You see, I was a bit concerned about routers, specifically for anything more than a basic one or two PC household. Where are you left when you’re slightly more than that?

What about people who have had “good results” with the Thomson TG585? Those who’ve had a terrible time with the NetComm NB6Plus4Wn? Was I really losing my touch? Could I have really missed the mark so badly?

Thankfully, my recent testing has proved pretty conclusive as far as I’m concerned.

You see I’m not specifically a “light” user. Neither is my wife. We regularly go through around 160-180GB a month. It doesn’t help I’m always doing PC fixup jobs for friends and things, Windows Updates along can be over a gig… Throw in downloading of a browser (Chrome, of course), iTunes, Adobe Reader, updates for MS Office, and very quickly you can start bumping up the downloads.

Same for YouTube and the likes, given the chance I don’t watch anything less than 720p. I’ve got the bandwidth, so why not? That’s my theory at least.

Now I recently switched from VDSL2 to Orcons Genius plan. I’ll go into that first (If you’re here for the router information, jump down to the next header):

The nightmare switch to Orcon

So I rang Orcon telling them I wanted to switch. I was on Naked VDSL2. I rang them on a Thursday afternoon around 2PM and told them I wanted to switch.

I told the lady I had my own router and a setup that far surpassed anything they could offer, and I didn’t want their Genius router. I also didn’t care one bit about their VoIP number, I do VoIP for a living and have my own number with 2talk.

She told me my options were:
1) Don’t sign up for a contract, but you’re *required* to rent the Genius router for $5 a month, even if you don’t use it
2) Sign up for a contract, 18 months for the non-handset Genius version, then I don’t have to pay the additional fee

Why on earth would I want their router when I already have a fully perfectly good working one of my own, and I specifically don’t want their features, but want my own features.

Then, it gets better when they txt me in the morning telling me I’ll be cut over that evening. Awesome stuff!

I get home from work at 4PM. No dice.

I ring Orcon, tell them I can see I’m getting line sync but no authentication. The problem is it’s not taking my credentials so I’m not getting an IP Address, so I can’t get online. I’m told the “automation will go through and do it at midnight tonight”. I wait up until 2AM and still am not online. Unfortunately Orcon don’t take calls at that time.

So I ring first thing in the morning and complain, I’m still not online at 8AM. Call back from a supervisor at 10am, my details weren’t put in to the automation system so I won’t get online until Monday. WHAT?!

By now I’m about ready to pull a Steve Jobs and go nuclear on Orcon. I’m without a connection the whole damn weekend?! Are you guys retarded or something? Did you seriously think it was a good idea to migrate a customer over last thing on a Friday and not have everything ready for them to go? I work from home, I like to game on the weekend, I have a VoIP line … All down! The idiots!

Luckily I had a friend who worked at Orcon who had a feeling that this sort of thing might happen (He’s a bloody legend, I tell you), and he’d created an alternative Username that I was able to use on the Thursday when I signed up. I’m figuring this must be happening a little bit at the moment. Either way,  he was a lifesaver, so first thing on Saturday AM I throw his username and password in, and it was enough to keep me going until Monday evening when I got home from work and was able to use my correct username and password.

Word to the wise: If you’re getting connected, don’t put in the request on a Wednesday / Thursday, as Chorus have been pretty damn quick lately with getting people connected and it seems Orcon are a little behind the ball at the moment with their provisioning.

But on to the good stuff:

Trialling the different routers

So I had some time on my hands on Saturday, I figured I’d give all the routers that I had a whirl:
Thomson TG585v78 and a TG585v8
NetComm NB6Plus4Wn
Orcon Genius Router Lite (The one without the handset)
Draytek DV120 and an Asus WL-520GU running Tomato

That’s a decent little assortment I thought. Once I’d confirmed I was online with the Genius router, I quickly ditched that and thought I’d give the TG585 a try for a day or two.

How wrong I was…

The Thomson TG585v7 & TG585v8

The router would get online for roughly 6-8 seconds before dying. Completely dying. I’m not talking about “Can still get in to the WebUI and see that it’s just not syncing” or anything, no I’m talking about “Won’t even respond to pings”. I have two of them too, a v7 and a v8. Both exhibited the same results, so it wasn’t just a single faulty one.

I figured that couldn’t be right, so I unplugged it from the network and plugged just my PC straight in to it.

Fascinating, it would now get online and stay online! Awesome! So it’s just that I’ve got so many devices!

Well by “so many” I mean 2 laptops, 3 desktops, two cellphones, a tablet, an ATA, a VoIP phone (SPA942), a network printer, a Tivo, a WDTV, an AC!Ryan PlayOn media player, and also a file server. Not too much really? Granted it’s potentially 3x the number of devices a normal “small house” would have, but I look at my parents, they’ve probably got the same number of devices. I look at my inlaws, they’ve probably got the same. Maybe I extend my technological influence a little too far on my family, who knows.

But anyways, back to the TG585′s. The TG585 was online with just my PC! I was stoaked. I tried plugging in the SPA942 as well to make a phone call, and it wouldn’t connect. Unhappy, coz it was working fine just before. It’s not that calls wouldn’t go through, it’s just that it wouldn’t connect at all. Restart the router, just in case that was the issue, still no dice. So I unplug the SPA942 and then go back to my PC. I wanted to get in a game. Time for some DotA2.

Most games of DotA2 last for around 45 minutes. They can sometimes take 5-10 minutes to “get setup”, so all in all you allow around an hour for a match.

I’d been in a game of DotA2, with JUST my PC plugged in, no torrents, no nothing, for around 40 minutes when things quickly started to go pear-shaped. Latency increased significantly, then after about 30 seconds the internet connection dropped.

I was furious! Disconnected in the middle of a game!

It took about 3-4 minutes to come up again, just in time to prevent me from being labelled as having “abandoned” the game and getting my account flagged for a week.

I was able to finish the game just fine.

My wife comes home and wants to hook up her laptop, we’re now up to two devices on the TG585v8.

I decide I want to have another game of DotA2, so I restart the router right before I jump in and start, in order to give it a “clean slate” (While ignoring the cries from the living room about the wifi disappearing).

