Network

Sometimes you have to do Network things 

Network Overview

Wired is faster than WiFi. Fiber is better than copper. 10/100/1000 means a network device is capable of 1000 Mbps. This is also called “1g” or “1gbe.” 10g(be) is 10x faster than 1g, but it’s not something you encounter very often. I had 6 years of glorious 1g squared fiber and now I’m back to copper and it is… a bummer. If you have fiber in your neighborhood/building, it is the same price as a mediocre high-end cable line. Get the fiber.

In addition to the 1g and 10g flavors, there is also 2.5g, and 5g. You can probably assume what those numbers mean.

5ghz is faster than 2.4ghz, but 2.4ghz has better range. In other words: put all your smart home bullshit on 2.4ghz and all your computers and media devices on the 5ghz (or wired).

Some things you can do when your internet is bad or not working properly

When you’re troubleshooting networks that aren’t yours, you can almost always get into their admin panel and make some fixes (or cause some chaos). Navigate to your computer network settings, find the router address, copy and paste that into a browser. This is the admin panel for the network. The chances that the router’s login is “admin” and the password is “password” is surprisingly high. Also: once you know the router’s iP, you can figure out who the manufacturer is, and then you can google “default admin login x manufacturer. Have fun with that. For the lazy: you can usually type 10.0.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 and that’s the router iP.

I can also recommend buying a compact WAP and keeping it in your kit. I go through phases of doing this, then I sell it to a job and don’t replace it. A WAP of your own means that you can connect to an existing network and use your own settings so you don’t need to think about it much. Sometimes you need to coordinate with venue IT, but more often than not, you can get away with this and no one needs to know.

A good network hack is using Powerline devices. These are fairly affordable network devices that allow you to run LAN over power cables. A good use case is: you need to get a hard line to a different room in a hurry and the two rooms don’t have a clear cable path, but they do share a circuit. Plug the Powerline TX in one room and the RX in another. These are always slower than the real thing and other devices on the same power circuit can cause interference. Never put these on a switchable outlet because the interference at the switch is aggressive. A 1-gig line with a high-end Powerline on a circuit with moderate interference cuts your speeds to ~200 Tx/Rx.


Internet On Location

You’re on location and you need good internet but can’t rely on what’s immediately available? You should rent a bonded-SIM system.

FlypackNY / FeedCentral a company that does it in New York. Haven’t used them, but have used some of their gear (TVU pack was solid when used in Austria w/ 100up/100down). The guy I spoke with there is ANDY. Nice dude. Depending on where you are in the city it’s between 35x35 and 100x100, but mostly around 50x50.

Unifi/Ubiquiti

Unifi devices are kind of like a “prosumer” networking ecosystem. It’s a step up from an unmanaged network, but a step down from a legit network (think Sysco or similar). You can use it for a theater, but your probably shouldn’t use it for DOD. That said, for most things, it works great and the price is right. I'm personally a big fan

Some gotchas:

When you plug in a new network device, like a switch or WAP, you need to adopt it to your head-end (UDM). You can’t do this via the web interface, you have to do it via the iOS or Android app. This is the only dependency on handheld devices for setup. Everything else can be done via the web interface - which is pretty slick.


Home Network Chaos

So you want use your own network equipment over ISP provided? 

After years of battling this with multiple ISPs, I finally just used the ISP provided equipment. And in my 800 sq/ft apartment, using their mesh system I get nearly the full data pipe available to me over WiFi. The trick to not being continuously frustrated is to keep the ISP provided gear on default SSID name and password, that way, if there's a network reset of some kind, you won't have to reconfigure all your devices ✅

If you plug your own router "down the chain" below their supplied router, the speed will almost certainly be gated. 

If you remove their router from the chain and replace with yours, the speed will almost certainly be gated (Verizon 5G Home) or the internet might drop regularly (Optimum Cable).

One could call the ISP and ask them to set it up so it's not looking specifically for the MAC address of the supplied router. Calling up Optimum (cable) and doing this is pretty simple. Once they set this configuration, it worked like a charm. 

Verizon is a lot harder as their support won't... support third party network gear. I've spent a lot of time in their router's web portal(s) with all kinds of configurations and the best option was to find the MAC address of their router and clone it (or copy and paste it) to your own router. Now that we know this – such an obvious thing to do! But this didn't continue to work after a 5G system bork and I gave up. That said, it did work well for a time! 

Obviously : 

Proceed at your own risk!

Home 5G ISP Borked

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7 days of completely borked internet. 63 % uptime. YIKES! 

For posterity, and anyone else facing multiple days of Verizon home 5g outages.

Equipment : I am using the Verizon router CR1000A and a CE1000A extender on top of the gateway. I used to use my own router on top of the gateway, but it had tons of problems and Verizon wouldn't officially support it. The speeds I'm getting with the Verizon supplied devices is surprisingly superior (1200 down on wifi? Siccccck).

- Call 611 to see if your tower is effected. https://www.verizon.com/support/check-network-status/ doesn't have detail to tell you if it's your tower or your general area. If your tower is good, but the general area is messed up it will still read as messed up. This is probably the most frustrating aspect of this for me. The website, the chat support, and the AI support all pointed to this status page and they were all like "sorry it's broken, they're working on it, it should be fixed in 2 days." That was fundamentally false. The network status page is sort of like the weather forecast. It could report that it's heavily raining and you look out of the window and the skies are blue. I digress. Next:

- If your tower is clear, and your connectivity is sporadic or inconsistent, like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/verizon/comments/1vol2xs/day_6_of_verizon_home_wifi_down_in_brooklyn/ then your system is having trouble re-setting properly.

- Restarting your devices, including the receiver/gateway won't fix it, but here's what will:

1. Unplug any extender(s).

2. Factory reset (paperclip trick) your router. Side Effect: This will reset your router to Vanilla settings. I stopped doing custom names for my gear years ago because of this. As long as you are using the original name and password for the device, the factory reset won't bork all of your devices. This was a pleasant surprise.

3. Wait until the status lights return to indicate the router is back online.

4. Try to connect via WiFi - it might show up as available, and you might not be able to connect to it even with the default password. If you can connect via WiFi, fantastic. If you can't: plug in an ethernet cable.

5. Once you are successfully connected to the router, internet may still not work. Go to the web portal of your router. For Verizon, this is typically 192.168.1.1 The admin password for this is on your device. Most web browsers will throw a warning and say this website isn't safe. In this very specific scenario, you can go ahead and proceed anyway.

6. The web portal will ask you a few configuration questions. Like enabling IoT, WiFi 6 etc. Turn the stuff on that you want on.

7. Wait a minute or two and watch the system status in the web portal.

8. The device may now show as "connected" instead of offline. Nice!! Even though it says "connected" it might still be offline. Go to some websites or run some pings or speedtests. Fixed? Great. No dice?

9. Unplug just your gateway. Wait a minute. Plug it back in. Wait ~10 minutes.

10. Go to some websites or run some pings or speedtests. Success!!!!

11. Plug in your Extender(s). If you never changed the device name and password, everything will reconnect. I didn't expect this to work and I was very thankful that I didn't have to reconfigure all the convoluted network devices in my apartment.

FWIW on step 4 Verizon offered to send me new equipment, which probably would've worked, but I didn't want to go through the hassle of a return so I tried a few more things. TBH the Verizon person was learning as we were fixing the thing, but they were really great. I mean that seriously. I should've called earlier. WHOOPS. There were tests and things they were running.

GOOD LUCK !