The joys and trouble of getting a TDC fibre
UPDATE: I switched to Gigabit.
There I have gigabit internet terminated in an Ethernet outlet, a fixed IPv4 address without any additional cost ... and IPv6. It's amazing.
I recently moved and got access to a fibre from TDC. Having fibre
internet to your home is awsome and gives you the potentiel to enjoy a
fast internet connection with low latency.
The product that TDC sells does come with some caveats.
I have the "Home trio" product. That includes telephony, TV and
internet. I haven't used the telephony part, but you can't avoid it.
The base TV package has 51 channels. The internet connection is 50
MBps downstream and 10 MBps upstream.
The joys
It's great to have an internet connection with low latency. It makes
the network feel a lot faster.
It's faster than the 20/2 MBps ADSL I had before.
The TV seems to work as expected.
The trouble
- Why is it only 50/10 MBps when the same company sells 100/20 MBps over cable TV for 50 DKK/month less or 300/60 MBps for 50 DKK/month more? Gigabit.dk is even able to deliver 1000/1000 MBps with native IPv6 at the same price that I'm paying TDC. Unfortunately Gigabit.dk is unable to deliver a TV signal.
- The connection comes with the worst piece of hardware called a "HomeBox".
- Latency over Wifi with the HomeBox is several milliseconds. I expected it to be around 1 millisecond, which is what I get if I use my own access point. Why ruin the low latency connection with crappy hardware.
- The HomeBox can only do static port forwards to IPs that it handed out over DHCP, so no static IPs, only static DHCP leases. This was unknown to the supporters that I talked to while debugging why the port forwarding didn't work, and the HomeBox didn't complain when making the forwards that wouldn't work.
- The fibre ends in a media converter that connects to the HomeBox over ethernet. By looking at the interfaces on the HomeBox and various other ressources on the web I guess that TV comes tagged as VLAN 34 and internet comes tagged as VLAN 101, but no one at TDC has been willng to confirm this. I'm hoping to find time to set up my own gear instead of the HomeBox
- You can't choose to use other DNS servers with the HomeBox because the admin interface does not allow you to change these to some that are not censored like the TDC name servers.
- TCP ports 25 and 119 are closed by default. You have to call support to have them opened so you can run SMTP and NNTP services.
- A fixed IPv4 address costs 50 DKK/month.
- There is no IPv6.
In other words, I have chosen TDC for the low latency and the TV
signal. But I'm very far from impressed with the product they are
delivering.
My plan to work around the crappy hardware from TDC:
- Find a managed switch that can split the VLANs into TV and internet. Using a bit of sniffing it should be possible to figure out what goes where.
- Use a Linux box as a router/firewall for my home network.
- Use my own access point to get better Wifi performance.
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