I’m about 20 minutes in to the game this time, when the same thing happens, disconnected. I was not a happy chappy by now! Luckily it came back within 4 minutes, so I had less than a minute to spare before being flagged as abandoning the game. Because I was gone for 4 minutes, it was enough for the game to swing in favor of the enemy team and we were being ripped apart. 10 minutes later and the connection drops again. The router doesn’t come back up at all after waiting for 15 minutes (I was so furious I had to go cool off and make a drink). Account is flagged for the next week. Thanks Telecom and your absolutely terrible Thomson / Technicolor routers you recommend. I officially hate you.

That was with two devices, it wasn’t able to stay online for more than 10 minutes. Needless to say I found those results conclusive enough that the TG585 may be able to cope with one, maybe even two very light users, but certainly not me.

Righto, on to the next device:

The NetComm NB6Plus4Wn (Also known as the N300)

These previously were my absolute fav device for recommending to people, because they were simple to get up and running and yet were cheap enough and very reliable. I’ve also got it on good accord that the NB6Plus4Wn costs at least $10 less per-device to the ISP’s than the Thomson routers do. They go for around 1/3 what you’re likely to pay retail for them.

I plugged this sucker in to my PC and it worked perfectly!

Gave it a good run-down, threw my whole network at it, still didn’t miss a beat! Grabbed the latest firmware too, turns out nothings actually changed aside from “Changed default Bandwidth mode from 20 MHz to 40 MHz to optimize the 11n Wi-Fi Performance.”! Excellent.

I dug deeper and did some more research, it’s not the NB6Plus4Wn, it’s the NB6Plus4W that doesn’t play ball!

Specifically, if you’ve been having issues, have a read here: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1421224

This also mirrors some of my earlier sentiments about the RTA1320 preferring not to use them (Going back to something like 2009 now I think).

I was able to make SIP calls with mine, it took a beating of me doing gaming while my wife was on the phone, and a whole host of other things. Didn’t miss a beat!

The NB6Plus4Wn still seems to be the reliable router of choice for the small office / home user. The NB6Plus4W however, I would avoid.

Apparently the NB6Plus4Wn differs from the NB6Plus4W in a few crucial ways: Case ventilation, and less RAM.

So far I’m 2/2 on accuracy, which is pretty good, the results were just what I’ve said all along. Lets see how the Genius router pans out though, having never used it before:

The Orcon Genius Lite

It wasn’t a bad router, all things considered. For the better part, it “just worked”. It also had the nice ability to be provisioned by Orcon, so for a home user who just gets the router, plugs it in, number gets ported, it ought to “just work”. That is, of course, provided they don’t get connected last thing on a Friday evening.

Reliability was pretty damn good, to be frank it far surpasses anything else that I’ve seen Telecom push for example.

I didn’t use the SIP line that they provisioned, I don’t really care about it coz I’ve got both an ATA Adapter and my own SPA942 that I use with 2talk and a remote asterisk server. However, it worked fine with both of those, so I give it a bit of a thumbs up there.

The router was good, wasn’t quite as fast as it could have been. Throughput nationally it didn’t seem to like doing too much when I was hammering it doing a whole lot of other things, but overall for a bundled router, it works pretty damn well. I’m not entirely sure I’d run a small business from one, I’d have to give it a bit more of a rundown first, however the Genius Lite seemed to do overall pretty well.

Which leaves the best of the best:

The Draytek DV120 and a Tomato / Gargoyle Router

This is my absolute fav setup of all!

Take a Draytek DV120 and turn on PPPoA -> PPPoE Passthru mode. Setup something like the WRT54GL or with Tomato or Gargoyle and you should be good to go! They’re great, they take a beating, and they just keep on going.

However, a word of caution. The later models of firmware such as Gargoyle play nicest with devices that have 32MB of RAM. The Linksys WRT54GL and the Asus WL-520GU that I use have only 16MB. You may need to run a 1.3 version of Gargoyle in order to get the best results, as newer versions are more memory hungry. Just keep that in mind when you’re looking to buy a router.

Also keep in mind that although Gargoyle sell the TP-Link WR741ND themselves, they use version 1.9 of the hardware. Many places in NZ sell v4 of the hardware which uses a different SOC which is *not* compatible at this stage and should be avoided if you’re wanting to run it. You can check the sticker that’s on the underside of the router and it’ll tell you the hardware version. Do this before you buy it. If you’re shopping at PBTech or the likes, ask one of the store salespeople to help you open the box (They get incredibly pissy if you do it yourself) and get them to check for you.

Anyways with this setup, it’s reliable as anything, I’ve had uptimes of a couple of hundred days (With the occasional minor blip from the Exchange which was the fault of Chorus or the ISP, the actual Gargoyle / Tomato device stayed up the whole time though), a host of useful features like per-device bandwidth limits, graphs, logging, and much much more!

It’s the ideal scenario if you know a little bit about networking and are happy to get your hands dirty.

Conclusion

So, I still stand by my prior recommendations of the NB6Plus4Wn.

I’ve also got in touch with PBTech to let them know that it appears to JUST be the NB6Pluw4W that has issues, and that the N-Version is fine.

Specifically, this appears to be because the NB6Plus4W has only 16MB RAM vs the NB6Plus4Wn which has 32MB. That seems to make a massive difference.

In fact, I actively avoid it at almost all costs. I’ve not been there in months now to be honest.

A long time ago I was put off NZHerald by the stupid ramblings they call journalism by a writer named Chris Barton. It’s a shame really because there’s another writer there Hamish Fletcher who I’ve found to be actually quite good, well educated, well rounded, and to be frank he’s not just bitching and moaning in every single post or suffering from ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ like Chris does.

So it was a quiet night a couple of nights back and I had a few moments spare. Google+ had been read and I didn’t feel like Exploring. I’d read all of the Stuff website so I figured I’d take my chances at the NZHerald site.

What a mistake that was, I immediately came across this article, and remembered why I never go back there: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10802539

What’s so wrong with it? You mean aside from the fact that the article is a gigantic whining session?

Maybe it’s just me, call me crazy, but if I’m writing something I’d actually like it to be semi-useful, or semi-constructive. So I thought I’d take the chance to pick through some of the bile that’s been written.

Don’t get me wrong, everybody is entitled to an opinion, but some times you really have to wonder. So without further delay, lets get into it!

So what he writes, I’m going to quote like this:

“I know what you’re thinking. Who cares about copper when the future is fibre and ultra fast broadband (UFB)?”

