Random Tech Questions you want answered.

My installer was great, but it's clear that information about what he called the "new platform" isn't flowing particularly well.

Wouldn't have been an issue if I was doing a traditional use-their-router install. And in my research I found that there ARE plenty of Frontier FIOS users able to run the Ethernet connection from the ONT directly to their own router without the additional middleman, so I understand a bit why there's confusion about what setup does and doesn't work. There seems to be a lot of inconsistency in the behavior across platforms and geographic locations.

What's frustrating is how trivial the fix was. Like, "oh on this platform you must have our device connected to the ONT, just pop it into bridge mode and connect it to your router". Bing bang boom, no problems, no double NAT or anything. But Frontier just doesn't seem to have this info sorted out and available to the rank-and-file.

*Legion* wrote:

And in my research I found that there ARE plenty of Frontier FIOS users able to run the Ethernet connection from the ONT directly to their own router without the additional middleman, so I understand a bit why there's confusion about what setup does and doesn't work.

I'm on Verizon and that's what I do. The ONT and the gateway in your setup are functionally doing the exact same thing. The ONT takes a fiber input and gives an ethernet output, and functions much like a DOCSIS cable modem that takes an RF input and gives an ethernet output. This is provisioned with the IP that is tied to your account, and it's just a bridge so it forwards it on to the next device. In your case, that's now a gateway that's in bridge mode, so it's just taking the IP from the ONT and forwarding it on to your router. And you're probably paying them for the privilege of having their gateway in your network for no reason.

PurEvil wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

And in my research I found that there ARE plenty of Frontier FIOS users able to run the Ethernet connection from the ONT directly to their own router without the additional middleman, so I understand a bit why there's confusion about what setup does and doesn't work.

I'm on Verizon and that's what I do. The ONT and the gateway in your setup are functionally doing the exact same thing. The ONT takes a fiber input and gives an ethernet output, and functions much like a DOCSIS cable modem that takes an RF input and gives an ethernet output. This is provisioned with the IP that is tied to your account, and it's just a bridge so it forwards it on to the next device. In your case, that's now a gateway that's in bridge mode, so it's just taking the IP from the ONT and forwarding it on to your router. And you're probably paying them for the privilege of having their gateway in your network for no reason.

When I upgraded my Verizon FIOS service from 150Mb to Gigabit, I was told that the coax cable connection couldn't support anything over 200Mb, and that I would have to use the ethernet port coming from the ONT to my router. Which was fine by me - I didn't want their crappy cable modem anyway.

PurEvil wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

And in my research I found that there ARE plenty of Frontier FIOS users able to run the Ethernet connection from the ONT directly to their own router without the additional middleman, so I understand a bit why there's confusion about what setup does and doesn't work.

I'm on Verizon and that's what I do. The ONT and the gateway in your setup are functionally doing the exact same thing. The ONT takes a fiber input and gives an ethernet output, and functions much like a DOCSIS cable modem that takes an RF input and gives an ethernet output. This is provisioned with the IP that is tied to your account, and it's just a bridge so it forwards it on to the next device. In your case, that's now a gateway that's in bridge mode, so it's just taking the IP from the ONT and forwarding it on to your router. And you're probably paying them for the privilege of having their gateway in your network for no reason.

Do you use fios for internet + cable, or internet only? I was under the impression you couldn't have both ports provide interenet and this would prevent the set top box from having updated listings. More research on my part is probably required. For household sanity reasons, cord cutting is not yet an option.

Internet only, haven't had cable since I worked for Comcast and it was heavily discounted (almost all channels with a DVR, internet, and phone for $25/mo). But I'd be surprised if it functioned that way. My guess was always that the coax port functioned more like MoCA for internet service. But that was more of a guess as I have no coax run through the house so never had a reason to hook that port up.

When I upgraded my Verizon FIOS service from 150Mb to Gigabit, I was told that the coax cable connection couldn't support anything over 200Mb, and that I would have to use the ethernet port coming from the ONT to my router. Which was fine by me - I didn't want their crappy cable modem anyway.

That's likely a limitation of the modem, as it's certainly not a limitation of the cable medium itself. A coax channel can support around 166 6Mhz channels, each with a throughput of around 40 Mbps. But that means nothing if you don't have enough transceivers running on those channels.

PurEvil wrote:
When I upgraded my Verizon FIOS service from 150Mb to Gigabit, I was told that the coax cable connection couldn't support anything over 200Mb, and that I would have to use the ethernet port coming from the ONT to my router. Which was fine by me - I didn't want their crappy cable modem anyway.

That's likely a limitation of the modem, as it's certainly not a limitation of the cable medium itself. A coax channel can support around 166 6Mhz channels, each with a throughput of around 40 Mbps. But that means nothing if you don't have enough transceivers running on those channels.

That's what I figured, given that e.g. Comcast offers gig-E over coax. Presumably Vz just didn't want to send me a new modem, or didn't want to support higher-tier modems.

I'm looking to improve the cooling on my AMD Ryzen 5 3600, as with the included cooler it gets pretty damn hot under load (95C). I came across this one, which has good reviews and doesn't cost too much. Would this be a good replacement?

