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[bbnovice]

Hi:

Bit of a novice question I know,  but I've acquired from ebay a brand new unboxed BT Business Hub 2701HGV-C which I intend to use as a backup for the BT HH3 I'm currently using. (I am on BT FTTC Infinity 2).

Any tips for setting up the 2701 for FTTC or should it work out of the box?

Thanks
BBN
 

[burakkucat]

As far as I can determine (not having a VDSL2/FTTC service and not having Beattie as my CP/ISP but being the owner of one of those 2Wire devices), it should 'Just Work'.

What I would suggest you do, first of all, is to have the 2701HGV-C completely isolated and power it up. After a couple of minutes following power-up, press and hold the recessed 'reset' switch for ~30 seconds, then release it. Leave the device alone for another couple of minutes and then it is all ready for use -- totally reset to the factory defaults.

[bbnovice]

Hi Bcat,

Thanks for the info.

This morning I took the plunge, unboxed the 2 Wire and tried it out.

I simply peeled off the “DO NOT REMOVE” sticker from the Fibre port on the back, connected to the OR modem and PC and powered it up.
Establishing a connection to my FTTC Infinity 2 service was relatively painless, even without using the RESET step you mentioned. However:

(1) It initially tried to use a weird username/password to connect to the internet which failed. Substituting the usual my.name@btbroadband.com quickly fixed that issue.   

(2) By default it responded to unsolicited ICMP Pings so failed the Gibson Research test. Again that was simply fixed by changing the default on the router.

(3) The BT speed tester did not work properly if accessed via diagnostics.bt.com – you have to try it twice and on the second try it runs but warns that it cannot verify your line details/telephone number.   It seems to expect to communicate with a HH3 router. However the speedtest.btwholesale.com site  worked normally.

(4) The connection speed of the 2701 was noticeably slower than the HH3 on the Downstream side. My profile is 50/20 and over a period of several hours the 2701 operated at an average of 41.7/12.2 DS/US. The HH3 speed was tested immediately afterwards and averaged  49.2/11.4 over a period of about an hour.

The 2701 reports that its firmware is at 6.3.9.41 (which I believe to be the latest), and the broadband connection set up is shown in the attachments.

So in summary the 2701 will provide me with a more than adequate backup to the HH3 (especially as I paid next to nothing for it on ebay), but unfortunately the performance fell short of expectation.

Regards BBN

[burakkucat]

Thank you for that update and your notes.

I wonder, if the 2701HGV-C had been given as long as the HH3 has had connected, whether the throughput would have gradually improved?

[bbnovice]

Would that make a difference?

In my ignorance I thought that the router in a VDSL FTTC set up just worked (or not) and that it would not improve/degrade performance over time.

[burakkucat]

I am somewhat ignorant in such an area but being privy to the results from some of the lines that Walter and Bald_Eagle1 are monitoring, it does seem as if a PPPoE session can take a little while to stabilise. (I would, personally, have allowed at least 24 hours before noting the throughput results.)

Perhaps Bald_Eagle1 could give an opinion, please?

[Bald_Eagle1]

Perhaps Bald_Eagle1 could give an opinion, please?

I would certainly monitor any hardware changes over at least 24 hours. Probably 3 or 4 days would be a suitable period.

See the attached FEC/RSCorr Error graph.

We are not yet sure of the cause of these errors, but I'm fairly certain that performance would have been degraded during the peak error periods.

The cause could be any or a combination of the router, the modem, the cable quality, interference, the ISP's contended service etc. etc.

Maybe the 2701 will settle down over a reasonable period.
I would certainly allow it to try for a few days.

[bbnovice]

Many thanks for that info. I didn't realise that the router needs time to "bed in".

The 2701 is now back in its box. As posted earlier the 2701 is intended as a replacement for the HH3 should it give up the ghost in the future, so I'm not overly fussed about a slight performance degradation. If I ever need to deploy the 2701 I will certainly bear in mind your comments and keep its performance under review over the first 2-3 days.

Again, thanks for the advice.

BBN 

[asbokid]

The 2Wire 2701 has an interesting architecture.  It has a completely obscure Philips processor in it called a Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) Trimedia CPU. [1]  Similar to a multicore (five core), the VLIW however has a single instruction pointer, and a single set of registers. The CPU can crunch in parallel, but in very limited ways.

Philips, being Philips, have kept a veil of corporate secrecy over the Trimedia.  For example, there's no publicly available toolchain for it (compiler, assembler, linker).  Only a proprietary toolchain that costs several thousands euro.   Consequently, its "hacker interest" is very low.

There are some ramblings about the 2Wires here [2].   If anyone would like to hack the 2Wire, please drop me a line.  There are a few secrets not shared publicly that make hacking it much easier.

cheers, a

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_long_instruction_word
[2] http://hackingbtbusinesshub.wordpress.com/about/