Then, I’ll rebut like this:

Actually, a lot of people care about Copper. Considering the speeds VDSL2 is able to attain, at the price, and given that an “entry level” Fibre connection is only 30mbps down and 10mbps up, why even bother with Fibre at that speed when you can deliver VDSL2 for cheaper, no additional cables to be laid?

So, lets continue then.

“But the truth is most of us are going to be on copper – for the so called “last mile” to our homes for years to come.”

Most probably, considering it’s a 10-yr plan with several of those still left to go. It’s also significantly easier to cabinetize than it is to re-run the last mile. Suck it up and get used to the fact that you’re not going to get on to UFB right away. I can get Fibre at my place already, I believe through FX. I enquired about it several years ago now so I’m a little hazy but it was around late 2009. Anyways, I could get it. It was a $2,000-odd installation fee and then a further $1K a month, but I could still get it if I wanted it. If Chris really needs Fibre so badly, he can still get it in Devonport. If he wants it cheap, he’s just going to have to wait patiently (Or impatiently, bitching and moaning all the way, as he does).

“To get any real advantage on fibre I’d have to opt for a 100Mbps down/50Mbps up service which is going to cost around $124 a month with 60GB cap.”

Yeah funny that. New technology costing more than old technology, who’d have thought? Clearly he’s not an iPhone / Apple user or he’d basically say “Shuddup and take my monies”. When has any new technology come out and cost less? Basically Chorus and the Govt have invested a truckload of money, they need to recoup that. So you either pay for it like this, or you pay for it with your taxes to the Govt indirectly. One way or another, you’re going to be paying for the rollout and then for some of the costs to be recouped.

“Then there are the extra setup costs – a new router, possibly new wiring in the house and maybe an uninterruptible power supply to ensure you still have a phone line when the power goes out.”

What, you want them to just do it for free, because they love you, because you write just so many nice things about them? Pffft… Get real son, you’ve got a lot of learning to do! That’s not how the world works, and certainly not to people who are right pricks, bashing the company every step of the way. Do you really expect that if I were to write bad things about McDonalds on a weekly basis that when they open a new branch in my neighbourhood they’d say “Oh yes, come here, have a free meal on us, come and bash us some more”. Think about it.

“horror stories like this report from Palmerston Northabout the parking mayhem and disruption that can happen in your street when the Chorus contractors arrive.”

How else are they supposed to dig up the roadside? Again, more bitching … It’s like you’d prefer not to have to deal with the inconvenience and instead just live with Copper for the next million years!? I dunno Chris, you’re confusing me. First you want Fibre before 2014, now you don’t want the possible hassles of getting it like wiring your house, or the disruptions to your street. Which is it?!

“providing a low cost infrastructure for businesses to engage in creating big data services, products, content and collaborations that can be exported anywhere in the world in a blink of an eye.”

Yeah of course! However, the rollout isn’t happening purely so that businesses can get cheap fibre. Businesses can already get Fibre, and for those who actually need it, the cost isn’t too bad, and they’ll work it in to their business plan. Same for if you want VDSL2, I know that Hosting Direct do some quite competitively priced plans vs ADSL2+, and they’re rumoured to drop in price even further!

“By anyone’s logic, shorter copper loop lengths should lead to lower loop prices.”

Not specifically. Chorus have just spent a truckload of money over the last few years rolling out 3,600-odd cabinets. That’s a massive multi-billion dollar investment! You don’t spend a whole lot of money, then drop your only source of income.

“But this is New Zealand where we have a Commission that long ago lost sight of what it’s supposed to do”

More bashing / tall poppy syndrome…

“Its cunning plan to prevent competitors taking its lines customers away was to “cabinetise” exchanges – that is move the lines closer to the customer in roadside cabinets.“

Oh great, yeah sure lets just scrap cabinetization altogether. I for one would be going from a 24mbps VDSL2 connection down to a 900kbps (Kilobits, not bytes, that’d be 125KBps) with an even slower upload speed. Thanks Chris, for wanting to send us all back to the stone age, just in the name of “competition”. I’m glad we have you to defend New Zealand from any form of technological progress at all.

You’ve been on the same “Geek Exchange Tour” that I have, and I saw it as one of the greatest things to come to New Zealand infrastructure in a long time. You see it as anti-competitive and a bad thing because now ISPs such as Vodafone and Orcon have 3,600 more places to put their equipment in to.

You know what, you’re right, there’s not much room for competition! That’s because this is New Zealand and with only 4,500,000 people in this country, it’s simply not cost-effective to have 3+ ISPs wholesale-servicing 70-100 homes.

That’s roughly 25 to 30 connections per-ISP. Why would an ISP want to spend thousands putting their own equipment in there, when they’ve gotta get it from the Cabinet back to their main datacenter, and then further out to the internet? Considering an average connection is ~$50 a month, x24 months for a real long contract, x30 customers means that they’ve taken $36K over the space of two years from a single cabinet. It’s just not cost-effective, and that’s why so many ISP’s are simply using Telecom Wholesale. They could put their kit in there, but it’s not worth it even at what you describe as highly over-inflated pricing, let alone what you suggest by cutting the cost of a port in half.

“It’s also a key reason why Chorus should never have been let anywhere near the ultra fast broadband project.”

So we could have somebody else instead run another entirely new backbone? All that most providers would have done is the “last mile”, because there’s already several providers out there with Fibre up and down the country, from TelstraClear to FX Networks and more. All the proposing companies were in a similar boat, it’s just that Chorus had the furthest existing reach and the best current infrastructure at the time that would make the rollout as fast and as effective as possible.

More sour grapes from you, I think. Must be because people gave up listening to your bitching and moaning all those years ago.

“In a perfect competitive world, lower cost copper services would drive down the cost of entry-level fibre services”

No, this is wrong!

Lower cost copper services such as ADSL2+ or VDSL2 would most likely bring on more people from Dial-Up, or increase the ways that people currently use copper. The relationship between copper and fibre pricing is not linked. ADSL2+ is a ‘commodity’ product, similar to dial-up. Anybody can get it. VDSL2 is more of a “premium” product, higher peak speeds means ISPs need to purchase more bandwidth overall to be able to cater for the ‘bursts’ in data during peak hours. So it’s going to cost more in that respect alone.

