Explain the new fiber modem/router please?

[joeyyung911]

What are you trying to accomplish?

[ankh]

I think I better just deal with Support, not kick this around in a forum thread.

[joeyyung911]

The point of a forum is to share your experience. Someone else might be in the same boat as you.

[ankh]

I trust anyone who has read the thread down through

Support said the older Pace has a somewhat stronger wifi radio and should work with the new fiber connection, just connect it up -- but no joy after connecting the ONT to port labeled for ONT on the older Pace device.

will understand the problem that I'm taking to support.

Bless your heart for trying to be helpful.

[ankh]

OK, long productive testing-stuff session with tech support.
Suspect the ONT hardware has a problem.
(among other indicators, the ONT voice light stayed dark even with a phone plugged in to the phone port

EDIT --- the ONT "voice" light only lights up when a phone is off hook so that's ok


, as well as no Internet over the ethernet even when the laptop was direct connected to the ONT)
EDIT -- solved, another device (Meraki Z1) was somehow causing the Sonic router to lose its IP address; power cycling the Z1 resolved the issue.

Much testing with plug this in, unplug that, how about now.
Good Support!

And this is the kind of reason I love Sonic.

Sonic: "We can get you a technician on the 14th, how's that?
Me: well, OK

Sonic: No, let me expedite that, is tomorow OK?
Me: Yeah, better

Then the phone rang, it's Sonic's dispatcher saying she has a truck in the neighborhood and is right now acceptable?

Me: hearts and flowers ...

Truck dispatched and a tech is on the way for this afternoon.

EDIT -- Roberto came by at the end of his work day, sweated over everything and got us working. My apology to his wife who wondered why he was late getting home(!)

Later we had an intermittent connection and phone support tracked the problem down to the Meraki Z1 device that was connected on our home network.

[ankh]

Ok, it was a defective ONT.
Tech said it was the second ONT he's had to replace recently.

Got it all hooked up and it tested good -- he could surf with his Windows laptop.
For about 20 minutes it wasn't talking to my Mac laptop at all, then I switched the network settings to plain DHCP, and suddently it's working

ping sonic.net
PING sonic.net (209.204.190.64): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=6.563 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=6.045 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=6.114 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=6.127 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=4 ttl=55 time=6.263 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=5 ttl=55 time=6.244 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=6 ttl=55 time=6.189 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=7 ttl=55 time=6.061 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=8 ttl=55 time=6.411 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=9 ttl=55 time=6.382 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=10 ttl=55 time=6.306 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=11 ttl=55 time=6.426 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=12 ttl=55 time=6.395 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=13 ttl=55 time=6.338 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=14 ttl=55 time=5.998 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=15 ttl=55 time=6.392 ms
64 bytes from 209.204.190.64: icmp_seq=16 ttl=55 time=6.466 ms
^C
--- sonic.net ping statistics ---
17 packets transmitted, 17 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 5.998/6.278/6.563/0.160 ms


speedtest Sonic wifi
Your download speed is 93.21 Mbps
Your upload speed is 94.02 Mbps

ethernet

Your download speed is 93.08 Mbps
Your upload speed is 94.14 Mbps


Your download speed is 92.72 Mbps
Your upload speed is 93.77 Mbps

===========
Hold on, that was with Mac OSX Network hardware Ethernet speed setting itself "automatically" --- so I thought, should I trust it? Naw. So I changed it to manual and the faster setting, and Lo:

Your download speed is 277.07 Mbps
Your upload speed is 217.03 Mbps

[ankh]

Well, and all the above was done with Ethernet going through an Apple Airport Express.
Soooo --- let's try direct Ethernet to one of the ports on the new Sonic router:

Your download speed is 573.55 Mbps
Your upload speed is 578.03 Mbps

Oh goodness.

[Larns576]

Supposedly, if you download the Speedtest for Windows program, you may get even better results. The web page version has a browser bottleneck somehow.

http://www.speedtest.net/apps/windows

[ankh]

Well, I could try running the Windows program in a virtual machine on my Mac, but that would probably add a layer of slowness to the test.

We discovered that a proprietary router used for working at home ("Meraki Z1") can cause the Sonic router to lose its IP address for ten or fifteen minutes out of every half hour or so, when it's connected. Investigation continues.

[ankh]

Another vaguely related gotcha ---

Changing from Fusion DSL to fiber means losing any old voicemail you had left on the system, and requires setting up voicemail again from scratch (*99 on the phone dial, or web page).

If you had any family or otherwise messages saved on the system, download them before changing service.