A quick Google tells me a Ryzen 5 3600 is AM4, and the cooler you linked there doesn't seem to list AM4 as compatible. So, no, it would not be.

Could have sworn I checked that, yet here we are. Thanks for catching that!

Supports up to 100W AMD CPUs AM4, AM3+, AM3, AM2+, AM2, FM2+, FM2, FM1,940, 939, 754

Should be fine. Ryzen 3600 is a 65w cpu.

I was looking at the bullet points and didn't see AM4 in there, but the product listing says AM4, so... maybe? I don't know, it's confusing.

PurEvil wrote:

The ONT takes a fiber input and gives an ethernet output, and functions much like a DOCSIS cable modem that takes an RF input and gives an ethernet output. This is provisioned with the IP that is tied to your account, and it's just a bridge so it forwards it on to the next device. In your case, that's now a gateway that's in bridge mode, so it's just taking the IP from the ONT and forwarding it on to your router. And you're probably paying them for the privilege of having their gateway in your network for no reason.

My suspicion is that this might be the "VLAN0" issue, ie. the packets coming from the ONT have a VLAN0 802.1Q tag, which the Frontier gateway is configured to support, but which a lot of other equipment either doesn't support (pfSense currently doesn't) or requires additional setup and config to accept.

I've read about people both using other routers which support VLAN0 as well as people using dumb switches to naively strip the VLAN tagging from the traffic passing through them as alternatives.

I may mess around with this at some point to see if I can remove the gateway from the equation, but it's not a pressing issue. And I'm not yet certain this is exactly the problem, as this is once again one of those details that seems to vary across Frontier's different deployments and geographical regions.

beanman101283 wrote:

I'm looking to improve the cooling on my AMD Ryzen 5 3600, as with the included cooler it gets pretty damn hot under load (95C). I came across this one, which has good reviews and doesn't cost too much. Would this be a good replacement?

You can get the GAMMAXX 300 for $15 right now and get a 3rd heatpipe that the 200T lacks.

That makes sense. I mean, it being VLAN tagged and routers not natively working makes sense, but it doesn't make sense why they would tag traffic in the first place unless it was to force more people into leasing their equipment. It's a LAN... why do you need to tag traffic (by default) in a private residential LAN? I'd grab a switch and set it up for VLAN tagging just to spite them.

I think all my years being a tech for Comcast has made me a bit spiteful against ISPs doing stupid sh*t that makes things unnecessarily difficult on consumers.

NSMike wrote:

I was looking at the bullet points and didn't see AM4 in there, but the product listing says AM4, so... maybe? I don't know, it's confusing.

I must have done the same thing when I went back to check. Definitely odd.

*Legion* wrote:

You can get the GAMMAXX 300 for $15 right now and get a 3rd heatpipe that the 200T lacks.

Thanks, I'll look into this!

PurEvil wrote:

it doesn't make sense why they would tag traffic in the first place unless it was to force more people into leasing their equipment. It's a LAN... why do you need to tag traffic (by default) in a private residential LAN? I'd grab a switch and set it up for VLAN tagging just to spite them.

So, I believe the priority tagging has something to do with how they provide TV and phone traffic. I don't know the details for sure, but references to TV/phone service seemed to come up a lot surrounding discussion of that tagging. It does seem like whatever problem is being solved could have been solved in a different way, though, so there may still be some user-hostility going on.

I think all my years being a tech for Comcast has made me a bit spiteful against ISPs doing stupid sh*t that makes things unnecessarily difficult on consumers.

Oh my god, when I went to my parents' house to try and help replace their Comcast-provided modem with one of mine, the activation process was like pulling teeth. It runs through a phone app now? Which of course is super convenient to use when your wifi's Internet access is down because you're trying to activate a new modem and maybe don't have the best cell data service in that location. Worse, the app just failed and kept taking us in circles, necessitating a phone call with a long wait to get someone to do the part that we couldn't get the phone app to do (after much arguing when they tried to push us to use the phone app).

Also, when I upgraded my own Comcast service to gigabit (with my DOCSIS 3.1 modem already in place, the excellent Arris S33), I didn't actually get gigabit speeds until I called someone and got my service updated by manual intervention. What do you want to bet that, next week when I downgrade my Comcast service to the 600 Mb plan, my gigabit speeds will disappear without someone having to touch it?

When I had an EDGE (2G) cell phone, the connection dropping down to GPRS (1G) meant "you're not gonna get any data".

When I had a 3G cell phone, the connection dropping down to EDGE meant "you're not gonna get any data".

When I had an LTE (4G) cell phone, the connection dropping down to 3G meant "you're not gonna get any data".

Now I have a 5G cell phone, and the connection dropping down to LTE means "you're not gonna get any data".

Just had an interesting week at a remote old-fashioned resort in Maine. Phone signal was very limited, as was their Wifi. I finally figured out that their phone system was working connections up from 2G; if you had that, it would use that and no more.