Then you have Fibre, which not only requires significant wiring from the cabinet, down your street, to your home, but it’s also going to require an ISP further buys more bandwidth to cater for peak hours. Otherwise if they over-subscribe too much, you’ll end up with higher latency, dropped packets, poor throughput, and an overall *worse* product than if you had ADSL2+. Your logic simply doesn’t make sense.

Conclusion

So much moaning Chris, so much complaining Chris, so much suffering from “Tall Poppy Syndrome”.

Have you ever thought about taking a break, perhaps playing devils advocate for a change and *not* bitching about absolutely everything? You’re the sole reason that myself and a number of people I know never go to the NZHerald website. Yup, I’m sticking with Stuff instead. They don’t do quite so many tech articles, but more of them are better written and well researched, factual, rather than the opinion of one bitter old man.

Yeah granted things with the UFB rollout aren’t perfect, they were never going to be purely because of the amount of people this country has, spread over such a massive distance.

If you have something constructive to say Chris, then by all means get in touch, I’d love to hear something positive from you for a change.

Thankfully it’s nice and easy!

No screenshots, but we’ll dive right in and get moving, it should only take 2-3 minutes once you’ve got all the files.

Before we begin, now is a good time to backup your SMS messages using SMS Backup & Restore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.riteshsahu.SMSBackupRestore

It’ll save it to a .xml file on your phone that you can easily restore afterwards. Copy this off your phone to your PC, as everything will be *wiped*. By wiped I mean *everything*, completely 100% gone from your phone.

So we’ll start by grabbing Fastboot & ADB. These are required for flashing your phone back, so rather than make you download the full SDK and stuff, I’ve got them here in a small .zip file: fastboot-adb

It’s approx 275KB so won’t take long.

Now you need to go here and get the official firmware from Google:

http://code.google.com/android/nexus/images.html#yakjuimm76d

This will take you straight to the part of the page with ICS 4.0.4, which was the latest at the time of writing. This download is much bigger, approx 186MB.

Download it and extract it to your C: Drive. You should then have a directory called “yakju-imm76d”. You’ll want to extract the fastboot-adb.zip file to that same directory.

Now, get your phone turned fully off. Give it a second or two, then you’re going to boot in to Fastboot mode by holding the Vol-Down, Vol-Up and the Power button. Keep them all held down until you see this:

Perfect! Plug your phone in and it’s time to get flashing.

Fire up a command prompt. In Win7 click on the start button then type “cmd”. In WinXP click Start –> Run –> cmd

Now type:

cd \yakju-imm76d

If you type “dir” you should see the listing of all your files, the fastboot & adb files, as well as a few firmware files for your phone. Perfect, you’re in the right place.

Now, type:

fastboot flash bootloader bootloader-maguro-primela03.img

Watch down the bottom of your phone as you type this and you’ll see a very small line with information about its progress. It’ll only take a couple of seconds.

Then type:

fastboot reboot-bootloader

Cool, your phone is now rebooting with the updated bootloader, it should only take 3-4 seconds to reboot. Now we flash the Radio with:

fastboot flash radio radio-maguro-i9250xxla02.img

Then reboot the phone again with:

fastboot reboot-bootloader

Give it a couple of seconds to come back up. Finally we’re about to flash the actual firmware, by typing this:

fastboot -w update image-yakju-imm76d.zip

That should be it, it’ll take a moment or two and you’re all done and dusted!

Don’t forget to reinstall SMS Backup & Restore from the Play Store to restore your SMS messages.

I wrote about it some 2 1/2 years ago now, and unfortunately not a lot has changed. ISPs are still giving out cheap routers by and large. People are still having silly little issues with their routers. Connections still drop more than they need to (And for some reason people just ‘put up with it’ and presume its how things ought to be, presumably because they don’t know better). Sadly, there’s just as much confusion as there ever has been.

Thankfully its not too difficult to get a solid connection, and while some people may balk at the idea of having to purchase their own router / modem devices, a lot of people will find that the juice is worth the squeeze.

Lets start by addressing ISP-supplied devices. Not many people know, but I’ve been working for one of the smaller ISPs for a few months, and we dabbled in selling the same branded devices that the “big players” also offer.
I can also tell you a few things I know having worked as a consultant for a supplier of Dynalink / Netcomm devices.
Basically, there’s a reason why ISPs supply Thomson, D-Link, 2wire or Huawei devices, and it’s not because they’re awesome. It’s because they’re cheap.

Back around the year 2000 when New Zealand first received “Jetstream” broadband (ADSL1), the uptake was decent, but sort of slow. Most people were relatively used to paying $29-ish a month for unlimited dial-up, but a lot of people were still on cheaper plans. Add on to the fact that ADSL was going to double the cost of that, plus $100-200 for a router / modem and it hampered the uptake. So then Telecom had a brilliant idea: Lets give away routers and modems to help increase uptake!

Now back 12 years ago, that was a great idea. It helped people get online, people only had one PC, maybe two for the better part. PCs didn’t ship with anywhere near as much RAM, 512MB was a lot, so computers also only had a couple of apps open at a time. This in turn put less load on routers as well.

Why does this matter?

Well load on routers increases the heat. What increases the load on a router? Anything that keeps a connection open, or opens a lot of connections. Bittorrent is notorious for this. Skype was back in the day, I’m not sure because frankly I’ve not used it in a year or two now. SIP (VoIP) calling is rough though, it makes baby routers cry. I know, because I’ve both done VoIP for a living for a few years, as well as having watched the likes of Orcon fail with their “Genius” router. However, that’s a story for another day.

Anyway things like that all add load to a router, and many cheaper routers don’t survive under it because they get warm, this in turn affects your DSL connection which eventually drops.

Other routers have a limited amount of memory, which means that the memory that would be used to keep track of their “state table” fills up very quickly, and it kills off older connections because it knows its running out of memory and won’t be able to take any new connections if it doesn’t. This is how things like VoIP calls also end up dropping.

Then there’s just poorly written software for some routers. The likes of the Thomsons are notorious for DHCP and Encryption issues. For example, many of them will start to “throw a wobbly” after they’ve given out half a dozen DHCP leases and just not accept any other devices on to the network. Other stupid things that cheap routers are prone to doing is not playing nice with a larger number of devices while using WPA / WPA2, and forcing you to use WEP or no encryption. You shouldn’t have to use anything but WPA2 in this day in age.

