Author Archives: Gabriel

About Gabriel

I am the sole proprietor of this site. Caveat emptor!

Working as Designed

My ~3 month follow up to Installing Bell Fibre Internet is due and there’s not really a whole lot to say.

My observations:

  • I’ve had no outages and no technical issues between Bell’s CO and my own router.
  • Latency and bandwidth seem stable and consistent with what I’ve paid for, when measured. I plan on gathering data and publishing some analysis in the future.
  • The price is about the same as what I paid TSI for a lower bandwidth cable service.
  • The hardware is aimed primarily at bundling Internet and entertainment, but it works.
  • There is an acceptable method of configuring the modem to act as a pass through device so I can manage my home network using my Turris Omnia router.
  • Bell is difficult to deal with and likes to obfuscate their billing details.

So, I suppose this is to say that I’ve gotten more or less what I expected in the best case scenario.

In summary: It’s great to have a highly reliable fibre service into my home. It’s also a shame that Canada’s telecommunications industry is so moribund that Bell isn’t forced to do a better job. I have no complaints, just laments!

Installing Bell Fibre Internet

Unfortunately it appears that TSI is throwing in the towel as a truly independent ISP. So for this and some technical reasons (it’s the only way I can get FTTH where I live), I’ve decided to go back to being a Bell Canada Internet customer.

It’s the first time I’ve been with Bell for home Internet service since my original DSL connection! Though to be fair, in general, I’ve never had any big problems with their technology, just their business practices.

So I now have a Bell HH4000, a Bell branded Sagemcom F@st 5689, on my shelf. The hardware itself seems fairly well made, though it’s definitely intended for Bell’s average customer, and out-of-the-box it is configured as a combined modem/gateway/wifi-router.

I’ve been reading through the various forum and blog posts from people who have successfully configured the HH4000 to act effectively as a PPPoE passthrough device, but I’m not totally satisfied with the results I’ve had based on this advice.

That said, in my limited usage, the service seems fast and stable. I’ve not seen any evidence of packet loss and the general performance and latency seems good when tested directly from the modem. (I seem to have some overhead on the link between my modem and router in the current config, possibly due to PPPoE in openwrt, possibly due to the physical topology of my old network devices).

I’m going to be making some changes on my router when I get around to upgrading my first-gen Turris Omina to my new third rev model that supports WiFi 6 and uses a 2.5Gbps SFP+ for its WAN link to the modem. At that point I’ll worry about refining the configuration. Once I’ve sorted out these details, I’ll be documenting my configuration in the wiki.

Note: A very short 3 month follow up can be found here.