when I first saw the PDF I thought “no problem, about 25% of it will be in English, and the rest in other languages like all the other kit you get these days”. But it was 1153 pages in English!

the device itself weighs 1.2 kilos (it is in a good solid metal case). The manual (lever arch binder included, as without it the contents would scatter everywhere) weighs in at 2.9 kilos (nearly the max weight of the small scale). And is physically way larger than the gateway.

It is a very nice piece of kit (my work had obtained it two years ago at some discount when FTTC was supposed to be deployed), but it didn’t get a great deal of operational use due to the delays in rollout meaning we had to continue with legacy ADSL products, you can’t turn off half the network in a old peoples home whilst trying to get a router to work without not just working late evenings but puttinng the whole place into emergency mode (red phones etc) as the phone system is VOIP..

For those who might complain about the “complex” Draytek UI, this is 10 times harder. TBH this kit its approaching the capabilities of an edge router you might find in a Telephone Exchange.

As the Draytek was purchased via my employers account these is a good chance that when it gets replaced with a working one (it seems to be a very simple issue probably do to with the PSU not being strong enough) I might just redeploy it for less critical use at another site out in the sticks (our largest one) when FTTC does finally get rolled out and keep this USG for my home (which also serves as test lab for new kit (and where I recover obsolete stuff and re-use it for the studio :laugh_at:)

I was going to pay back the cost of the Draytek but a 2 year old USG would be about the same price anyway, and advise my employers to get another Zyxel for the comms rack at this site, as it would be perfect for allowing patients and staff to use their smartphones, Android equipment etc, whilst giving more security/priority to more critical stuff that is there – this site has grown loads and its not uncommon for the older Draytek in the comms rack there to lock solid and have to be rebooted.

For the techies here this is the device. It is Taiwanese, but the EU headquarters appear to be in Denmark 😉

USG 200/100-PLUS/100/50/20W/20 | ZyXEL

Fibre to the Cabinet – instead of the ADSL circuit being delivered on a copper pair at the local Telephone Exchange (often taking bizzare routes along 1970s era cable with many splices), a fibre circuit is provided from the Telephone Exchange to various street cabinets, in the UK often conveniently located next to the existing green cabinets which contain loads of 237 blocks that are used to connect the cables in the ground to peoples houses either via other underground cables or overhead dropwire.

the cabinet looks like this inside

this is a 237 krone block

at the LHS the fibre is terminated and equipment converts it into multiples of 24 PSTN (analogue telephone) and VDSL ( fast broadband) circuits. it normally takes its power from the 230V street lighting circuit, and a PSU converts it to -48 VDC, but at the bottom are (hopefully!) some accus that are charged by the -48 VDC and should keep this going if the mains power fails.

on the RHS are yet more krone blocks, which is where the circuits from the line cards end up on. They would be connected via jumper wire and tie cables to the existing green box and from there to the customers premises.

So the copper circuit is only about 1.5 km max rather than 3km or more and higher frequency data resulting in faster broadband speeds is possible.

The BT Openreach engineer changes the faceplate of the master socket, tests the circuit and leaves you with a modem that has to be connected via a router capable of PPPoE WAN connections, which I have already set up, so hopefully on Tuesday it should just be a matter of swapping the WAN cable over.

I expect I will now have to run 230V “red mains” from one of the UPS units to the front of the house to power the Openreach kit, as it needs to be near the master socket and have power.

At least I’ve got plenty of mains cable and already got a safe route planned (150mm clear of the network cable)

@Dr Bunsen 561511 wrote:

Ok this country were calling that Fibre to the Node as opposed to Fibre to the Premise.

They may use similar terminology in Singapore and Malaysia for those flats in tower blocks and other multiple occupancy places, as the fibre would go to a service cupboard and from there also containing the DSLAMs and other associated kit, and copper circuits then get provided to the buildings (a mixture of VDSL or Ethernet and the phone being provided via VOIP) or in some cases the coax cable for existing cable TV services is used.

The use of this sort of green street cabinet is perhaps a “quaint British” type thing as it dates back from the time of the General Post Office (as does much of the existing copper wiring!).

British Telecom evaluated VDSL back in 2001. I recently read a blog from the Singapore hackerspace, and they had two FTTP circuits provided from Singtel (100MB for each one) 😉