fibre

1 Week on

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I’ve had Zen’s FTTP 900 product now for just over a week and whilst I’d love to say so far I’ve absolutely thrashed it, sadly I’ve been caught out with a bout of Covid (first time) so wanting to protect the family I moved out into isolation for a week. this meant I wasn’t at home and able to use the connection but the family were still benefitting from multiple streams but I also benefitted vastly from the enhanced upload.

Having nothing to do but stare at walls, I worked my way though a load of my old Plex content, streaming the original files was an absolute breeze and regularly I was peaking 20Mb of upload bandwidth and that was fairly consistent across most of the days I was away. No issues there.

Hopefully I’ll have something a bit better to be able to trumpet about the amazing new connectivity.

Less than a week

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We’ve just dropped below a week until my new FTTP service is scheduled for install. I’ve been doing a bit of prep work in anticipation as well, the CHR is back alive on a new server, low powered Xeon this time rather than monster. With the new efficiencies of RouterOS it’s now more capable than ever and I am “only” going to be pushing 1Gb max.

I’ve also upgraded it to ROSv7 so I can take advantage of the newer queueing algorithms, FQ_CoDel being the main one I wanted to get my hands on but I will try with CAKE once things have settled down although I hopeful that with a 1000/115 connection I shouldn’t need to QoS much of anything.

Home Router Downgrade?

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After having some what of a very quick and easy build process for the ESXi server I was hoping to put a new CHR installation on I’ve struggled massively with noise levels with the kit. Even though I knew to expect “some” noise, I just can’t get the Dell quiet enough to live in my rack permanently.

My cave is a very nice tranquil place and even though my Ryzen build hums at times, the ESX server just wasn’t cutting the mustard for me.

I have now down / side graded back to my RB3011 however I have made a slight change to the network. As I receive service through FWA the cat5 comes down and goes into an RB260GSP where it is converted to fibre and then that is fed from the house out to my cave. The RB3011 having an SFP port is ideal so now is connected directly without going through further multiple copper links and patches.

The LAN has not been left alone either, a copper uplink into a CRS112 has been used (due to it’s 4 SFP slots) and also extend the RB3011’s 10 copper ports. The CRS112 is now feeding a Unifi 8 port PoE switch in the attic, a CRS125 (for non PoE) in the attic and also the PoE switch in the cave as well as the “Tutorial” RB2011.

A busy and disappointing weekend (week really), but it has left me wanting a bit more. I’m thinking about possibly looking in to a CCR1009 with 2 SFP slots (WAN and LAN) but that’s a fairly large amount of money that I won’t be getting my hands on with the new Ryzen Zen+ lineup launching in 2 months time.

For the time being I’ve also managed to tidy the attic up, I had been using 1m patch cables and it was getting extremely messy up there so now have properly mounted the Unifi switch with the CRS and things have neatened up a treat.