Anyone successfully used a third party router with CenturyLink Fiber?

[Pink Jazz]

As everyone here should know, when you are connecting a CenturyLink modem to a fiber ONT, it isn't really a modem, but a router. This means that you can use third party routers with your CenturyLink fiber service as long as they support VLAN tagging.

I was wondering, has anyone ever successfully used a third party router with CenturyLink fiber? We swapped out our Actiontec C2000A for a TP-Link Archer C7 in order to get 802.11ac, since we are on the 100Mbps plan, for less money than what CenturyLink was willing to charge for a Technicolor C2100T or ZyXEL C2100Z. However, it took us a while to get it set up and we did need to get a little help from CenturyLink to get the PPPoE password. Afterward we simply added the VLAN ID and changed the priority, as well as setting the IPv6 configuration and changing the MTU size to match CenturyLink specs. So far performance has been good based on speed tests.

Note that I heard that using your own third party router isn't recommended for CenturyLink gigabit fiber connections. Can anyone confirm?

I was wondering, has anyone successfully used their own third party router on CenturyLink fiber? How was the experience in setup and how is the performance?

 

[JackMDS]

Your Archer C7 is a 800 Mb/sec. so if you upgrade the connection to Giga it probably would do very close to Giga.

I.e., a Router that its system can accommodate the Centurylink "unusual" authentication and can do Giga probably would work as well.

 

[mnewsham]

DSLreports is probably a better site for this, but from what i've seen pretty much any modern decent router should support the proper VLAN tagging, I know the Asus routers are commonly recommended.

For gigabit speeds you'll want to get something higher end, as the lower end routers simply don't have the performance to hit gigabit WAN-LAN speeds.

I've heard some of the higher end netgear routers take a big hit in performance due to PPPoE overhead, so maybe avoid those.

 

[Genx87]

Are you talking home or business class fiber? I haven't worked with their home fiber yet. But with business class fiber I have them hand off with Cat 5 from their switch, and our wiring guys bring it into our data center or where I need it.

 

[Pink Jazz]

Are you talking home or business class fiber? I haven't worked with their home fiber yet. But with business class fiber I have them hand off with Cat 5 from their switch, and our wiring guys bring it into our data center or where I need it.

It's home fiber. Most newer communities are being set up with FTTH. Existing communities are mostly being upgraded to VDSL2 with Vectoring and/or Pair Bonding.

 

[Genx87]

Cool, havent been lucky enough yet. Centurylink has extended fiber to the pole in my neighborhood. So I have some form of DSL that uses 3 copper wiring pairs to the tune of 10mbps up and 135mbps down.

 

[Pink Jazz]

Cool, havent been lucky enough yet. Centurylink has extended fiber to the pole in my neighborhood. So I have some form of DSL that uses 3 copper wiring pairs to the tune of 10mbps up and 135mbps down.

That is actually pretty good for DSL. Even though CenturyLink offers fiber to the home in our neighborhood, gigabit speeds are not offered in our neighborhood. We get about 50Mbps up and 100Mbps down. It is pretty much the very newest communities that CenturyLink is offering gigabit fiber in our town (I think built around 2015 or later; ours opened in 2014), and I think it is mostly in higher income communities for most of the rest of the metropolitan area.

 

[Genx87]

The amusing thing is because the neighborhood I am in was built in the 1960s everything is above ground. Which made it easier for Centurylink to bring fiber to the pole. A buddy of mine lives about a half mile up the road from me in a neighborhood built in the late 80s early 90s. He is stuck on 20Mbps DSL. Everything is buried. I guess there is one advantage to having old above ground infrastructure

Now if only we didnt lose power 3 times a summer because a tree had a branch snap off in the wind and fry a transformer. Life would be grand!

But it is interesting how they are achieving these speeds. 2 of the three pairs are download. They are bonded\load balanced and each came up at 65ish Mbps down. Upload is capped of course.

