Weblog – Thomas S. Iversen

Finally I got FTTH. My manager at my work was cool enough to let me have FTTH by upgrading my work@home package from ADSL to Fiber. This picture shows the difference between ADSL and Fiber very well. Latency goes from 16ms to 2ms. And the packet loss is gone (the drops you see in the 2ms line is me fooling around, but about that in a moment)

Technically TDC HomeDuo fiber consists of a Raycore RC-OE1A followed by Sagem HomeBox (rebranded for TDC). The latter is geared towards mr. and ms. ignorance and is very limited to what you can actually do. To make matters even worse, my company has a special profile that locks the box down even further, making it impossible to live with if you are just a bit technical. Playing around with the setup, and wanting to go back to my beloved rt-n16 running openwrt, I had some experiments, where I played around with it, to make it work (hence the packet drops). It is actually not that hard

• TDC FTTH uses wlan 101 for WAN
• To get your own router online fast, I suggest using the mac address from the Sagem crap.

So to get that to work, select network in openwrt. Select switch. Enable vlan tagging. Assign  vlan 101 to port 0 (WAN) and CPU

After that is done, you select interface, select WAN (eth0.101) and press edit

Under the advanced tab you then override the mac address if needed and it ofcourse has to start at boot

And then under physical, you bind the WAN to eth0.101

And the result of going from Sagem to openwrt is also measuable. The difference is not large in latency, but it is there. The usability of openwrt over the sagem box is however worth every hassle endured.

The bandwith provided by my work is “only” 50Mbit/s. The raycore is providing/connect at 100Mbit/s, so the limit is artificial and done on the TDC equipment upstream.