So back to the story, basically it was a great idea that Telecom (Xtra) had back in the day to start giving away devices. However, in order to do-so, they had to give away basically the cheapest 1-port device they possibly could. This was the D-Link DSL-302g. It was riddled with security vulnerabilities over the years and was an all around “Cheap and nasty” device. These vulnerabilities included the device giving out the DSL username & password via the WAN interface. In otherwords if you scanned a specific TCP Port on all the ISPs DSL ranges (As I did a few times), found which devices responded, then ran a mass script to grab a certain file from them, it was easy enough to get somebodies account name and password. From there you could do everything including increase their data cap online, to shutting down their account altogether if you really wanted to.

It was good, it got ADSL uptake to skyrocket compared to what it would otherwise have been, and it was also very bad. I spoke with a friend in Telecoms Shared Services division a short while back who said they were still trying to pull the last of those crappy devices off their network.

Telecom also started to use 2wire devices. These particular devices were great because they were easy to mass-provision, and they’re also remotely configurable. The plan was that Telecom would be able to login remotely, have a look at what was going wrong, and fix it for you. The flaw with this theory is that it wasn’t the end-users 99% of the time that were causing the issues, it was either a fault with their wiring (Which Telecom almost always deduce without touching the router) or it was a faulty router giving the end-user issues. The theory behind it was great, but it just wasn’t terrible well thought out.

The 2wire routers didn’t last terribly long as Thomson came along riding in on a white pony with the TG585v7 (And subsequently the TG585v8 which is the same as the v7 but just with N-wireless, though only one antenna), saying “Look we can give you all that 2wire are giving you, but it’s going to be so much cheaper!”. How much cheaper? I’m unsure to be honest, but I know that it’s not difficult to pick up the VDSL2 Thomson (Technicolor TG789vn) devices for somewhere in the vicinity of $180 without even having to place a massive order. Given that ADSL2+ devices are generally in the vicinity of 25-30% the total price of VDSL2, then add in the face that you’re Telecom and you’re ordering a few thousand, it’d be even cheaper, I’d suggest they’re getting them from somewhere close to $40-50 a pop. I know that some of the more ‘expensive’ (Read: reliable) brands go for ~$50 a pop, so a conservative $50 is probably pretty close.

Unfortunately I’ve not been able to get an accurate figure, but if you’re reading this and you’re able to tip me off, then I’m all ears. I do however know that Technicolor will only customize units if you’re committing to order more than 50,000 units in a 12-month period, so basically Telecom would have committed to getting in a truckload of them before they realized the “quality” of them.

So anyway, Telecom are giving away these $50 routers for free. They’re able to do wifi, they have 4 ethernet ports on the back of them, so what’s the issue?

Well, the issue is they suck.

Don’t get me wrong, I know people who’ve been using them for months without missing a beat, however that’s usually just one, maybe two devices attached to them.

These routers were heralded on TV ads and everything as being the device that would “break down all walls” and allow you to “Surf in one room while streaming video in another”, for example (I can’t remember the exact wording of the TV ads, it was a while back). You would presume from the way they were portrayed on TV that they were the *ideal* family router that would work happily with multiple devices.

Unfortunately by the time you load on your printer, cellphone, a couple of laptops and maybe a desktop, they’re pretty much rendered useless.

What breaks? DHCP stops giving out leases, wireless has to be turned back to WEP encryption, or encryption turned off entirely. They overheat because they’re slow old devices with not much RAM, and the firmware is badly written. Don’t even get me started on the Web UI, that interface is absolutely freaking terrible! For the record, they have a 240Mhz ARM CPU (not too bad, should be sufficient), 4MB Flash (The bare minimum to be useful, but not the end of the world) and 16MB RAM (The bare minimum). The RAM is where the issue mostly lies I believe, combined with terrible firmware.

To give you a good comparison, my Draytek DV2750 has 64MB RAM and (I believe) a 266Mhz ARMv9 CPU. The TP-Link WR740N that Gargoyle recommends has 32MB (A ‘good & ample’ amount by todays standards).

Also, have you ever tried turning on content filtering, on one of those Thomson devices? That thing will fall over faster than you can blink, your throughput will absolutely *crawl* to a halt! What’s the point in having a feature like that? Can you imagine it’s like having air conditioning on your car, but as soon as you turn it on your car can’t go faster than 15kmph. That’s just retarded!

Now here’s what I’m finding difficult:

Device vendors change things, but when they do-so they don’t change the model number!

For example:

The TP-Link TL-WR740N that Gargoyle recommends and uses on their website is excellent! It’s well supported by OpenWRT (The base for Gargoyle) and the hardware is solid all around. The original firmware on the TP-Link is mediocre, but it does the job and it’s relatively solid.

Then, they go and change things with Hardware Version 4.20, quite drastically in fact. Suddenly OpenWRT no longer works (Support is added now, to the experimental builds), Gargoyle firmware also isn’t supported… Yet, if I’d told you to go and get the TL-WR740N and you’d picked one of these up, you’d consider me a liar and begin to doubt my technical prowess.

Same thing has happened with the NetComm NB6Plus4Wn. After a few people on PressF1 reporting issues, I decided to look in to the issue.

It doesn’t take much to look back through my blog history and see that I’ve been recommending them for a while now. I’ve literally bought and on-sold close to 3-dozen of them myself just with family and friends, let alone the *countless* people online who’ve asked for my suggestion and gone and purchased them.

You see, I’m pretty much the reason why PB Technologies used to say this on their website about the router:
“Troubles with your current router failing? Suffering from disconnections? Try this router, guaranteed to fix your issues or your money back!”

I spoke with PBTech back in the day (Around 2+ years ago now I think?) and told them about this router. They tried it themselves, got excellent feedback, and thought it was a great selling point for what was otherwise being overlooked as one of the more expensive routers. People had been opting for cheaper D-Links and Belkins as upgrades or replacements from their ISP-supplied devices and many were still having issues. Same even for some of the Linksys. In fact I’d been having a great time with my AM300′s and my WRT54GL’s, so I went out and bought 6 of the WAG160N’s for myself, my family, and a couple of friends.

That was a mistake, they were terrible, and I noticed issues within about 48 hours! Thankfully, PBTech were pretty good and took them all back.

But back to the NetComm NB6Plus4Wn devices. I’ve got in touch with PBTech now and see that they’ve cottoned on around the end of last year to the fact there’s a Hardware Revision 2, and they’re having some pretty major issues. Right now it’s expected that it’s a firmware issue that NetComm are looking in to, but that’s not really the point. The point is the hardware / firmware has changed, and the hardware is no longer as reliable as it was.