 

[XavierMace]

The amusing thing is because the neighborhood I am in was built in the 1960s everything is above ground. Which made it easier for Centurylink to bring fiber to the pole. A buddy of mine lives about a half mile up the road from me in a neighborhood built in the late 80s early 90s. He is stuck on 20Mbps DSL. Everything is buried. I guess there is one advantage to having old above ground infrastructure

That's the problem in Phoenix. EVERYTHING data wise is below ground here.

 

[repoman0]

The amusing thing is because the neighborhood I am in was built in the 1960s everything is above ground. Which made it easier for Centurylink to bring fiber to the pole. A buddy of mine lives about a half mile up the road from me in a neighborhood built in the late 80s early 90s. He is stuck on 20Mbps DSL. Everything is buried. I guess there is one advantage to having old above ground infrastructure

Now if only we didnt lose power 3 times a summer because a tree had a branch snap off in the wind and fry a transformer. Life would be grand!

But it is interesting how they are achieving these speeds. 2 of the three pairs are download. They are bonded\load balanced and each came up at 65ish Mbps down. Upload is capped of course.

My house was built in the 1910s -- wonder if the above ground infrastructure is part of why Verizon came in with FIOS. I just swapped over to it from cable today actually. All I had to do was plug the cat6 the install guy ran from the ONT into my pfsense VM, renew DHCP, and I have symmetric gigabit

Some day I am going to want to move further north in New England to NH or Maine and my biggest concern is leaving behind my 940/940 megabit connection.

 

[VirtualLarry]

@repoman0 , do you actually have a use for Gigabit FIOS? I had it for a few months, it was spectacular, kinda, but really totally overkill, as most downloading that I was doing, was Linux distros, and those would still come in at like 3-5MB/sec, and the Gigabit was basically wasted unless I downloaded like 20 at once. For a single-user household, it was overkill. I'm now on a 100/100Mbit/sec plan for much cheaper (had to cancel and re-subscribe), and don't really notice the difference, even though I technically have only a tenth of that speed.

 

[repoman0]

@repoman0 , do you actually have a use for Gigabit FIOS? I had it for a few months, it was spectacular, kinda, but really totally overkill, as most downloading that I was doing, was Linux distros, and those would still come in at like 3-5MB/sec, and the Gigabit was basically wasted unless I downloaded like 20 at once. For a single-user household, it was overkill. I'm now on a 100/100Mbit/sec plan for much cheaper (had to cancel and re-subscribe), and don't really notice the difference, even though I technically have only a tenth of that speed.

Hey Larry -- really no reason at all. My downloads are definitely faster than 3-5MB/s, more like 90+ (obviously downloaded a bunch of stuff to delete five seconds later to test it out). Here it was 100/100 for $40 or 1000/1000 for $80, and like you I was back and forth on them ... but they pay for Netflix for a year with gigabit, and my GF and I split the cost so just decided to go for it.

 

[mnewsham]

@repoman0 , do you actually have a use for Gigabit FIOS? I had it for a few months, it was spectacular, kinda, but really totally overkill, as most downloading that I was doing, was Linux distros, and those would still come in at like 3-5MB/sec, and the Gigabit was basically wasted unless I downloaded like 20 at once. For a single-user household, it was overkill. I'm now on a 100/100Mbit/sec plan for much cheaper (had to cancel and re-subscribe), and don't really notice the difference, even though I technically have only a tenth of that speed.

If you're getting 3-5MB/s you've probably not got your torrent client configured to take advantage of the faster speeds.

Even going through a proxy in the Netherlands most of my torrents hit 400mbps+ (50MB/s)

 

[VirtualLarry]

Not torrents, straight HTTP / HTTPS downloads from SourceForge, etc.

 

[mnewsham]

Not torrents, straight HTTP / HTTPS downloads from SourceForge, etc.

Most Linux distros are primarily distributed via torrent, so I assumed.

But even over that, I can download from microsoft servers at 800mbps+ on FIOS

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, Microsoft servers, Steam, and NVidia driver servers, were the only places that I seemed to be able to actually utilize the speed of my Gigabit connection.

 

[Genx87]

Makes sense. I bet they use CDNs that have resources on the network of your ISP to deliver best performance.