keep up with it.

I currently have 100/100 Mbit internet service which is enough for me. I think I can get anything up to 500/500 or even gigabit.

I'm in the process of replacing the EnGenius with a small PC (a Jetway JBC372 ), because it has more capabilities and I prefer to be in control of something as essential as my router, but in essence the EnGenius is/was fast enough. Consumer routers will not be able to do high speed VPN routing and other CPU intensive things, but simple routing is no issue.

Phone line or cat5 from the NID/demarc to the gateway will be fine. U-Verse gateways have four port RJ11/RT14 jacks on the back of them. I think they’re required to use the new "Branded Jack" kit in some markets now.

They'll probably install it (the new phone jack with an AT&T logo on it, a port that you plug the gateway into, and the voip back-feed port) fairly close to the NID on the outside of your house, and unless you already have really good cat5 wiring, they'll likely add new cat 5 to do it. They can feed voice signal back from the residential gateway to the house demarc if you want to put a phone somewhere other than right by the gateway.

The tech will make use of either one or two pairs depending on your speed tier and your distance to the DSLAM, probably sitting pretty and beige next to your closest SAI/crossbox.

"Business" U-verse will give you IPs and 25, but you have to use their provided gateway and bridging is weird. There's no RFC1483 here, alas.

The gateways are all consumer-class equipment and are "okay" devices. If you have another DNS/DHCP server, you'll likely be able to use that in tandem with the gateway, but it's not easy or reliable to simply make it hand off Ethernet and relinquish all responsibility. (I do this with my ISP gateway -- disable DNS/DHCP, and I run a server for those roles.)

Depending on what services you get, you'll also probably need to account for the $7/mo rental of the gateway. Most of the pair bonding devices require this, if you buy TV, it's also required.

That said if you can live with its limitations and the speed is good it should be a really consistent performer. They feed the DSLAMs for all flavors of U-Verse with ten gig Ethernet and have dark fibers they can light up for more.


http://www.dslreports.com/forum/uverse and http://www.dslreports.com/forum/dslextreme are worth looking at too.

While we're talking about it: I have CenturyLink *(Qwest) DSL at home. 1536/896k kilobits. I keep it because I'm not very smart, but almost more importantly: open 25 and (one) static on residential, plus it lets me avoid "wifi is included in the rent!" -- because nobody else in town seems to want it.

I have a gateway that's got a VDSL2 WAN port (supports up to 50 megabits on 8MHz profiles, may do more on 12/17MHz profiles), four gigabit LAN ports, and a 2.4GHz 802.11N radio. I disabled the DHCP server and just use my main Windows server for DHCP/DNS on the LAN, but CenturyLink's devices all support RFC1483, so I could just use any other router on the planet, if I were so inclined. (U-verse uses 802.1x auth and does not have full bridging at all, and the options their gateways do have work poorly.)

U-Verse is really interesting from a product design aspect. The appearance is that they want to manage the network closer and closer to your computers than a more "traditional" setup -- such as your T1 or CenturyLink/Verizon DSL, where they don't care what bridge or router/gateway you use. Part of it is because they're selling voice and video as IP over the network, and I think part of it is to help avoid the "well, the reason your 300 megabit cable only gets 40 megabits is because you're using a WRT54G from twelve years ago" situation. That won't necessarily stop them from shipping you really bad/old hardware though, but you can mitigate that, or just go with it.

One more thought: You'd know you were getting fiber because there'd be a backhoe on your street, but U-Verse is probably about as good as DSL will get. They're using PTM transfer mode and 802.1X authentication so there is little or no transfer overhead, and AT&T loves over-provisioning by a few megs on most flavors of the service, so over VDSL2, 18/1.5m will probably be 20/2 in reality.

AT&T isn't quite as great about upload speed availability as CenturyLink, and so there's no hidden tiers with 20 or more megs of upload, as CL sometimes has.