On 9/27/2016 1:40 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Mon, 26 Sep 2016, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
Well there is an answer to that. Instead of paying your development
team to do a from-scratch build, you can just have them port over
dd-wrt or openwrt. Both of these router firmwares are most likely
tremendously advanced over anything your CPE development team can come
up with.
I've been working with this for the past 3 years or so. We have a CPE
using OpenWrt we use as development platform.
So while OpenWrt is great for supporting development of new protocols,
it's nowhere near as stable/bug free as one of the more restrictive
vendor CPEs. When you have millions of devices in the field, shipping
OpenWrt with all the bells and whistles available would be just a
nightmare. If one were to restrict it a lot and just use the features
"needed", then it might be managable.
That's what I have been arguing for. If they only have the ability to
configure their CPE with a web browser and they cannot ssh into an
openwrt command prompt and do anything with it, then IMHO they don't
have the need to go mucking about with a web interface that makes it
easy for them to shoot themselves in the foot.
I know some vendors who do this
and ship HGWs based on OpenWrt. It's however quite heavily modified
OpenWrt from what I can tell, and they don't rev their versions as fast
as the OPenWrt project does.
You should look at dd-wrt also, the effort on it is quite different
than openwrt it's not just "another openwrt"
I am sorry about this but there you have it. The largest ISPs out
there are solving the support issue by basically offering no useable
support, the customer calls in, complains something doesn't work and
is told to go away and find someone else to help them. These ISPs know
that no matter how angry the customer gets with a non-answer, that
ultimately the customer knows if they quit service and go to another
large competitor that the other large competitor is going to treat
them exactly the same way - so they don't benefit by quitting service.
90% (or more) of people want their ISP to just "FIX IT! FIX IT! FIX
IT!".
90% of more of people want to do the cheapest thing. If they can con
their ISP into fixing for free what they would normally have to pay
to have done, they will TRY that first.
So we're going to see more and more ISP provided equipment in
peoples homes and ISPs getting more and more involved in running the
home networks.
I disagree this is what's going to happen. The larger ISP's around
here, at any rate, have figured this out and started to tightly define
what they will do. Sure, they add wifi into their CPEs. But, they
restrict their CPEs down so badly that you can't do anything interesting
with them. That's fine for Ma and Pa Kettle and that's what I think
they should be doing - as long as they leave a button that can be pushed
to turn everything off on the CPE so the customer can use their own
ethernet-to-ethernet router.
I do not see any real interest by any of the large ISPs in getting
further into the home. The reality is that by adding wifi they have
actually withdrawn somewhat from the home network. Now with wifi
they don't have to deal with ethernet chipset incompatibilities because
some customer found an old dumb ethernet hub in someone's garbage
and dragged it home expecting to use it.
This is not something the ISPs are generally great at, the product
cycles are generally long, it's quite a lot of "let's come up with
something that works, is fairly bug free, then run the production line
for 3 years, oh, and we need to support it for another 3-5 years". This
is not a great combination with some customers wishes to always have the
latest and greatest. Very few people give any kind of love to their
"home router". They go and buy a USD40 device (or complain to the ISP
that it's too expensive when the ISP wants to charge that kind of money
for it) and then they connect their 1000 USD iPhone to it and expect
everything to work great.
But I also (I think we're in agreement here) think I am seeing people
more interested in their home networks now compared to 5-10 years ago.
Yes, probably because as time passes the young 10 year old grandsons are
growing up.
More people now know that you shouldn't put your wifi router in the
basement behind a lot of boxes if you want good wifi coverage. But there
is more to be done here, and we need more tools to help the customers
figure out what's wrong.
hear hear!! Well said!
Doing truck rolls to fix peoples home networks
is going to be too expensive, so we need home network devices (and SoHo
devices) to talk to each other so they can figure out what's going on
and give advice to the customer. Right now I see forum posts all the
time with people frantically kicking all the things to try to figure out
what's going on. There is no indication to them if the connectivity is
bad because the problem is in their home network, on the access line,
ISP core network, or further out from the Internet. People just don't
have the tools to help them understand what's going on. The only thing
they can say is "my Internet is slow", which of course says nothing what
the problem really is. Current devices can't even tell them if DNS
lookups are slow, if TCP establishment is slow, if TCP transfer rate is
low because of packet loss, because of high delay, because of something
else. This information just isn't available to the end user, and it's
sad state of affairs.
Well that's the part that isn't easy to do. Particularly since
different problems can have identical symptoms. They may have slight
packet loss that doesn't impact anything other than DNS or other UDP
and makes sites far away very slow while sites within a few hops are
not affected.
The IETF, vendors and ISPs are all quite siloed so I don't know where we
would start to actually improve this. I tried talking to the TCP people
at the IETF and had no takers. I tried talking to the IPPM people, but
they just want to measure with test traffic. I don't know who to talk to
next.
I think an area that can be improved greatly in CPEs is enhanced signal
reporting. You look at a typical cable modem CPE and it might show
signal to noise ratios on the cable but there's nothing in the interface
showing if the numbers are good or bad. Even putting a bar in there
that shows a continuum of red to green with the signal somewhere on that
would be helpful - as the customer can tell the tech support person
"My WAN signal levels are all showing red" and the frontline support
person can't then argue that's normal. After all, all WAN connectivity
does run on lower level something.
Ted
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