EPBFI Service Upgrade

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Well I had bellsouth/att dsl for many moons, generally reliable, slow, cheap. Service was usually up with few outages, but about 1X per year it would go bad, and was gut-wrenching infuriating to get service. Foreign-speaking with "bump up" tech assist from US citizens, the lower levels of which were required to go thru an infuriating long help diagnostic tree, all of which I was smart enough to do before ever calling them. I never called unless it was obvious they would have to send a fella out to climb a pole. Always insisted that I had to disconnect my network and connect a computer direct to the modem so they could poke and prod remotely, and finally after an hour or two of indecision send out a repairman. Now, the repairmen were always great friendly fellas, competently fixed it lickety-split, but seemed that ATT had a strategy to make people so mad they would just cancel the service and save ATT the cost of sending out techs for a service call.

 

Same deal with comcast-- Every comcast techie that came to the house was a competent and friendly fella, eager to bend over backwards and give out free boosters or whatever to make sure everything worked as good as possible and customers were happy. But the pricing and phone support was the pits.

 

Admittedly EPB could very easily degrade in the future, but from my experience with ATT and comcast, if Obama had given those companies zillions of dollars, they would have spent all the money and still had sucky expensive service. Ain't saying that its a great idea for the gov to spend money thataway, just that public utilities, monopolies joined at the hip with government, are hardly what I would call "private enterprise alternatives".

Edited September 19, 2013 by Lester Weevils

[Mark A]

Are they doing fiber to the house?  Or are they doing fiber to the POP and a couple twisted pairs to the house?  Either way it makes me kind of angry.
 
Fiber is expensive.  In Tennessee, despite the fact that it's come down a lot in recent years, laying last mile subterranean fiber is still just shy of $800/ft.

I've been out of Chattanooga for about 6 years. Before I left they were talking about a combination of both. New subdivisions were going to get fiber all the way. Not sure if they ever they ever did or not.

I know when we switched to them at work they pulled fiber all the way in.

[mav]

Just talked to EPB, and they will bump me up for free.  They told me I will need a router capable of handling 1 GB/s.

[Sam1]

Just got bumped from 50 to 100 megabaud (is that correct term?) per second for the same price! Is FREAK'N fast! They also dropped the price on 1000 mbs price to something like $70? My better half called them and they said we could upgrade to the 1000 mbs for ten dollars more a month. So, from 50 to 100 was no extra charge, then to 1000 for ten bucks. Suck eggs Comcast!!!!

 

would rather have fiber for the low latency, not the bandwidth.  Surfing the web at 1Gb is really no faster than 10Mb.  Would be great for downloading movies in a few seconds though.

[battleop]

I'm not an expert on this subject, but I thought a fellow member who is also in the tech business said that anything over a certain speed (much, much lower than 1gbps ) is useless, for one reason or another. I very well could have misunderstood.

 

 

I work in the telecom business and I can say this is very true for now.   The services that REQUIRE 50/100/500/1000mb services are not here yet and won't' be here anytime soon.

[Dane]

I will be the first to stand in line and tell Comcast to take a flying leap.

The Chattanooga fiber is nice. And, it was built with unlimited taxpayer $$$

In a few years, when there is no competition and the price goes through the roof and the service falls into the basement please come back and tell us how good life is.


Please don't forget the real reason EPB put in the fiber system. The power companies are salivating over smart meters. With smart meters comes the opportunity to require smart thermostats and other devices. And then, whenever EPB or TVA feels like it they will change your thermostat settings. Then they will stand up and trumpet how they've eliminated rolling brownouts... Of course, you will be happy about it even if it is 80 degrees inside in the middle of August.

This is progress over making them install more (quantity) or more efficient infrastructure. You know, man made global warming and evil coal and all that jazz...

Mark

Honestly I love my smart meter. I can go on and calculate my bill anytime I want. I can see when I use the most power and If there is anything I can do to cut it. In fact I have reduced my electric bill by close to 50% so far this year.

And the fiber is pretty awesome too. No modems, no junk equipment to throttle my speeds (like comcast).


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

[Guest 6.8 AR]

Your Smart meter could, one of these days smack you in the face. There are political reasons and liberty reasons

why those things haven't caught on in many places.

[Sam1]

Your Smart meter could, one of these days smack you in the face. There are political reasons and liberty reasons

why those things haven't caught on in many places.

 

 

I just did some research on these for my last class and they have the potential to be pretty scary.  The power companies are putting fancy security measures on them like local optical ports, but they don't even address the antiquated communications framework that they operate on.

 

Basically these are running on a master-slave configuration with one meter on each node running as the master.  You get into the master, and viola, every meter now belongs to you.  So someone may hack a meter 4 streets over and it has an impact on your house.  From what IBM said in the textbook, there are already tools on the market and programs available for people to do this with, and because of the way these propagate information, some are impossible to detect where the changes originated from.

[MadMarx]

This is actual Fiber to the ONT on the side of your house and then cat5 from the ONT into your house.

