I'm very fortunate to live in a high-rise in New West with fibre to the basement. It allows the high-speed 50 (Optik 50) package for the suite, which seriously kicks butt.
But the wiring is not quite what you'd expect. Instead of using the phone wiring for the last mile stretch (and getting 'true' VDSL), some funny business is going on directly in the phone room in the basement and we have an Ethernet cable coming straight to the suite entrance panel. The Actiontec V1000H modem/router provided by Telus does not use the phone service at all. The Ethernet coming in from downstairs plugs directly into the WAN Ethernet port of the Actiontec. From there its wireless and LAN ports happily serve out the HS 50 service, or something close to it given the heavy congestion of the 2.4 GHz spectrum in this building (wired is perfect however).
I threw in my old Linksys WRT54GL in place of the Actiontec and was surprised to see that Internet worked with that, although possibly because of the lack of the "registerdevice.telus.com" step, upload speed was severely constrained (download was alright though). Going through the register device setup with that plugged in might fix that though I imagine (and then in turn constrain the Actiontec if it's only a one at a time type thing)?
So it seems my Actiontec modem is only acting as a glorified router (and of course offers coax-out to work with a tv box). It implies there is another specialized modem already in place in the bowels of the building that is converting fiber-to-ethernet, quite possibly with no "DSL" type set up at all in-between. Equipment installed up here is just acting as a router for the pure WAN Ethernet incoming cable. Is that correct?
The unfortunate thing is that the entrance area of the suite is as any installer would probably know, in a metal box in the front closet. It's a nice way to kill the wireless-n that the Actiontec dishes out. But I guess it might have to be located there if I want to have two or more televisions working with Optik?
I was thinking of locating the Actiontec in the entrance block, and supplementing it with the Linksys WRT54GL acting as a WAP for the SSID on a different non-overlapping channel. But that is more complicated than anything I've ever set up before.
Does anyone else have this type of set up and played around with it to make it more effective? Or any installers have any insights on how Telus is doing this? To me the main surprising thing is that the modem/router we're provided doesn't seem to be doing any modem-type things and that's being done behind the scenes.
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