Leaving aside Firebrick’s 6000 series or x000 series or whatever, the FB ISP-grade line of routers that are terrifyingly expensive - ~£12k ? - I wonder if there will be a SOHO or small/medium business Firebrick that can route and firewall a full 1 Gbps, or 2.5 Gbps, or 5 Gbps or a no-nonsense 10 Gbps? Does anyone know anything?
I’m not sure that an FB 2900 can fully cope with 900 Mbps or 1 Gbps? (I thought I saw a figure of around 700 Mbps router throughput, but I can’t remember which FB model it was for ?)
AA is going to have to do something about this then pdq, no? I don’t really want to have to go over to the likes of MikroTik, because of the hassle, despite MikroTik being quite sexy kit from the very little I know. I get the impression that MikroTik performance is scary in some of their devices but I really need to read up more.
I would have to work out how to do the config for a different router such as MikroTik, although I know I can get help here of course, and there are MikroTik articles on AA’s support website at
https://support.aa.net.uk/Router_-_RouterOS_and_Routerboard. I understand the Firebrick to a certain basic level and love its UI and logical design. But the great thing is that I get awesome handholding, support and remote diagnosis and fixes from AA. I also have tools that can talk to a Firebrick: config upload tool with sanity checks on the config’s appropriateness for the correct model and the correct site!; pulling status info for all attached devices such as modems to give an overall WAN health overview; extract AA account quota remaining info. Just when I’ve finished adjusting to say MikroTik, Firebrick ltd would probably come out with the higher throughput device that I needed earlier but wasn’t willing to wait for.
Another killer for me is my philosophy of ‘where the buck stops’: currently any problem always lies at AA’s door: they can't blame router problems because it’s their kit; it’s their network and even if it’s a BT problem then it’s their responsibility to deal with it
for me; if bad modems - they sold me
one of my ZyXEL VMG 1312-B10A modems, not all of three+spares; I got the modem config from AA, with only minimal changes needed for my situation including multiple modems because I have an IP-bonded multiple DSL links setup. I have always had a hatred of situations where their is some problem and two or more parties both passing the buck and each blaming the other, passing the problem back and forth, so I’ve always been keen to avoid this possibility as far as possible. So that’s another big reason of sticking to Firebrick.
An aside: When the likes of BT advertise 900 Mbps downstream links for FTTP, do they mean 900 Mbps TCP payload ? ie TCP SDU rate, with who knows what packet size, maybe max-size packets. Is that just to cover them in case someone has never heard of the concept of TCP and IPv4 / IPv6 headers, so that they’re really talking about IP PDU rate ie including TCP and IP headers, as they should do in my opinion because then that is measuring the link, not the protocols. Who is even to say that a particular user is using IP, or TCP ? It’s ethernet is it ? (Not sure, if so, then we need to also include the cost of ethernet header overheads.) Anyway, quoting a figure of 900 Mbps is good of BT, because then no ignorant end users will be misled and disappointed, but it would be good to also quote the true link throughput capability, explicitly stating what protocols’ overheads are counted in the figures from whatever test procedures. What you would get from iperf might be one useful method and I’d also like to see an adjusted figure for true total throughput including all headers, to give the highest possible number.
If you include all headers, would the downstream L2 PDUs figure for BT Openreach PON FTTP be ~1Gbps? Anyone know a more exact number ?