Notes on 4 days' use of the TG589vn v3
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Tested on a TalkTalk ADSL2+ connection, medium line length, rather poor quality.
The DSL processing chip is a BCM6368.
1. General performance is excellent. Connection speed is ~300 kbps higher than other comparable modem/routers I've used recently. No issues with stability so far.
2. WiFi performance appears to be at least as good as the separate WAP I normally use, and video streaming is perfectly smooth.
3. LAN performance is as good as you would expect with 10/100 ethernet ports. Gigabit ports would be an improvement, but I don't transfer enough data around my LAN for this to be of any significance to me.
4. In my opinion the GUI interface is awful, and counter-intuitive in places. When I'm installing a new router I like to set everything up offline before connecting it to the telephone line, and Thomson routers make it quite difficult to do that. But in the end you can do most of the things you want to do in the GUI; it can just take a bit of time to work out how to do them.
5. There is a normal telnet interface giving access to the custom Thomson CLI. This has much the same features as other models in the range. There's an unofficial guide to the CLI here:
http://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/download.php?id=514441%E2%80%8E 6. There is an FTP interface which you can log into in the same way as telnet. This gives access to some commands which could be interesting for customisation:
eric@chaffinch:~$ ftp 192.168.1.254
Connected to 192.168.1.254.
220 Inactivity timer = 120 seconds. Use 'site idle <secs>' to change.
Name (192.168.1.254:eric): Administrator
331 Password required.
Password:
230 OK
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> help
Commands may be abbreviated. Commands are:
! dir mdelete qc site
$ disconnect mdir sendport size
account exit mget put status
append form mkdir pwd struct
ascii get mls quit system
bell glob mode quote sunique
binary hash modtime recv tenex
bye help mput reget tick
case idle newer rstatus trace
cd image nmap rhelp type
cdup ipany nlist rename user
chmod ipv4 ntrans reset umask
close ipv6 open restart verbose
cr lcd prompt rmdir ?
delete ls passive runique
debug macdef proxy send
ftp> ls
200 Connected to 192.168.1.30 port 53673
150 Opening data connection for /bin/ls
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 0 Jan 1 2000 tls
drwxr-xr-x 3 0 0 0 Jan 1 2000 osgi
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 0 Jan 1 2000 osgi.def
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 200 Sep 13 15:56 phy.conf
-r--r--r-- 1 0 0 9 Jan 1 2000 seed.dat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 106632 Sep 13 15:56 user.ini
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 26 Sep 11 09:22 persistent.cnf
226 Options: -l : 7 matches total
ftp>
6. DSLstats works with this model in the same way as other Thomson models, except that it reports traffic volumes slightly differently. Other models report bytes; this model reports KB or MB. The next release of DSLstats will have a mod to accommodate this.
7. I've been unable to find a means of getting pbParams data or any other way of automatically determining the band plan in use on VDSL2, but I guess there may be commands which are hidden unless you're actually on a VDSL2 connection. In the meantime I'll be looking at manual means of dealing with this in DSLstats.
8. There's no apparent way to tweak the target SNRM if that's what you want to do.
Overall, I would say that this appears to be a top class modem/router for ADSL2+. There are some limitations in the data which you can obtain for monitoring purposes. I have no information on VDSL2 performance.