So I told my phone to do LTE/3G, and blammo, in came the emails and all sorts of other queued content. I was able to do everything I needed with that. (I was pretty sure the 5G was not going to reach to where I was).

However, I turned full spectrum back on. 5G going up I-95 was kinda spotty but worked okay. Coming back down, I got a "5G UC" connection almost all the way from Bath Maine to my home, and the connection just screamed the whole time. Excellent call quality, no drops, internet everywhere.

Now I have it in my house. T-Mobile must have done some kind of radical upgrade. 5G UC is their 5G service for bandwidth, coupled with a 2.5GHz additional channel to add reach. Very very nice.

Robear wrote:

Just had an interesting week at a remote old-fashioned resort in Maine. Phone signal was very limited, as was their Wifi. I finally figured out that their phone system was working connections up from 2G; if you had that, it would use that and no more.

So I told my phone to do LTE/3G, and blammo, in came the emails and all sorts of other queued content. I was able to do everything I needed with that. (I was pretty sure the 5G was not going to reach to where I was).

However, I turned full spectrum back on. 5G going up I-95 was kinda spotty but worked okay. Coming back down, I got a "5G UC" connection almost all the way from Bath Maine to my home, and the connection just screamed the whole time. Excellent call quality, no drops, internet everywhere.

Now I have it in my house. T-Mobile must have done some kind of radical upgrade. 5G UC is their 5G service for bandwidth, coupled with a 2.5GHz additional channel to add reach. Very very nice.

T-mobile just added a butt load of frequency at the recent FCC auction.

WizKid wrote:

T-mobile just added a butt load of frequency at the recent FCC auction.

Yup, they bought spectrum licenses in 2,724 different counties (out of 3,143 total counties in the US).

Hoping this will finally mean my wife gets coverage in the rural school where she works. Santa Barbara County was one of the counties covered in the auction. If not, I suppose their deal with Starlink will eventually cover that ground.

Well, it was an amazing change for me, both on the trip and at home. Very, very cool upgrade at no cost.

Mozilla reaffirms that Firefox will continue to support fully functional content blocking extensions, in the face of Google pushing the extensions API in a direction that will limit the capability of content blocking extensions in Chrome and Chromium-based browsers.

This is your 1000th reminder that, if you aren't running Firefox as your primary browser, you should be.

*Legion* wrote:

Mozilla reaffirms that Firefox will continue to support fully functional content blocking extensions, in the face of Google pushing the extensions API in a direction that will limit the capability of content blocking extensions in Chrome and Chromium-based browsers.

This is your 1000th reminder that, if you aren't running Firefox as your primary browser, you should be.

And if anyone wants to stick with a Chromium-based browser, Brave will also continue to block ads after v3. (To quote the best explanation I've seen for this, Brave's blocking "is native to the browser rather than an external extension and has never used any extension api, so any changes to the extension api will not affect ad-blocking done by Brave Shields in Brave browser.")

I use Brave on my phone currently, and it's functionally the same as Chrome, Edge and the rest, except with no ads.

*Legion* wrote:

Mozilla reaffirms that Firefox will continue to support fully functional content blocking extensions, in the face of Google pushing the extensions API in a direction that will limit the capability of content blocking extensions in Chrome and Chromium-based browsers.

This is your 1000th reminder that, if you aren't running Firefox as your primary browser, you should be.

I had switched from using Firefox as my main browser to using Google Chrome several years ago because something was making Firefox unstable and I couldn't figure out what it was. Eventually it got sorted out but I never went back. I switched back to Firefox last night after reading this. Thanks for the info

Also Firefox is the fast browser now. Tracking schmacking it's just nicer to use.

I had to downgrade my version of Firefox because 103 or 104 was causing an issue with video playback. Didn't matter the site, whether YouTube or reddit, or whatever, videos would play choppy, but in a strange way, like it was compressing a second or two of playback into a half second. It made everything unbearable but I haven't seen anyone else reporting that kind of issue.

I haven't seen that exact issue, but I have seen Firefox hang on a site when trying to play a video, to the point where the only recourse was to close the browser.

Tasty Pudding wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

Mozilla reaffirms that Firefox will continue to support fully functional content blocking extensions, in the face of Google pushing the extensions API in a direction that will limit the capability of content blocking extensions in Chrome and Chromium-based browsers.

This is your 1000th reminder that, if you aren't running Firefox as your primary browser, you should be.

And if anyone wants to stick with a Chromium-based browser, Brave will also continue to block ads after v3. (To quote the best explanation I've seen for this, Brave's blocking "is native to the browser rather than an external extension and has never used any extension api, so any changes to the extension api will not affect ad-blocking done by Brave Shields in Brave browser.")

I use Brave on my phone currently, and it's functionally the same as Chrome, Edge and the rest, except with no ads.

I use Brave on my tablet to watch youtube without ads. I'm a bad boy.

I use Firefox on my Android phone and tablet with uBlock Origin installed. I use it for all media sites rather than using the built-in app. The controls can sometimes be a little fiddly to use, especially for Youtube, but I'll make that sacrifice in exchange for stripping out all the ad content that I don't want to see....

Does Brave block ads on iOS?