Comment by milankragujevic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by milankragujevic | Hacker News Reader

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milankragujevic

Having DOCSIS is the worst. The connection is unpredictably unstable and I personally reject any belief of a "tuned cable system" existing. It's all a mess. And by design since DOCSIS auth is done on the CPE (modem), the device is not trusted and you cannot use your own unless the ISP [is forced to] allows it and whitelists it.

So DOCSIS is hell.

GPON is ... depends. The technology is great, but some ISPs can and will ruin it because they're greedy and shortsighted. Someplaces you can get a bridge CPE (ONT) that does have remote access but doesn't allow configuration, someplaces the ONT itself is fine (i.e. HG8245 series for which too you can disable TR069 interface and CWMP and change the passwords - which I did), but someplaces you just get the "DOCSIS over fiber" experience, with hostile ONT in your home network the ISP uses to make your existence miserable.

Personally, DSL is fine for me. I am so used to low speeds (~20/2 Mbps) when I am in the village (since march due to COVID, working from home), I have started bonding [0] DSL and LTE for around 95/45 Mbps and that is fine for me.

So, I'd rather stay on tried-and-true, stable, low ping DSL, than muck around with DOCSIS and fear any rain or wind.

For GPON it depends on the ISP, but the technology does not dictate any remote management requirements except OMCI which is not concerned with "higher layer" configuration such as WiFi or router features.

[0] https://milankragujevic.com/openmptcprouter-true-bonding-of-...

At least where I live, the key is to have a modem that does not support the latest DOCSIS standard the ISP claims to have supported. They basically never get the implementation of the latest thing correct, so you don't want to wind up using it. I have the option to bring my own modem, so I just get a cheaper and slightly older modem and use that.

The prevailing issue is the way the US regulates ISPs leading to a lack of competition, giving them little incentive to do anything other than raise prices on a regular basis. While I have at least talked to technical support people who understand the concept of a cable modem being supported or not, there is no one available you can talk to who understands signal levels, etc. The only diagnostic they can perform is "does speedtest show the advertised speeds".

There is still some sort of issue with the cable modem getting "stuck" in a bad state. I have a USB controlled relay that is used each morning to interrupt the DC power to the cable modem. This basically fixes it. I'm not awake when the modem resets so it is a non issue to me.

Yes but the key is to have an ISP that [is forced to] allows you to get your own modem. Also most of the world is on DOCSIS 3.0, so any older than that is DOCSIS 2.0 which would be max 50 Mbps which is not ... nice, and that's DSL territory (VDSL2 does up to 100/30 Mbps).

Being able to use your own modem would fix a lot of problems I have with DOCSIS ISPs, but sadly there's no regulation for it. So yeah, you have to use theirs.

I wish AON was more common than GPON, since with AON you can have your own CPE, while with GPON your CPE will get data from multiple customers, so you controlling it is a privacy risk.

Yes, me too. But it's more expensive. And ISPs are so used to milking old infrastructure it's a miracle we're getting any fiber now that DOCSIS can do gigabit.

edit: funnily enough, DSL is similar to AON in that it's dedicated last mile

I wish there were fully libre DSL routers.

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