The collected works of Cory5412 - Page 2

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.

What a total blast from the past.

It's both entertaining and depressing to read my own writing from eleven years ago.

Back in 2004 was just before Intel's 900-series chipsets, which were a huge performance and usability increase. Although it's funny -- I ended up getting one of the $500 Dell bargain systems from 2003 a few years later. 2.0GHz Pentium 4, one or two gigs of RAM, and a fresh disk later meant that it worked really well with Windows XP. I might even still have that system in my storage locker. If I do, it would likely get Linux/FreeBSD or Windows 7/8.1U1/10 on it, these days.

It's interesting too because the Apple/Adobe dynamic has changed in the past eleven years, or the stuff that was being guessed based on observations eleven years ago (Premiere 6.5 being discontinued) has sort of started to become more true. Adobe and Apple are sort of throwing their weight in opposite directions in terms of Flash, and in 2006 and 2007 I started having pretty big problems with the stability of the Creative Suite applications on Mac OS X (then-current, both 10.4 and 10.5, I jumped ship to Windows when Vista and Mac OS X 10.6 were both launched, finding that Creative Suite was faster, more reliable, and more efficient on slower Windows hardware.

In general, these days I don't really use any "vintage" or "off the beaten path" platforms for anything productive. I do some dinking around in OpenSTEP on a Sparcstation Voyager and Mac SSW7 on a Power Mac 6100, but all of my "real work" is in Linux/Mac/Windows, all current versions that get patches. At the time (in 2004) I had some older Macs that I was using for productive work, because IE4 was basically the same on a Quadra as it was on an iMac G3. Classic Mac OS is another issue entirely though, these days at least.

I keep thinking about pulling out my Octane, but I'm not quite ready for that yet. Back when I first had it in like 2005/2006, I was planning on using it as a primary/active computer, but it never really advanced from that point, so even if I could deal with "the web" at the speed of MIPS (I mean my particular Octane was never super impressive, but even a much faster one would be a challenge in patience, even if a modern web rendering engine were available) you'd be unable to render most of it, and any local software that still runs on IRIX is unlikely to be really widely compatible with contemporary versions. Though, I don't know the state of nekoware, so things like GIMP and OpenOffice/LibreOffice may be up to date.

This is pretty neat looking. Is there any update on the FPGA component?