Hi, . A lightning strike near my parents' house frazzled their phone and Internet connection, yesterday. It has damaged and disabled their ISP-provided router, as well as disabled the phone service, which indicates that at least one other piece of equipment – possibly the faceplate or equipment at the exchange – has also been damaged by the electromagnetic pulse from the strike. . While that other damage is diagnosed and fixed, I could do with getting a VDSL2 modem that, together with an existing OpenWrt, non-DSL router, will replace the nonlibre, ISP-provided, VDSL2 router. . As always, I'd prefer it to be OSH and run libre firmware. If possible, it would ideally be able to analyse the frequency spectrum of SNR or attenuation on the line, and show something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ADSL_spectrum_Fritz_Box_Fon_WLAN.png That, and any other diagnostics, would be really useful to quickly determine the quality of their long rural line which has several outages and degradations per year. . Seeing as this is the 3rd occasion in about a decade and a half that an EMP has frazzled their modem / modem router, and seeing as I'm planning to get an ADSL2+ Annex M landline myself in my flat, if there's an OSH VDSL2/ADSL2+ modem that can show diagnostics then I'd gladly get 3 of them! . Otherwise, please advise me on recommendations of the freeëst such modem(s) available.
Best regards, James R. Haigh.
On 14/09/16 21:17, J. R. Haigh wrote:
if there's an OSH VDSL2/ADSL2+ modem that can show diagnostics then I'd gladly get 3 of them! . Otherwise, please advise me on recommendations of the freeëst such modem(s) available.
I would like to have that too.
Sadly, as far as I know, the most free solution is to have a non-free router/modem in bridged mode for the DSL and then do PPPoE and upwards on your free software and free hardware router.
A related question was asked on the Debian-uk list recently:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/debian-uk/2016-August/000392.htm...
which included a link back to this older post:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/debian-uk/2013-August/000202.htm...
M.
On 14 September 2016 at 21:40, Michael Dorrington michael.dorrington@member.fsf.org wrote:
On 14/09/16 21:17, J. R. Haigh wrote:
if there's an OSH VDSL2/ADSL2+ modem that can show diagnostics then I'd gladly get 3 of them! . Otherwise, please advise me on recommendations of the freeëst such modem(s) available.
I would like to have that too.
Sadly, as far as I know, the most free solution is to have a non-free router/modem in bridged mode for the DSL and then do PPPoE and upwards on your free software and free hardware router.
That is what I would suspect also. ISTR that the modem bit tends to be done using SoCs from Broadcom and the like — vendors not known for the openness... — with DSP capabilities added to handle the (de)modulation, which with modern data rates would probably require a fairly hefty device to achieve the same with a general purpose processor.
I should also imagine that the DSP firmware is highly proprietary and probably has to be certified by the Broadband Forum or similar, such that if you use a non-type approved (expensive process!) hardware/firmware combination and as a result end up causing nuisance, the penalty may be high. This is all just a guess and I'd love to be proved wrong :o)
Cheers,
Andrew