[Guest Keal G Seo]

Here is the way I look at smart meters. The government has already allowed monopolies over areas, not much you can do there. So you have one of two options, keep your power with a smart meter or cut it off. Sure solar, wind etc are an option but quite an expensive and not as reliable one. As for smart thermostats, switches and the like, that is your property not theirs and they can't force you to change it. Worried about them just throttling your electric to cut you down? Get battery back ups that when they throttle you, you have the extra power from their grid you wanted anyway.

I say if they want to see how much electricity I use on an hourly basis in exchange for fiber internet and me being able to get a lower bill (as much as 1/2 as eluded to by Dane), where do I sign? People always object to change, especially technological change...that is until they use it for a while. What exactly is this information good for beyond knowing when you are awake and at home and when you are EITHER asleep or not home?

As for hacking the meters: One, when was the last time your computer was actively hacked? Two, I am sure if it became a problem they could make it a closed system and put 256 AES (government standard 20 year crack) encryption on what goes over the air.

[MacGyver]

The Internet...the last government teat onto which to get people attached.

[MacGyver]

Makes great sense really.  Just don't cry foul when you find yourself with a label attached.

 

After all.  The data won't lie, right?

[Guest Lester Weevils]

The Internet...the last government teat onto which to get people attached.

 

Nah, I can quit any time I want! [twitch, twitch, twitch]

[Sam1]

As for hacking the meters: One, when was the last time your computer was actively hacked? Two, I am sure if it became a problem they could make it a closed system and put 256 AES (government standard 20 year crack) encryption on what goes over the air.

 

This is the field I work in, so deal with it on a daily basis. And encryption levels are irrelevant if you use the tools available to log in and reprogram the meter (what I was talking about in the previous post).

 

As far as communications go, from what IBM said there's no set standard (of using wireless or wired communications) that will work everywhere and hacking PLC's has become more popular since they are essentially functional hubs with connectivity available to anyone with an electrical outlet.  It's similar to how you capture your neighborhood's internet traffic on a cable connection, granted extracting a smart meter signal from PLC is a wee bit more difficult than the cable thing.

Edited September 20, 2013 by Sam1

[Guest Keal G Seo]

Strike this, wasn't on topic of the reply. 

Edited September 20, 2013 by Keal G Seo

[Sam1]

There's no passwords in the meters, they normally have an internal, for lack of a better term, proprietary connector or an external infrared sensor (and you can program via infrared).  

 

Granted all of this info I got was just from reading IBM's book on information architecture, I have not personally seen them get hacked into, but have no doubt that the 4 or 5 phd's that contributed to the book, know what they're talking about.  If it was some data from wikipedia, I would question it myself.

Edited September 20, 2013 by Sam1

[Guest Keal G Seo]

There's no passwords in the meters, they normally have an internal, for lack of a better term, proprietary connector or an external infrared sensor (and you can program via infrared).  

 

Granted all of this info I got was just from reading IBM's book on information architecture, I have not personally seen them get hacked into, but have no doubt that the 4 or 5 phd's that contributed to the book, know what they're talking about.  If it was some data from wikipedia, I would question it myself.

You are right, there should be though. Just read up on the 2011 Black hat conference about the PLCs. Basically bypassing it all together. All I can say is maybe if it became a problem they would redesign them to include a password on each meter just to access it.

[mav]

I upgrading my router on Saturday to the NetGear R6300.  I decided to check my speed this evening.  All I can say is wow.

 

[Oh Shoot]

I upgrading my router on Saturday to the NetGear R6300.  I decided to check my speed this evening.  All I can say is wow.

 

 

Holy crap, with a static IP you could use your personal computer as a webhost. No matter how fast the download, they usually throttle the upload way back just to prevent that very thing.

 

- OS

[2.ooohhh]

Holy crap, with a static IP you could use your personal computer as a webhost. No matter how fast the download, they usually throttle the upload way back just to prevent that very thing.

 

- OS

YEP. . . A friend is allowing several of us to co-lo our servers in his garage, even with 4 of them running full tilt it barely effects his upload speeds.

 

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Yep, anything past 50 mbps, would never see the full benefit with only a local 100 mbps router or switch.

Luckily gigabit routers have got affordable. For awhile after they started putting gigabit adapters standard in puters, gigabit routers stayed spensive.

Its good you are getting such fast speeds to atlanta. With the epb 100 mbps connnection, the only server I could redline to nearly 100 mbps, was the chatt epb hosted speedtester. The atlanta and nashville connections were "close enough in the ballpark" faster than 50 mbps, but nowhere near 100 mbps. Suspected maybe even 100 mbps would be wasted on a lot of connections. Wonder why the atlanta server is fast enough to deliver that measurement on your gigabit connection? If its fast enough to go so fast for you, seems odd it wouldn't be fast enough to get "real near" 100 mbps for me. Not that it is very important. Its "fast enough" for my uses.