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A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP

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121–130 of 184 posts

Re: A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP

#121
post #30

In the Netherlands we now have a law where ISPs must allow your own choice of network equipment. This means they must give you the required information on how to connect your own device with their network. I have a fiber connection, which I connected directly to a Ubiquity router through a suitable SFP module. My ISP supplied the information on the fiber type and which VLAN ID's to setup for internet, TV and telephon…

I don't know if it's "law" in America but I've never seen a major ISP give any more guff than sometimes making a technician come out to read the modem's MAC address. I've never had a ISP's router or modem on my networks

Re: A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP

#122
post #61
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Spectrum cable Internet. I use their modem, but I supply my own router, and they've never given me any trouble. In fact, they recently upgraded my modem (from a Scientific Atlanta 2203C to a Ubee E31U2V1) and they didn't send me a router. The Ubee E31U2V1, like the Scientific Atlanta 2203C before it, only has one Ethernet port, and their official guide to getting the new modem working involved rebooting an ext…

> I don't see a point to being able to provide my own cable modem Other cable providers (e.g. Comcast) charge you a monthly fee (~$5-15) to rent their modem. Buying a modem gets cost effective pretty quickly.

I use my own one because the $2 Huawei ones perform really poorly, they’re the source of a large portion of general internet performance issues for a lot of people.

Re: A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP

#123
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My ISP does Out of curiosity, which ISP do you have?

init7.net. They have a bunch of official guides, but also help with other devices and have debugged issues with new devices. Basically if your device is capable they want to make it work.

+1 to init7. They've gone above and beyond when I needed them to change their routing policies to improve end to end latency to a specific destination. Good luck getting that from a major us carrier. And I wasn't even a customer.

Re: A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP

#124
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ISPs job isn't just "provide the Internet," it's also "provide all the troubleshooting for every non-technical customer who just wants to watch Netflix but doesn't even know what a router is" No ISP that I'm aware of will provide troubleshooting for devices they don't own. They just say "sorry, not our device, not our problem". When I installed my own cable modem and router, Comcast was quite clear about that. And…

The ISP I work for does, and it's a very large one (not in the US). If a router is not ours, we check for sync or if PPPoE is up. We tell the customer what's the result of our tests and offer a technician if they are willing to pay in case it's not our fault. Most people are unwilling to pay, and yell at customer service. Most of the times, specially when the router has sync it's customer fault.

> we check for sync or if PPPoE is up.

The problem with this kind of procedure is that it's only a reasonable way to locate the problem when there are problems at that very moment. You're getting stonewalled when - during the day - you're reporting that it frequently loses sync during the night.

Re: A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP

#125
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my understanding is that once you have your own router, it's up to you to ensure its configured correctly.

Exactly. I have my own router (and cable modem, for that matter), and I don't call Comcast when one of them breaks; I fix it myself, since I own them.

Problem is you'll eventually reach a point where the problem is deep and requires them to escalate, and if you aren't checking the box of tested customer cpe they'll stop. Example of this is when I found a Comcast backbone link with an incorrect/inconsistent MTU setting. Had to go back channel in the end to someone on the ibone team, but I had no chance in hell of getting that fixed promptly via regular support.

Re: A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP

#126

It's funny to think that if you were to report all of your findings to your local newspaper (Turkish newspaper in this case), as to how Turkish ISPs have complete access to your router or how Huawei (China) has an SSH key for your router, people would go absolutely ballistic. But for us it's just another day of expected craziness and we're tired of talking about it

I'm pretty sure my new CenturyLInk fiber router is similar. I tried to create a PPoE connection from my WRT1900 direclty to century link using the same credentials and I couldn't connect to my internet. However, now I am motivated to create a bridge and find out why.

For CenturyLink fiber I have two boxes:

Box A: the exterior fiber enters this box, the tech said it was a "translator"; and the port 4 ethernet on it goes to ...

Box B: the centurylink wireless router, which performs the PPoE with my credentials which were somehow hardwired because no one ever told me my username/password. I'm guesing TR-069? Then port 4 on this goes to ...

Box C: MY WRT1900AC, which then goes to other subnets for my cameras, lab, and office.

I figured Box B was redundant, but trying to remove it has been problematic.

Re: A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP

#127

I never thought to nmap my own router until reading this. PORT STATE SERVICE 53/tcp open domain 80/tcp open http 631/tcp open ipp 5000/tcp open upnp 7777/tcp open cbt 20005/tcp open btx Now begins the three-hours-and-counting rabbit hole of trying to figure out what the hell is running on ports 7777 and 20005. Or why UPNP is apparently running, despite UPNP being explicitly disabled on the Netgear router's admin page…

Maybe it's a remote administration port for your ISP. I have a router provided by Froniter, formerly Verizon FiOS, where port 4567 is always open and cannot be closed with a firewall rule from the router's web UI (grayed out). After some googling I found out that it's their maintenance port: https://www.speedguide.net/port.php?port=4567

For a while I had my own OpenWRT router in place of the ISP one, but I think they got wise to it and blocked the MAC. I changed it to match the ISP router's MAC address, but it only worked for about 3 minutes before being blocked again.

Re: A detailed look at the router provided by my ISP

#130

It's funny to think that if you were to report all of your findings to your local newspaper (Turkish newspaper in this case), as to how Turkish ISPs have complete access to your router or how Huawei (China) has an SSH key for your router, people would go absolutely ballistic. But for us it's just another day of expected craziness and we're tired of talking about it

I'm pretty sure my new CenturyLInk fiber router is similar. I tried to create a PPoE connection from my WRT1900 direclty to century link using the same credentials and I couldn't connect to my internet. However, now I am motivated to create a bridge and find out why. For CenturyLink fiber I have two boxes: Box A: the exterior fiber enters this box, the tech said it was a "translator"; and the port 4 ethernet on it go…

B probably exists so they can split fiber between multiple end users or support things like phone service over the same link. Did you use the same VPI and VCI? PPPoE also sends an identifier (the "Host-Uniq" tag if I'm understanding it right) that probably has to match what your ISP is expecting or has assigned.
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