Bye cable, hello glass

Bit the bullet a few months ago and decided to go for a glass fiber connection. So after 25 years of cable internet from Casema/Ziggo we’re now hooked up to the optic fiber universe. Let’s see if it turned out to be the right decision.

Last year our whole region got a glass fiber network and getting your household hooked up was free of charge initially. But that changed now and just before getting charged for a connection I applied to get it done. Also the new provider has cheaper subscriptions, multiple TV channels with Ziggo were not working properly and with a glass fiber connection we will be ready for the future. I did look up to it though because for getting connected some work had to be done in our front yard. And even though it turned out ok-ish in the end I wasn’t really happy with the unannounced ventures in our front yard. Quite a part of the garden had to be opened up twice and everything isn’t really put back the way it was. Definitely no gardeners but that’s completely understandable.

Today the last things were taken care of, the media converter has been installed together with the router of the provider. The employee of the provider made sure everything worked properly and was done in less than an hour. After he left I only had to pull the network cable of my home network out the new router, stick it in the media converter, configure IPTV for VLAN 300 and tada, working internet with my own router setup (two Asus RT-AC68U’s in an AiMesh configuration). Took out the new router of the meter cupboard and loaded my stash of beer back in.

And is it faster? Partially. I already had a 1Gbit/s connection with Ziggo, but that was an asynchronous connection so upload is way faster now, about 8 times. Other pro is that the media converter is way smaller and probably draws less power. Other than that nothing really changed after the media converter which I like, fortunately there was no need to overhaul my whole home setup.

Bye cable, hello glass

New modem

A while ago I received a new modem from Ziggo since they’re switching to DOCSIS 3.1. Didn’t have the time to replace the old Ubee UVW3200 modem but this morning I was forced to do so because the lease had expired and Ziggo had decided to give me a new WAN IP address in a network segment with no internet.

After replacing the Ubee with the Sagemcom F3896LG-ZG I had no internet though. I did have a green LED lighting up our meter cupboard and apparently that indicated the modem was in bridge mode. The Ubee was also working in bridge mode so that could very well be possible. Quick search revealed I had to call Ziggo, have them disable bridge mode and then I could put it in bridge mode myself again. So I called, Ziggo disabled bridge mode and a few minutes later I still had nothing. No option to enable bridge mode. So I called again. Apparently in some regions the bridge mode option doesn’t show up so Ziggo enabled bridge mode again. Green LED reappeared after a while and tada, my router received a fresh new WAN IP address and there was internet again.

So if you run into similar issues when replacing your Ubee that was put in bridge mode by Ziggo with the new Sagemcom modem, call them. Modem works good now, it does use a bit more power (36W vs 24W for the Ubee) but a bonus is that you still have remote access to the modem which was not possible with the Ubee. And like the Ubee everything else but the modem functionality is disabled so it probably needs less than 36W at the moment. I’ll hook it up to a power monitoring smart plug to find out.

New modem

Kan het nóg goedkoper?

Ja dat kan bij Allobox.

Bizar lage tarieven, misschien een optie voor het bellen naar mobiele nummers via VoIP ipv. een Betamax/Dellmont kloon. Mobiele nummers bellen we nu via InterVoip maar hun tarieven liggen hoger dan die van Allobox.

Jeetje, je bent eigenlijk gek als je nog via een traditionele telecomboer belt. Vooral als je weet dat een aantal van hen (zoals Ziggo) het telefoonverkeer ook over internet gooit.

Edit: een andere zeer goedkope optie is Globe7.

Kan het nóg goedkoper?

Snelheidsverhoging Ziggo

Vanaf vrijdag 30 maart gaat m’n internetsnelheid omhoog van 40 om 4 naar 50 om 5. Dan moet ik wel m’n modem resetten dus dan ligt alles er even af. En in het ongunstigste geval krijg ik een nieuw IP en moet ik de DNS aanpassen van m’n domeinen die ik hier thuis heb draaien. Gelukkig zit de DNS bij Antagonist en die zijn retesnel.

Maar voor een snelheidsverhoging van 25% heb ik dat wel over. Kabelinternet rules. Wie had dat 12 jaar geleden gedacht met onze Drolsema (Casema) abbo’tjes? Toen deed ik nog dagen over het downloaden van een Slackware ISO. Nu haal ik dat theoretisch gezien binnen 15 seconden binnen.

Edit: modem gereset, heb gelukkig nog hetzelfde IP en snelheden zijn inderdaad omhoog gegaan.

Snelheidsverhoging Ziggo