This means that if you come across my old blog post, or any of my older posts on PressF1, you’ll see “NB6Plus4Wn is great, go for it”, but there’s obviously no mention of “This is only Hardware rev1.0″, because back then that’s all there was. Now, we’ve got a newer version ofthe “same device” and it’s not working for people. I’ve got reports of it overheating, DHCP issues, port-forwarding problems, the works!

What was once known the *the* device that you would turn to, is now potentially even worse than the cheap junk that ISPs give away!

So what can you do?

Well unfortunately even the “best of the best” aren’t without their share of issues. It turns out even the Draytek DV120, which is quite possibly the most solid ADSL2+ device ever, still had some issues with UDP packets and needed a firmware upgrade. Same for the Draytek DV2750 (For VDSL2), you *have* to turn off the “Hardware NAT” feature, it just doesn’t work right at all.

Is it just me or can *DSL device vendors not seem to get things right?

I mean, surely it can’t be *that* hard, you’ve got vendors churning out dozens of different devices, why not just take the time to take one device, make it reliable, and keep it that way?

To be honest I don’t know what device I should be recommending at this stage. Without a doubt the Draytek stuff is top-notch, but it’s still not without its imperfections. I’m still using Draytek in tandem with Gargoyle and Tomato devices at home and for my family / friends, it’s what I deploy when people ask me, so that’s probably a great place to start.

In terms of a reliable “all-in-one” device? Again Draytek do some great stuff, but it’s not the cheapest. My theory is this:

Cheap, reliable, features; pick two.

You see the Linksys AM300 is basically used as just a “bridge” from ADSL to some other device when I use them. They’re great, reliable, they’re cheap, but they have almost no features at all aside from this half-bridging support.

There’s the Draytek DV120 is also the same.

It’s a little different when you get to Access Points like the Linksys WRT54GL and the TP-Link TL-WR740N, because a lot of things are added with the custom firmware, however again, reliability can be hardware dependent too.

It’s mostly the “all-in-one” devices that have this issue. If they are reliable and feature-rich like the Draytek DV2750′s, you can easily spend $450+ on a single device, just to get you online for VDSL2.

The NB6Plus4Wn was cheap, was reliable, and had some semi-decent list of features (Though not so much). Unfortunately now it’s just fallen in to the “cheap” category because the reliability is out the window, and also half the features don’t actually work.

What would I suggest?

I would suggest you try a device, and if it’s not reliable, try another brand and make and model altogether. Don’t just go from the Linksys WAG160N to the WAG320N. Instead, jump ship entirely and try something such as the Netgear routers (Which I’ve been heard a lot of good things about lately).

Personally I’ve left ADSL2+ behind at the start of this year (2012), and wouldn’t want to ever go back again. Pricing is coming down significantly, and the higher upload speeds are great (The download is good too of course), which makes it difficult for me to actually make a recommendation.

That said, if it was me, I would still go for a small 1-port device such as the Draytek DV120, and bridge it (It does PPPoA -> PPPoE Passthru, instead of halfbridging like the Linksys AM300) to a larger gruntier device like the WR740N, running either Gargoyle or Tomato. Again though, check the hardware version of the WR740N before you buy! You don’t want to get Rev4.20 which is currently not supported by Gargoyle.

If you’re on VDSL2, then you can’t go past the Draytek DV2750!

Have you tested a Netgear device yourself that you can recommend?

What about some other brand? I’ve heard semi-decent results about some of the newer Belkin kit that always leaves me hopeful!

If this has helped you, leave a comment and say hi, or drop me some feedback, I’m always keen to hear from readers.

I’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus from MIUI since I got the Galaxy Nexus in late January 2012, but knew that the MIUI team (I’m talking specifically at miuiandroid.com) had been working on it. I’ve not tried any of the other builds that are available out there, but figured I’d just dive right in and give MIUI a whirl.

Turns out it’s quick and painless, far less effort than the Galaxy S was, which is nice for a change. Now, I’m looking forward to the weekly updates that come from MIUI!

So, lets get started, we’ll begin with backing up your device first.

To start with, you’ll probably want your SMS messages backed up so you can restore them once you’re in MIUI.

Grab this app and do a backup: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.riteshsahu.SMSBackupRestore

Next, grab yourself ROM Manager from the Marketplace, it makes things a little easier getting in to Recovery Mode, though this step isn’t essential: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.koushikdutta.rommanager

Now fire up ROM Manager and make sure you have ClockworkMod Recovery installed (If you’ve already got it, skip this step, naturally).

It should show that you have ClockworkMod Recovery installed. If not, you can install it from the app if you have root access.

If you don’t have root access, start with GnexRootToolkit.v1.3.sfx.exe, this page ought to help: http://androidcommunity.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-102062.html

So, you should have ClockworkMod Recovery installed. Go ahead and from ROM Manager hit the “Backup Current ROM” button. You may need to scroll down a little to see it.

It’ll reboot, the whole process will take 5-10 minutes as it backs everything up, maybe longer if you’ve got a *ton* of things on your phone.

Your phone will reboot back in to Android when it’s done. Now is your chance to do a final backup of anything crucial. Worst-case scenario and everything goes belly-up, lets pretend you lose 100% of what’s on your phone. It’s not likely, but worse things have happened, so copy off anything that you’d be pissed if you lost.

So now we’re going to grab MIUI and copy the file across. You can grab the current version at write-time from here: http://miuiandroid.com/community/threads/miui-rom-2-3-16-ics-gb-roms-uploaded.15733/

Once you’ve saved miuiandroid_GNEX-2.3.16.zip, you need to copy it across to your phone. Don’t extract it, just copy the single file across in to “Internal Storage”.

Excellent, now crunch time!

Fire up ROM Manager and choose “Reboot into Recovery”.

Once in ClockworkMod Recovery, go to “install zip from sdcard” using the Volume Down key. Press the Power button to select the current line.

Then, select “choose zip from sdcard”.

Press Volume Up a couple of times (It’s usually faster with the list of folders being there) and select “miuiandroid_GNEX-2.3.16.zip” by pressing the power button again.

Confirm you want to flash it, then sit back and relax for a minute.

