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[Black Sheep]

  I don’t understand why Openreach doesn’t escalate the issues given that there have been so many repeat faults mended again and again.

They do - it's called the FVR (Fault Volume Reduction) programme.

If a certain area has a high amount of repeat fault reports, then the powers that be will look at the historic cost of 'truck rolls' per fault (used to be around £350) and make an educated decision if an upgrade would be frugal.

Which also leads me to believe, you are the only individual reporting faults in your locality.

[Chrysalis]

Weaver you can just reduce MTU on the DSL if you want it to match.  Although you might find once you getting circa 50+ mbit on the 4G, you wont need to bond for bandwidth, that will feel like a huge amount given what you been used to, so might be better to just configure the DSL as auto failover.

Alex, mine has been ok on pfSense, but on windows, when AAISP had an outage, it just disconnected and stayed off, pfSense if that happens reconnects fine, although I have increased the fail parameters on the monitoring to make it more lenient, as I would rather my policy routing not switch for a very short drop.

[Chrysalis]

They do - it's called the FVR (Fault Volume Reduction) programme.

If a certain area has a high amount of repeat fault reports, then the powers that be will look at the historic cost of 'truck rolls' per fault (used to be around £350) and make an educated decision if an upgrade would be frugal.

Which also leads me to believe, you are the only individual reporting faults in your locality.

Interesting, when my last engineer visited last month I learnt something about work been done in my area.

Some may remember my DSL jumped up from circa 60 mbit to a fairly consistent high 70s, 80mbit, I assumed it was from when they fixed the tie pairs at the cabinet.

Well it turns out when I told the engineer my line was syncing way higher than the line estimates, he said the estimates are based on old data and in the area they actually did some copper rerouting, he said it was unusual but was a lot of speed faults in the area at the time.  Even though he couldnt fix anything on the call out we had a very good chat.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Alex, mine has been ok on pfSense, but on windows, when AAISP had an outage, it just disconnected and stayed off, pfSense if that happens reconnects fine, although I have increased the fail parameters on the monitoring to make it more lenient, as I would rather my policy routing not switch for a very short drop.

The problem is its regional, if your tower gets periodically overloaded then no matter what parameters you end up with the firewall restarting constantly and killing connectivity.  So I had to turn off monitoring entirely as having your backup connection cause your main connection to be unstable defeats the point of having one.

It doesn't help I've had the 5G router go offline a few times needing data toggled to get it back.

[Chrysalis]

Well it sounds like he isnt cancelling the DSL, so if it doesnt work out he is just back where it was, configure the DSL as backup.

I do sympathise with Weaver, he is paying a ton for multiple business lines with higher priority faults as well, so he is paying a fair whack for his service.

Also 5G has problems that 4G doesnt have, I deliberately disable 5G on my phone.

There is people who use 4G as their day to day broadband, and every time I have used it, it doesnt drop out, has been reliable, so its worth him trying.

On your connectivity going down on firewall restarts, if you using pfSense 2.6.0 enable the PF counters patch, a new feature causes massive latency spikes on every firewall reload, the patch disables the feature.  To be absolutely clear I have never had a 4g disconnect when hooked up to pfSense.  Its actually DSL isp's that give me uptime headaches.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I've used 5G and 4G, and while 5G has problems more often (likely as its adding more traffic to the 4K upstream until they roll out of proper 5G), they both had days where it was practically unusable and were talking completely different networks/cells.

Not sure what 5G specific issues you mean other than the above, given 5G is supposed to improve congestion issues over 4G.

[Chrysalis]

I've used 5G and 4G, and while 5G has problems more often (likely as its adding more traffic to the 4K upstream until they roll out of proper 5G), they both had days where it was practically unusable and were talking completely different networks/cells.

Not sure what 5G specific issues you mean other than the above, given 5G is supposed to improve congestion issues over 4G.

Well what are you trying to say here, are you suggesting Weaver should not try it because you think 7km ADSL lines are better that the ISP has said is now a wont fix?

5G specific issues related to very spotty coverage, its coverage is a fraction of 4G and the radius is much smaller as well with lower indoor penetration.

As an example my phone gets a only a few hundred kbit on 5G, but 24/7 120mbit on 4G.  5G needs lots of extra masts to work as well.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Well what are you trying to say here, are you suggesting Weaver should not try it because you think 7km ADSL lines are better that the ISP has said is now a wont fix?

No I was saying whatever he does DON'T get rid of the DSL and don't be surprised if his Zoom calls (or whatever it was he was doing) still suck.

I guess I shouldn't worry given his networking knowledge and he is already familiar with 3G backup.

[Chrysalis]

No I was saying whatever he does DON'T get rid of the DSL.

Regardless, I suggest you enable that pfSense patch as your connectivity going down on a firewall reload isnt normal.  (unless you enabled the option to reset states).

[Alex Atkin UK]

If there's one thing I dislike about Netgate its how long it is between releases.  They seem to be grossly understaffed for bugfixing.

[Chrysalis]

If there's one thing I dislike about Netgate its how long it is between releases.  They seem to be grossly understaffed for bugfixing.

There is a fair amount of niggly issues yeah, they will fix promptly if a patch is provided, but when its just a bug report it can be left at there for years, I think they usually prioritise things that affect the paying customers.

I have about 20 patches I made running on my unit right now, some of them will be submitted but some wont be as I think they wouldnt accept, I do plan to put them on the kitz wiki page soon.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I'm always a bit worried patches will break future upgrades, or are they applied on-the-fly so the installation remains stock?

[Chrysalis]

I'm always a bit worried patches will break future upgrades, or are they applied on-the-fly so the installation remains stock?

Those patches in the screenshot are done by the pfsense devs who maintain the package, These dev supplied patches I think will only be allowed on the right specific pfsense build (note it says 2.6.0 in the black box), these dev supplied patches I believe will all be part of 2.7.0, they just made the patches to get the fixes out quicker.

Above those patches which I didnt screenshot is my custom patches.

You can choose to have them auto reapply on pfSense updates or to leave auto update off so if the code changes, the patch will be there available but not applied.

However there is sanity checks, it wont apply the patch if it detects its not compatible (like if only some lines would patch instead of all).  It will hide the apply button, and auto apply will be overruled if its not a clean patch, I used to auto apply, but now I dont, and just put 'ON' at the end of the name to signify I currently use that patch so I know which ones to reapply after an update.  In short if you disable auto apply, any updates will remain stock until you decide to apply the patch, patches applied can be easily unapplied by clicking revert.

[Chrysalis]

Weaver I hope the little back and fro between me and Alex didnt put you off, please let us know how you get on and what you decide.

I assume if you do get wireless, it will be to supplement and not replace the DSL as Alex suggested.

[Weaver]

I’m going to ask AA if I can bond DSL and L2TP, provided I sort out MTUs properly.