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Using Ubiquiti Edgerouter with G.fast on TalkTalk

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TL;DR plug the ethernet cable coming from the modem into a port configured as WAN (i.e has a masquerade rule to the interface in the SNAT section). Have DHCP enabled. That’s it. In fact, it works pretty much with every router.

Now the long version, for the patient who want to go through my ramblings. Like in EE’s case, the documentation is wrong. I spent some time creating a 101 vif for eth0, just to look at the router with a rather frustrated look on my face that it doesn’t work. Got everything done and pointed to eth0.101 – NAT, port forwarding, the firewall policies for WAN, SQM. Then, nothing.

Went ahead and turned on DHCP for the eth0 interface. Within a few moments, I got an address on the interface. Wait, what? Turns out, the whole VLAN 101 thing does not apply for G.fast – sold as Faster 150 Fibre or Faster 300 Fibre.

There was absolutely no PPPoE nor MTU drama. As easy as it gets. Pretty much as it should.

Performance wise, the connection is slower, but it provides more throughput. Not as slow as Virgin Media which have atrocious latency and the buffer bloat is a joke – a really bad one. Not even SQM could save the slow and lossy DOCSIS 3.0, despite acceptable download throughput on VM.

When I say slow, I mean in terms of speed. The vast majority of people are illiterate in networking terms, and the worst offenders keep mentioning that “speed” is measured in “Mbps”. At least every person employed by an ISP should be forced to read this excellent article, which is, wow, around 24 years old now: It’s the Latency, Stupid.

So, to become un-stupid, speed = unit of distance divided by time, whereas throughput = rate of successful message delivery over a communication channel divided by time, typically measured in bits per second in networking. The multiples are used for practical reasons, hence Megabits per second in this century. The fact that they are both functions of time got people confused, then the marketing drones carried on.

In networking terms, knowing the actual speed doesn’t tell you much in fractions of the speed of light (it would be a very abstract number), so the measured latency of a round trip is used instead, but excluding networking adapters induced latency, there’s a relation between latency and the time it takes for the round trip for a given distance of network pipe. So, it is another measure for speed.

Having finally cleared what I mean by speed, let’s talk numbers.

TalkTalk has about 4ms extra latency compared to EE which sat around 7ms. It’s still nearly half of what Virgin Media used to achieve over DOCSIS 3.0, so I can’t complain. The upload throughput is virtually the same, mainly due to SQM – around 28 Mbps. Without SQM EE goes to 29 Mbps and TalkTalk to 30 Mbps (as quoted by the Openreach tier for this service), but the buffer bloat is terrible (for both). The download throughput is where I see most of the difference in terms of performance – 150 Mbps for TalkTalk while EE struggled to get to 142 Mbps, despite their minimum guaranteed being 143.8 Mbps.

I have raised this with EE, but they were like: everything is good on our side, we can send you an engineer. Well, the engineer would have probably billed me for a useless call. The DSL tester used by the engineer who came for the transfer clearly showed 159/30 while the Service ID was still pointing to EE. Therefore, I believe this is all down to that horrible thing called PPPoE.

The reason why I even had an engineer doing the easiest G.fast installation, ever, is that the G.fast service is only offered as managed installation, so they have to show up, test my power socket and my phone line, despite my service actually being online for months. Then, followed by about 3 hours of wait for my service to be transferred to the new ISP.

Using Ubiquiti Edgerouter with G.fast on EE

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Getting G.fast in my area was kind of a bad news – no plans for FTTP any time soon. However, it provided a choice that before did not really exist as Virgin Media surely knows how to milk their loyal customers/hostages.

There’s:

  1. Virgin Media’s higher download throughput lower upload throughput higher latency DOCSIS 3 – with abysmal latency sometimes which affects near realtime communication due to the crappy Intel Puma 6 in their hubs or the usual cable high latency.
  2. Opeanreach’s lower download throughput higher upload throughput lower latency G.fast – essentially glorified VDSL2 which is very sensitive to the phone line length. Basically BT, but with a different name because reasons, but still a fully owned subsidiary.

Yup, this is the sorry state of decade-behind-the-times broadband infrastructure in the UK for the people who don’t live in the upper 10% of places with FTTP.

My G.fast plan from EE came with a VDSL2 router/modem (EE Smart Hub), so, fortunately, Openreach provided a Huawei MT992 G.fast modem. They call this a managed installation as the modem is supported my Openreach. Unlike the parent company, BT, EE still offer the older Smart Hub which doesn’t have G.fast support. That’s not the case with BT’s Smart Hub 2. To add insult to the injury, the vast majority of these CPE’s on Openreach’s network don’t support bridge (aka modem mode) like Virgin’s SuperHub does. This is one of the bits that Virgin is doing right.

This ISP assumption that all of their customers are simpletons is rather disturbing. To be clear, this isn’t Openreach’s fault, but the standard MO for most of the ISP’s using their network. So, getting an MT992 with my installation was a blessing as the market is sorely missing enough options for G.fast modems. You do get the odd MT992 listing on eBay for £300, but that price is clearly a pipe dream.

Using double NAT with the Smart Hub and my proper Edgerouter always felt wrong. It is wrong. For those with Smart Hub 2 this is the only solution until some company, like Draytek, steps up to the game with Vigor 166 and I expect acceptable prices. That doesn’t mean cheap – it just means significantly less than £300 on eBay.

To circle back to configuration, both the EE documentation and their support engineer were wrong. Phoned for an unrelated problem, but the possibility of using my own device in place of their CPE came up. They said that the communication between the MT992 modem and their Smart Hub uses a proprietary protocol – something which I did not buy.

Armed with the PPPoE credentials determined by reading their documentation (that bit is accurate), got the PPPoE up and running on my Edgerouter straight away. That’s Add Interface > Add PPPoE from the router homepage, but I have used their recommended 1492 MTU.

However, it didn’t take long to figure out that something is wrong – some websites were loading, but some were not. This kind of red herring made it more difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem, until I somehow remembered that QUIC is a thing and that some websites are using it. So, I have reliably determined that UDP based protocols (like DNS and QUIC) were fine, whereas anything TCP based was getting blackholed.

Cue the classic Path MTU Discovery problem because someone somewhere decided that ICMP is too much of a risk. You got to love the security theatre.

The first step was to enable the TCP MSS clamping. This immediately solved the TCP blackholing issues and it proved that indeed the MTU for the PPPoE interface is wrong. Can’t remember the actual value and I don’t want to. PPPoE is horrible enough that I don’t want to take a second performance hit if the TCP MSS clamping can be avoided.

Turns out – it can be avoided. I have been reading on the PlusNet forums (also a BT subsidiary) that the Openreach network supports baby jumbo frames with the right hardware. Turns out, that’s the case with Huawei MT992.

I have immediately tried this:

  1. Disable TCP MSS clamping.
  2. Set the PPPoE interface (pppoe0) MTU to the full 1500.
  3. Set the eth0 interface MTU to 1508. This is configured as WAN 1 on my router and it connects straight into the MT992 modem. It is the parent interface for the pppoe0 interface.

That’s it. No MSS clamping and no TCP blackholing issues either. There’s certainly no proprietary protocol either as the Edgerouter has been working for months and I have not observed any loss of performance compared to the EE Smart Hub.