CAT-6 patch cord & ONU
Few months back I was offered a fibre service. Most of the service offering has been using Chinese infrastructure including the ONU (Optical Network Unit). Wikipedia doesn’t have a good page on ONU hence had to rely on third-party sites. FS (a name I don’t really know) has some (good basic info. on ONU and how it’s part and parcel of the whole infrastructure. I also got an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) but it seems to be very basic and mostly dumb. I used the old CAT-6 cable ( a decade old) to connect them and it worked for couple of months. Had to change it, first went to know if a higher cable solution offered themselves. CAT-7 is there but not backward compatible. CAT-8 is the next higher version but apparently it’s expensive and also not easily bought. I did quite a few tests on CAT-6 and the ONU and it conks out at best 1 mbps which is still far better than what I am used to. CAT-8 are either not available or simply too expensive for home applications atm. A good summary of CAT-8 and what they stand for can be found here. The networking part is hopeless as most consumer facing CPU’s and motherboards don’t even offer 10 mbps, so asking anything more is just overkill without any benefit. Which does bring me to the next question, something that I may do in a few months or a year down the road. Just to clarify they may say it is 100 mbps or even 1 Gbps but that’s plain wrong.
AMD APU, Asus Motherboard & Dealerships
I had been thinking of an AMD APU, could wait a while but sooner or later would have to get one. I got quoted an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G with an Asus A320 Motherboard for around 14k which kinda looked steep to me. Quite a few hardware dealers whom I had traded, consulted over years simply shut down. While there are new people, it’s much more harder now to make relationships (due to deafness) rather than before. The easiest to share which was also online was pcpartpicker.com that had an Indian domain now no longer available. The number of offline brick and mortar PC business has also closed quite a bit. There are a few new ones but it takes time and the big guys have made more of a killing. I was shocked quite a bit. Came home and browsed a bit and was hit by this. Both AMD and Intel PC business has taken a beating. AMD a bit more as Intel still holds part of the business segment as traditionally been theirs. There have been proofs and allegations of bribing in the past (do remember the EU Antitrust case against Intel for monopoly) but Intel’s own cutting corners with the Spectre and Meltdown flaws hasn’t helped its case, nor the suits themselves. AMD on the other hand under expertise of Lisa Su has simply grown strength by strength. Inflation and Profiteering by other big companies has made the outlook for both AMD and Intel a bit lackluster. AMD is supposed to show Zen5 chips in a few days time and the rumor mill has been ongoing.
Correction – Not few days but 2025.
Personally, I would be happy with maybe a Ryzen 5600G with an Asus motherboard. My main motive whenever I buy an APU is not to hit beyond 65 TDP. It’s kinda middle of the road. As far as what I could read this year and next year we could have AM4+ or something like those updates, AM5 APU’s, CPU’s and boards are slated to be launched in 2025. I did see pcpricetracker and it does give idea of various APU prices although have to say pcpartpicker was much intuitive to work with than the above.
I just had my system cleaned couple of months so touchwood I should be able to use it for another couple of years or more before I have to get one of these APU’s and do hope they are worth it. My idea is to use that not only for testing various softwares but also delve a bit into VR if that’s possible. I did read a bit about deafness and VR as well. A good summary can be found here. I am hopeful that there may be few people in the community who may look and respond to that. It’s crucial.
TRAI-caller, Privacy 101& Element.
While most of us in Debian and FOSS communities do engage in privacy, lots of times it’s frustrating. I’m always looking for videos that seek to share that view why Privacy is needed by individuals and why Governments and other parties hate it. There are a couple of basic Youtube Videos that does explain the same quite practically.
Now why am I sharing the above. It isn’t that people do not privacy and how we hold it dear. I share it because GOI just today blocked Element. While it may be trivial for us to workaround the issues, it does tell what GOI is doing. And it still acts as if surprised why it’s press ranking is going to pits.
Even our Women Wrestlers have been protesting for a week to just file an FIR (First Information Report) . And these are women who have got medals for the country. More than half of these organizations, specifically the women wrestling team don’t have POSH which is a mandatory body supposed to be in every organization. POSH stands for Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace. The ‘gentleman’ concerned is a known rowdy/Goon hence it took almost a week of protest to do the needful 😦
I do try not to report because right now every other day we see somewhere or the other the Govt. curtailing our rights and most people are mute 😦
Signing out, till later 😦
Experiences in the community 
Yup. It is the same one. The port is next to the RJ-45 but it’s a different port altogether. It’s round rather than how it should be.
Hi Shirishag,
How should it be? I think you’ll find that’s the fibre connector. What else could it be on that model unless yours is a special variant?
Sorry to hear that. I wish what you said was true, unfortunately it’s not as I was there the whole time the technician was there. Doesn’t matter, at the end of the day it is what it is and I have to make do with it.