Finally, when that’s done, go to “wipe data/factory reset”. Confirm it and you’re done! Time to reboot, so select “reboot system now”

Give it a minute or two to fire up, the first boot always takes the longest.

Congratulations, you’ve now got MIUI on your phone!

Now you’re going to want to grab a few essentials on your phone:

SMS Backup and Restore (So you can restore your earlier backup of SMS messages)

ROM Manager (In case you need to upgrade or anything manually)

Google+ (Doesn’t come with MIUI??)

There’s still the occasional bug, it’s a little rough around the edges in a few places, but overall MIUI is pretty slick, bringing the interface we all know and love from Gingerbread now to Ice Cream Sandwich, and they’ve done a real good job of it too!

Here’s a few screenshots I took after my initial boot-up (Click for a larger image):

Thanks, and feel free to leave some feedback / comments / questions. Don’t forget to check out the miuiandroid.com forums over here: http://miuiandroid.com/community/forums/galaxy-nexus.61/

Hopefully it’s not too annoying, we’ll see where I go with it in the long run.

I’ve also added a Donate button on the right-hand side if you like what I do, or if I’ve helped in any way, that’ll go towards my beer fund!

If you have any feedback on them, too intrusive, different sizing, whatever … I’m happy for the feedback in the comments.

Thanks!

However, getting it to run happily can be a bit of a mission if you’ve never done it before.

Thankfully, it’s not too difficult

First of all you need to fire up the SPA962 WebUI. You can easily find the IP Address by pressing the Page button (Under the Voicemail envelope) followed by the digit 9. Do this in quick succession and it will show you the IP Address.

In the Web UI, click on “Admin login” up the top right, then once it’s reloaded click on “Advanced” again up the top right.

Click on the tab labelled “SPA932″ (Not the SPA932 status) and you’ll want to make the following changes:

Server Type: Asterisk

SPA932 Call Pickup Code: **#

This lets it know what to dial in order to do the pickup. If **# doesn’t work, you can also try *8#.

Now you need to setup each Extension that you want to monitor. In this case, a sample line will look like this:

fnc=blf+sd+cp;sub=301@pbx.localdomain;ext=301;nme=John Smith

This tells the SPA932 that you want the following functions:

Busy Lamp (When they’re on the phone show a change in the lights)

Speed Dial (Dial the number when you push it if they’re not ringing)

Call Pickup (Pickup a call when they flash it)

The subscription tells it which extension you want to monitor

pbx.localdomain should be replaced with the IP Address or DNS name for your PBX

The Extension tells it what to dial

The name is largely not needed but useful if you’re looking at a massive wall of them

That’s all there is to it! Rinse and repeat for additional extensions and it’s that simple

At the time of writing, NFC is only available in two phones I’m aware of: The Nexus S and the Galaxy Nexus.

However, had I not gone and bought myself a Galaxy Nexus recently, I would probably have continued blissfully unaware about what NFC is. In fact, I know people who’ve had the Nexus S for quite a while who’ve never really looked in to it (And why would you bother? What on earth does it do, after all?). But since I’m the technology evangelist that I am, now that I’ve got it, I’m asking others if they’ve heard of it.

To be frank I usually get blank stares from people, and that’s cool, 3-4 months I would have given blank stares back as well if somebody had asked me about it. It was really only when I saw some of the features that the new Andriod-4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) was coming with that I really understood.

So what is NFC? What can it do? Why would you want it?

NFC stands for “Near Field Communication”, and it basically means “Talking between things that are real close to each other”

There are many things you can do with it, including mobile payments! Think about doing away with your wallet, no more EFTPOS or credit cards, you now just need your cellphone and you’re good to shop!

Let me explain how this works, and conveniently I received something in the mail recently from ASB Bank about it to help:

So when you’re out and about shopping, picture yourself at the self-serve warehouse places (I’m pretty sure they don’t support it yet but that’s OK, this is just hypothetical for now), and you’ve just purchased a couple of items like a Red bull and a DVD. Now, it comes to payment and you see these symbols over the payment terminal:

Awesome, so you grab your cellphone and unlock it (If the phone is sitting in your pocket with the screen off or still locked then the NFC isn’t turned on), hold your phone over the terminal for about 2 seconds and the Wallet app pops up and says “Please confirm the purchase for $32.98″. You touch the screen to confirm.

Sounds cool right? That’s NFC, and it’s now included in Visa payWave and Mastercard paypass cards. You’ll know if your credit / debit card can do it because you’ll see one of the aforementioned logos both on your card, as well as a similar logo in places where you can use it to pay.

There’s a few cool things as well you should know about this technology:

Free money!

Yes, at the moment in order to get everybody to take it up, it turns out Google are giving away USD$10.00 when you activate your Google Wallet account on an NFC phone to help you get started. It’s pretty awesome of them, so it looks like they’re getting behind this technology in a big way too!

No internet needed

Yup even if you’ve got your internet access turned off to save you GB’s, your phone is still able to use the NFC side of things. It works because the terminal you’re paying on does the communicating with your bank.

No accidental purchases

When I first heard about NFC, I thought “Wait how on earth will they stop this thing from accidentally buying stuff as I walk out of a shop?”. Simply: Require a confirmation.

It works by the payment terminal basically calling out to your phone and saying “Hey I wanna charge you $32.98, is that cool?”, so your phone pops up and says “Please confirm”. You confirm, then your phone passes over your details. If you don’t confirm, it doesn’t pass the details on. No need to worry about walking past a payment terminal 2-3 meters away and have it accidentally charge you for something you might not walk out of the store with.

On top of that, it’s close range, you’ve got about 1-2cm between the phone and the terminal before it won’t work. So when you think of NFC meaning “Near Field Communication”, it’s a REAL ‘near field’, these things have to be right on top of each other and THEN you have to confirm.

Program your phone

I’ve got my phone doing a whole ton of cool things. Picture this:

I go to bed and pop my phone down on the bedside table to charge for the night. As I place it down I pop it on top of a small NFC tag (About the size of a 50 cent piece) for a second, and then lay it down to rest. It doesn’t matter if I were to leave it on top of the NFC tag all night, but I put it kind of close to the edge of my bedside table and I’ve accidentally kicked the phone off as I get out of bed. So I move my phone into the middle, but moving right along.

