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How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

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Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

#81

Post by jebblue »

icehawk wrote: post #78
jebblue wrote: post #77

He's connecting to his neighbor's router seemingly without permission. "When you rent a cable modem/router combo from Comcast (as one of my nearby neighbors apparently does)" It may be illegal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking Comcast is not on the EFF's list of Wireless Friendly ISP's (referenced in the Wiki article): https://www.eff.org/pages/wireless-friendly-isps Even if it were: http://compn…

xfinitywifi is provided by Comcast, you need a valid comcast login to connect. He is a Comcast subscriber himself, and thus he has a valid Comcast login.

It has not been proven that Comcast has the authority to do this:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141208/13222529362/comca...

It has been proven that in many places at least in the US, it is illegal and in some cases is a felony.

Edit: Further, it is not a good idea to connect to any known SSID unless you know for a fact that it can be trusted:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/06/free-wi-fi-from-xfin...

Your neighbor might be hacking you while you think you are legally using their hardware.

Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

#82

Post by windexh8er »

icebraining wrote: post #50
windexh8er wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As stated above even if he is doing that its implied, not a direct statement. Assume away. Also, doing this will actually make your connection worse as that connection will always be more latent. Think of it this way. When you stream a movie from Netflix it is one TCP session. Not 5, 10, etc. So if you load balance to your neighbor your stream will be worse by default. This is not equal cost load balancing, this is a…

Think kd it this way. When you stream a movie from Netflix it is one TCP session. Not 5, 10, etc. So if you load balance to your neighbor your stream will be worse by default. Like others have pointed out, Linux doesn't load balance a single connection over multiple WANs, so as long as the Netflix stream gets on the best link, it'll be better since it'll have to compete with fewer connections (since some will be rout…

Actually it won't. Think of it this way...

4 lane highway vs 1 lane dirt road. While combining the two makes the number of paths greater the paths themselves are not equal (my equal cost load balancing remark). So, if the router is not taking link cost into account, which it is not, you'll actually have worse performance over all of your connections because the router will try to balance them equally on session start. This means that 50% of the time you start out going to your neighbors connection and fail or go slow. It's actually more advantageous to wait for a spot on the wide, fast link than it would be to take the alternate path.

If the router was taking into account link reliability and speed (overall cost) it would only give a small percentage of connections to the worse link and only if the main link was saturated from a bandwidth perspective. None of this is happening by round robin load balancing which means more of your connections are worse. This is why routing protocols that have these features exist.

Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

#83

Post by listic »

jfroma wrote: post #67

I use this very same feature of openwrt to load balance between my two ISPs. Here in argentina neither of the two ISP are reliable, but cheap enought if you really use then and you need reliability. I recommend multiwan3 as the op suggest, other pkgs didnt work for me. Some modern routers have two radios for 2.5 and 5ghz, but even with one radio openwrt allows you to set it up as client and ap. I find other features…

I was going to go with pfSense for that feature. Do you think it makes sense?

Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

#84

Post by FireBeyond »

moron4hire wrote: post #79
FireBeyond wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It counts it towards your data cap (if you are subject to it), but not to the bandwidth available under your plan.

That's the worst. I have more than enough bandwidth for Netflix, but I frequently hot my data cap. I don't think there is such a thing as a comcast account without a data cap.

I pay for a business account (but I work from home). No caps, no torrent or other throttling, no port blocking (back in the days when I ran my own mail server), optional static IPs. But you definitely pay for it.

Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

#85

Post by devicenull »

shmerl wrote: post #80
FireBeyond wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It counts it towards your data cap (if you are subject to it), but not to the bandwidth available under your plan.

That's weird. Since it defeats the purpose of expanding their WiFi hotspots coverage. If people have capped plans, they are likely to disable that hotspot altogether and use their own routers to begin with, to avoid anyone switching it back on. If they wanted such thing to work, it had to be excluded from both monthly data caps and active bandwidth limit. That's besides the point that monthly caps is a completely nas…

> That's weird. Since it defeats the purpose of expanding their WiFi hotspots coverage. If people have capped plans, they are likely to disable that hotspot altogether and use their own routers to begin with, to avoid anyone switching it back on. If they wanted such thing to work, it had to be excluded from both monthly data caps and active bandwidth limit.

I think what he's trying to say is that as an individual using the xfinitywifi network the traffic counts towards your data cap. As the person hosting the access point, other people using it does not count towards your cap.

Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

#86

Post by shmerl »

devicenull wrote: post #85
shmerl wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's weird. Since it defeats the purpose of expanding their WiFi hotspots coverage. If people have capped plans, they are likely to disable that hotspot altogether and use their own routers to begin with, to avoid anyone switching it back on. If they wanted such thing to work, it had to be excluded from both monthly data caps and active bandwidth limit. That's besides the point that monthly caps is a completely nas…

> That's weird. Since it defeats the purpose of expanding their WiFi hotspots coverage. If people have capped plans, they are likely to disable that hotspot altogether and use their own routers to begin with, to avoid anyone switching it back on. If they wanted such thing to work, it had to be excluded from both monthly data caps and active bandwidth limit. I think what he's trying to say is that as an individual usi…

> As the person hosting the access point, other people using it does not count towards your cap.

Ah, that makes more sense.

Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

#87

Post by grandalf »

chatmasta wrote: post #46

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this in the thread but you can actually opt out of the xfinitiwifi thing. The deal is that you can use any of the hotspots if you have a comcast account and also share your router. If you opt out, you can no longer use the xfinitiwifi hotspots but nobody can use yours either.

If this is the case, then would it be more efficient to connect to your own router with the second connection and just allocate the extra channels to yourself?

Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

#88

Post by CodeWriter23 »

windexh8er wrote: post #64
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #60

Xfinity says your wireline speed will not be impeded by others who are using WiFi via the xfinitywifi shared service. Since DOCSIS 3.0 has no limit on the maximum number of channels (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Bandwidth_tables ), I believe in order to make that claim, they have to allocate additional channels to the xfinitywifi traffic. BUT OP will only double his bandwidth if he is purchasing a rate…

Every modem has a finite number of channels it can bond. Up and down are different. Also the CMTS (the device the cable modem connects to) limits the number of bonds per source modem. A piece of coax has a finite amount of bandwidth it can carry. As modulation schemes get better (QAM256) you can do more with less. To say DOCCIS 3 is limitless is not taking into consideration the hardware and frequency constraints. Th…

Yes, and more than a couple of people have observed downstream 16 channel bonding on Comcast. That would be 4 times as many as you cited "Most commonly 4 channel bond on the downstream and 2 on the up", in your post that I failed to reply to.

Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT

#89

Post by davej »

ricardobeat wrote: post #41
mwsherman wrote: post #15

I don't see any benchmarks, did I miss them? I suspect this doesn't double bandwidth, the packets all end up over the same neighborhood network. The only way it would increase bandwidth is if it evades artificial throttles. Having two connections to the same (neighborhood) pipe seems useless.

UPC has a similar system, where the guest network has extra bandwidth, on top of your own subscription. Even if Comcast doesn't do this, he is leeching off his neighbour's connection and not his own.

Was interested in this so I did a bit of investigation into whether it makes sense with UPC.

UPC only makes a small amount of bandwidth available on the 'Wi Free' (UPC's version of Xfinity) network, seems to be about 2.5mbps down and 0.5mbps up. In my country (Ireland), the minimum package you need to get 'Wi-Free' is 120mbps down, so It's not really worth the effort for an extra 1% bandwidth.

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