If you don’t mind let’s confirm the identity of your router. Is it the Digisol DR-DG1310? If not, what is it and what can you tell about the port this mysterious cable is connected into? Excuse my quest to understand.
I don’t know what fibre involves in your part of the world, but if its coming into your home going by your description likely what you are calling an ONU is the ONT and what you are calling the ONT is just a router. You should be able to replace that with a router of your own choice. Why not something that can be reflashed with OpenWRT? Maybe you have something already? Sometimes DSL modem/routers can be reused even if they don’t have an explicit WAN port marked. Assuming your provider allows use of customer provided gear they can provide any configuration details that are needed if they’re not visible on the supplied router. You don’t need any with DHCP/IPoE but you do with PPPoE and other variations on connections. If they won’t provide details that you’ll just have to hack them out of the device provided. This can be the case with bundled (VoIP) services here when the provider supplies a router/ATA.
Unless your computer and networking gear is positively archaic or broken you should be getting well over 10mbps. 10mbps would be considered a poor WiFi speed.
I actually linked to my provider. You can see this – https://www.keralatelecom.info/download-latest-ftth-onu-ont-firmware as an example. The problem is they use a slightly different kind of connector. While I could get a TP-Link router and also put OpenWRT on it, the hassle right now isn’t worth it, especially with the service provider that I have. As far as bandwidth is concerned, the service provider eloquently puts up to 10mbps. That ‘upto’ means it can be anywhere between 256 kbps to 10 mbps and I cannot complain to the service provider. This is by design. The gulf between claimed and reality is huge. Below is my service provider with the service offerings. You can see the ‘upto’ terminology cleverly being used. SLA’s only with corporate customers.
https://portal2.bsnl.in/myportal/trai_landline.jsp?catogery=BHARAT_FIBER_BROADBAND_COMBO&circle=MH
That link clears things up a little. Unlike Australia and New Zealand for example it appears your provider has opted to provide you a router with a fibre interface i.e. a combined router/ONT so I think you might be misidentifying what you’ve called the ONU instead. Is that inside and connected into one of your power sockets? If not, it’s just a passive box where the the outside fibre is connected to an inside fibre socket.
I don’t know what the quality of your Internet service is like but I see your ISP does offer higher speed plans. If one can rarely reach 10mbps then I doubt they would have much take up of their higher speed plans. You should be able to reach near the speed of your plan during an off-peak period and one would hope that’s longer than 5 minutes between at 2:30am. Without adequate competition or an effective regulator though you’re just going to have to cross your fingers.
In Australia, Internet providers who offer services via the NBN, a mixed technology access network built by the federal government, are forced to specify “typical evening download speeds” and the federal competition and consumer regulator (ACCC) also runs a testing program and goes after providers for making all sorts of false claims. Not just ISPs either but typically only the largest businesses are their targets.
It may surprise you that currently only roughly 20% of connections are on fibre all the way to the home in Australia with the majority of fixed connections being only partly fibre with the majority of these either using existing telephone wiring to a high density node within an area and speed drop off according to one’s distance to a node (FTTN) or using an extended version of the formerly closed cable network previously owned by our largest telco (HFC). Fibre to the home is much more ubiquitous in New Zealand and was a private build by Chorus.
In both Australia and NZ the network builder supplies an ONT with the user needing to supply a router however NZ has a model of ONT that can provide router and access point functionality if the ISP enables it. For most NBN network technologies, nbnCo provides an interface device which is referred to locally as a NTD (Network Termination Device) except for FTTC (Fibre to the Curb) where its called a NCD (Network Connection Device) – don’t ask me why. For FTTN (Fibre to the Node) the user or their provider needs to provide the router/modem which connects to an existing telephone socket. Typically, the largest ISPs In Australia will force their router/modem upon you on any service with bundled voice (VoIP) since they will not provide credentials for your own gear. Some proportion of voice services are also provided via the ONT in both Australia and NZ.
Both the Chorus network and NBN are wholesale access networks open to ISPs who retail internet service. They are only open because of the actions by their respective governments. The threat of open access being forced upon them is what delayed the largest telco in Australia telco, Telstra, from rolling out their own extensive fibre network. Ultimately, the Australian government broke the stalemate by deciding to build an access network themselves and forcing Telstra to cooperate by selling and leasing infrastructure under threat of being denied further mobile spectrum. In New Zealand it appears the prospect of being granted the contract for building the network was incentive enough for the Telecom New Zealand to undergo structural separation into separate retail and wholesale providers.