As you wave your phone over the NFC tag, it starts doing a few pre-programmed things that I want as I go to bed:

1. It turns off the notification tone on everything except phone calls (I figure if somebody is ringing me at night, it’s probably an emergency)
2. It stops the vibration on all alerts. I don’t want it making a racket every time I get a Google+ alert or email during the night
3. It turns on Wifi, just in case I’ve turned it off during the day, I want it on Wifi overnight rather than using 3G
4. Fire up the Clock app (I don’t have a bedside clock so I use my phone)
5. Dim the brightness down to a minimal amount, I don’t want to be blinded as I wake up by my phone showing me the time

Best part is it’s so incredibly simple to do this, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist.

I have one next to the sofa that lets me control the TV with an app on my phone.

What if you had a friend come over, have you ever been asked “Hey, whats your Wifi key, I wanna jump on your wireless and do XYZ”? I get asked it heaps. Wouldn’t it be easier if I had a tag somewhere that I could just say “Swipe that tag over there”, and have it share the Wifi details with their phone automatically, and then turn on their phones wifi and connect them. That would be awesome!

Sharing

It’s very easy to share things like a link to a YouTube video, or if you have a Game open on your screen and hold two phones back to back, it’ll share the link to the game in the Market with your friend. It’s fast, and simple, just hold the back of the phones together.

Same goes for a Contact. Open the Contact on your phone, then hold it up to the back of your friends phone and it’ll say “Tap to confirm”. You tap, and instantly your friend receives that contact information. Like Bump on steroids, and you don’t need an internet connection to use it.

Bluetooth files between phones

This part is still coming, but imagine this:

You have a short video or photo on your phone that you want to send to a friends phone. You both have Bluetooth.

How many times have you tried, but given up because you spent too long mucking around with the options (Do I have to pair with the phone? Whats the PIN?).

What they’re working on in the next update for Android is a way for NFC to do that part for you, so you hold your phones up together and get the option of sharing via Bluetooth. You tap to confirm. NFC then does the hard work of establishing all of the options you need to send the file to your friend, and it kicks off the process. Then, because it’s being done by Bluetooth, you don’t have to hold your phone up to your friends phone for the next 30 seconds as you send that small video. Genius, right?

So you can see there’s a whole variety of cool things you can do, and the mobile payments side is really starting to take off in America. I’m sure it will here too.

What do you use NFC for? Have you thought of any cool uses for it? Could you see yourself getting a phone with NFC next time you buy a phone?

My asterisk box picks up and says “Oh hai, you want Pizza Hut on 0800 83 83 83, I’ll pass you on to that user”.

Asterisk sends me off to the Pizza Hut server.

Then on the Pizza Hut box we receive something that looks like this:

-- Executing [s@from-trunk:1] Set("SIP/VoIP_Provider-0000014f", "__FROM_DID=s") in new stack

The “__FROM_DID=s” basically means it’s not getting the information it needs from the remote side, so then the Pizza Hut server will say:

“Hi this is the Pizza Hut asterisk server, who do you want?! You haven’t told me? Meh, I’ll hang up on you, try again later”

Not good

Thankfully it’s not too hard to get it to forward on the correct details.

In some places this is known as DNIS, or Dialled Number Identification Service.

I was searching for “Dialled CID” or “Called Number” and a variety of other things.

Thankfully it didn’t require much, just a quick change of dial-plan. Mine was previously:

exten=>0800838383,1,Dial(SIP/pizzahut,30)

Now it looks like this:

exten=>0800838383,1,Dial(SIP/pizzahut/${EXTEN},30)

All solved!!

I figured, it was time for VDSL2!

Now, I’m signed up with Hosting Direct, I get excellent speeds 24/7, I’m syncing a ton faster, currently 19mbps down and 10mbps up (Was down to around 9.5mbps on ADSL2+ since Slingshot put in the new line) and I’m loving it! I don’t know why they advertise it as 30M down / 10M up, coz its not a guaranteed minimum, nor is it the limit? I know people with them getting over 50mbps download, so it seems kind if odd. They’ve told me they aren’t throttling it or artificially limiting it in any way, which is cool, you get what you pay for!

However, there’s a few “Gotchas” about VDSL2 when coming from ADSL2+ that you might want to be aware of.

The first thing you’ll notice is you’re going to need a new router. No two ways about it, you need one, and it’s going to be expensive. I’m personally steering clear from Thomson still because of the crap job they did of the TG585′s, however their VDSL2 stuff appears to be branded Technicolor, and from what I can see it’s more reliable. Still, I’ve got enough of a bad taste in the mouth to go elsewhere.

I ended up going for the Draytek DV2750. I got mine for $250 (Box was slightly damaged) but you can pick them up from the likes of Ascent if you want, or any other SnapperNet reseller (SnapperNet are the distributor but they don’t sell direct to the public). There are a few others like ZyXEL who do a decent one (I can’t remember the model number) and from what I can tell NetComm are going to be bringing a cheaper model to the game, something very similar to the NB6Plus4Wn that I’ve been recommending (Which is only for ADSL2+).

Now the first thing you’ll want to know is that you’ll be using PPPoE to connect, not PPPoA. Because of this, you don’t have to do Half-bridging or a PPPoA -> PPPoE passthru like I was, just a full bridge works if you want to have a device behind it handle things.

You also need to change the WAN (Internet) VLAN ID to VLAN 10. I’m not 100% sure if this is for all ISP’s or just some of them, but I know its required for HD, and for a couple of others based on what I’ve heard.

Now, you need to specify the user name in the format of “username@adsl.hd.net.nz”. I know it says adsl but its the same for VDSL too, so I just didn’t question it. It works just replace “username” with the name you specified during the inline sign up process and you should be fine.

I got asked about my static IP too, that is automatically assigned. It works by assigning an IP address to the user that I authenticate with, so although I ask for my IP via DHCP, it will always be given the same IP address.

Finally, filters. VDSL2 uses different frequencies from ADSL2+, so technically you need proper filters. I have Naked VDSL2, as does everybody I know. However I see that you can get VDSL2 with a phone line so I thought I should mention what the guys at SnapperNet told me. Technically you just need to block out the phone frequencies, so you quite possibly can use ADSL2+ filters. However, you’re probably better off getting the filter installed at the demarcation point in your home so you don’t have to worry about it.

I hope this has been of use to you. In the mean time, I’m off to enjoy my shiney new high speed VDSL2 line!