After over 10 years of faithful service, and more than a few call from Bell, I have upgraded the old Actiontec R1000H to the Bell Gigahub and moved from the 500 Mb/s/500 Mb/s to the 1 Gb/s/1 Gb/s service. Luckily, there was no install fee, no upgrade fee and no increase in the monthly cost. I guess that Bell is getting to the point where they were as anxious as I was to get rid of an over 10 year old piece of equipment as I was.
Moving from the old system is interesting: (1) The ONT and router are now integrated and (2) There is NO battery backup (I have an APC 1500 SmartUPS just for the Bell equipment – more than enough runtime 🙂 ).
I had a fairly high level of concern when upgrading as there were many, many, many posts on issues that people were having with Advanced DMZ such as not getting the correct IP, not working at all, etc. These posts were mostly from central Canada where they use PPPoE. Bell in Atlantic Canada used DHCP and this makes a big difference. Advanced DMZ works without issue. On the Netgate 6100 I did release/renew the DHCP lease (I received the same IP), restarted OpenVPN, restarted HAProxy and refreshed Dynamic DNS for good measure. I guess I could have rebooted the 6100 but this worked.
The speed is note quite 1 Gb/S but very consistent using SpeedTest.net to Bell Mount Pearl, St. John’s, Dartmouth, Montreal and Toronto, Eastlink St. John’s, and Rogers Halifax. Below is with some YouTube, etc. happening.
The second new thing is that the old HP DL360P Gen8 is now gone. It was getting a little old as well plus the 1U fan whine was getting to me. I replaced it with another DL380 Gen9. This one is spec’ed with 2 x E5-2630 V3 8-Core 2.4GHz Intel Xeons, 128GB RAM and 8 450GB 10K disks. It also came with the rails (new-in-box! – usually $100 extra with other sellers on eBay). I also picked up a couple of 3m 10 Gb/s DAC cables. You need to have the 3m length especially when using cable arms. (I need to pick up a couple more for the original DL380 which also has a cable arm.)