No, actually what the service provider has done is offloaded the actual implementation to third-party people. He has a passive box on the outside and has given this ‘router’. Use your search engine and see ‘Digisol-Gepon-300mbps-Router-Gigabit’
On the surface of it, there are two bodies who are supposed to make policies and rules, those are DOT (Department of Telecommunications) and TRAI. BSNL, my service provider is a Govt. nationalized company. On the national level there are only three companies now that have ability to provide fiber. BSNL, Airtel and Jio while the last being the blue-eyed boy of the Government. There is another thing, almost 95% of the fibre connecting to the outside world is unlit, only 5% is lit. Real world scenario and what is on paper are miles apart. Some of my friends who use fibre commercially have two three connections and backups from different companies because you never know when it’s going to fail. That’s another Pandora’s box that I don’t want to open or talk about. Jio has been given gateway service provider authority status and has monopolized the whole thing. So if BSNL wants more bandwidth for its customers it can only go to Jio and buy that. This is against TRAI’s own rules but as shared b4 reality and what’s on paper are two different things. What you were pointing out as well as I is that while it’s a case of false advertising and most people know that, nobody does anything because the whole system is corrupted.
> Digisol-Gepon-300mbps-Router-Gigabit
That would appear to be the Digisol DG-GR1310 So that’s the only powered equipment you received?
There’s a Wikipedia article on BharatNet but I didn’t really grasp the architecture until I looked at the NOFN pages atBBNL and in particular this concept diagram concept diagram and the statement that “BharatNet is a middle mile network from block to Gram Panchayats (GPs) which provides connectivity to Service Providers like TSPs, ISPs. MSOs, LCOs and Government agencies for extending their services from Block to GPs.”
So in the main it’s an access network for service providers. They in turn need to install their own network infrastructure to service end-users and they themselves need to obtain Internet from an upstream provider which could be themselves and they can either use the GPON of Bharatnet or use dark fibre for the connection of the link between the block and the GPs they are servicing. There also seems to be various models of how the last mile service will be rolled out across India.
So do you have any choice of ISPs with the fibre that’s been installed to your residence or will you need to have another fibre run if you decide to change providers?
The main problems we have in Australia are the poorer reliability of some access technologies and the constant complaints from service providers that the model and level of charging from nbnCo intended to recoup the investment by the government (wishfully perhaps) impairs both their service and profitability. nbnCo is currently trying to establish a new agreement with service providers but the competition regulator has knocked back recent attempts.
You are more than broadly right. I got the above equipment only. What they have done is have a passive box till my house, then a coaxial cable with an odd connector (not the regular RJ-45 or RJ-110 that is used). A pure Fibre service would mean right to the modem. May happen few years down the road. Yup, it’s mostly a licensee model. As far as choice of service providers, on papers yes, in actuality no, it’s a monopoly. If I need another service provider, they will need to run another fiber. There are only two, Jio and Airtel and both told me 18 months. Jio in fact, just relaunched their fiber service few days ago. But don’t think either of them are viable either in short of long-term. They usually look for dense housing societies where they are the only monopoly. That’s the name of the game.
Sorry to be belabour this (perhaps I have a touch of Asperger’s) but it doesn’t make any sense for you to have a fibre connection to a unpowered passive box and a purely electrical connection as coaxial cable would imply between the box and your router. If the supplied router is a Digisol DG-GR1310 then there is no doubt about it and the cable you have running into it’s grey port is optical fibre.
What I would do if I get a 5700G is use that, download the latest weekly iso https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso . Copy that to a thumbdrive. Install it. As far as I get a shell and prompt, I’m home and over days and weeks can get the GUI. The newer 6.1 kernels add support for even Zen4 CPU’s while I am looking at Zen 2.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-61-features
Notice the above was an rc kernel. I am on testing currently and running 6.1.0-7-amd64 even though it’s an Intel rig.
The latest changelog –
https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/l/linux-signed-amd64/linux-signed-amd64_6.1.20+2_changelog
The AMD Ryzen parts with integrated graphics are pretty decent, at least as far as non-gaming use is concerned (not caring about gaming use personally). I was looking for parts with lower power consumption and initially saw the 2400GE, rated at 35W, offered in pre-built and customised systems. When I came to make a purchase, that was no longer available from the customised system vendor I was buying from, but they had the 3400G, rated at 65W, instead, alongside other parts of that generation. I was lucky because this transaction occurred in the first half of 2020 before the market went wild. The 3400G needs at least a 5.x kernel which was initially not entirely optimal, and you also need the proprietary firmware blobs, but not any of the proprietary drivers, thankfully.
There were also some low-end Athlon-branded (but Zen-based) parts, too, which usually get dismissed by all the usual “gearhead” online reviews, but the Athlon 3000G seems pretty decent, even though it benchmarks at supposedly only half the speed of the 3400G, having only two cores instead of four. It has a 35W rating, alongside the 200GE-series parts which perform similarly. When everyone was desperate for CPUs, the prices even of these budget models rose by probably four or five times.