Considering buying Spectra. Need some advice

[varkey]

using edgerouter x. upgraded from a pretty shitty TP-Link which is now lying useless.

well yeah. if spectra can deliver stable connectivity and reasonable speeds without illogical blocks and throttling, i would love to switch to it as my primary connection and move excitel as backup. excitel and abs which i am currently paying for are both unlimited so unmetered usage has no temptation for me lol.

you really should consider getting a VPN connection. even if just for downloading. i started using a vpn for torrents few years ago and it has been just great. now i just have to deal with p2p sites being blocked by these internet companies. though turning on vpn in browser usually just take 2 clicks so it's a minor annoyance.

Interesting, will check out the Edgerouter X. Did you get it from India? How much? Seems to be selling at $50 in US. How does it compare to a Mikrotik Gigabit router, any experience?

VPN 🤔 Will check that out. But I mostly use private trackers (which thankfully aren't blocked yet) so the blocks haven't really affected me much, except when l needed to get things from the public trackers and torrent search engines.

 

[Sushubh]

Over http/80, I get a block page, but if I use HTTPS it goes through.

should be fine i guess. do keep an eye on your torrent usage. if you notice that it is being throttled somehow. would also affect private trackers.

 

[Mak4]

Speedtest.net results from a wired device connected directly to the D-Link router. Tests were done using sivel/speedtest-cli as the only wired device I have right now is a head-less NAS device (so throughput may have been affected due to hardware limitations on my side too)

How are pings and speed to servers outside India?
Could you try opening command prompt and pinging a server outside india such"ping sgp-1.valve.net -t" or "ping 203.117.172.253 -t" and let it run for 10 minutes to see if there's any packet loss ?

 

[igloo]

@Sushubh Edgerouter X review plz?

 

[Sushubh]

not sure what to review. it is a pretty old and very popular model so there should be lots of proper reviews out there.
i only got it because i was not happy with the size of the TP-Link router i was using. this one is insanely compact. a friend was coming to india from states and he asked me if i wanted anything. at usd 50, this made a lot of sense.
it is somewhat complicated to configure compared to regular routers. but seems to be quite stable.
i am running it in load balance mode which means that both connections are used at the same time.
but internet goes down for as long as a minute when one of the two connections disappear (abs mostly). so it's kind of annoying. tp-link had the same problem but the time duration was very low.
there could be configuration changes that might fix this. but it's kind of complicated as you have to find scripts online and run it on the console. user interface does not really offer a lot of options for load balancing or failover configuration.

in short... i only got it because i had an option to get it at 50 dollars. i like it because of the small size. it does work fine as a router for both load balancing and failover. but only get it if you understand what you are getting and what you would use it for. and be ready to read a lot of online articles to find out how to implement advance features as not everything is accessible from the backend user interface.

 

[varkey]

How are pings and speed to servers outside India?
Could you try opening command prompt and pinging a server outside india such"ping sgp-1.valve.net -t" or "ping 203.117.172.253 -t" and let it run for 10 minutes to see if there's any packet loss ?

When compared to Act it seems pretty bad for both the destinations you gave.

I don't have the Act screenshot right now, but the same sgp-1.valve.net through Act was under 50ms.

 

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[varkey]

not sure what to review. it is a pretty old and very popular model so there should be lots of proper reviews out there.
i only got it because i was not happy with the size of the TP-Link router i was using. this one is insanely compact. a friend was coming to india from states and he asked me if i wanted anything. at usd 50, this made a lot of sense.
it is somewhat complicated to configure compared to regular routers. but seems to be quite stable.
i am running it in load balance mode which means that both connections are used at the same time.
but internet goes down for as long as a minute when one of the two connections disappear (abs mostly). so it's kind of annoying. tp-link had the same problem but the time duration was very low.
there could be configuration changes that might fix this. but it's kind of complicated as you have to find scripts online and run it on the console. user interface does not really offer a lot of options for load balancing or failover configuration.

in short... i only got it because i had an option to get it at 50 dollars. i like it because of the small size. it does work fine as a router for both load balancing and failover. but only get it if you understand what you are getting and what you would use it for. and be ready to read a lot of online articles to find out how to implement advance features as not everything is accessible from the backend user interface.

There are also the Mikrotik RouterOS based devices, RB750GR3 for example hEX Ethernet Router RB750Gr3 and is easily available in India for around the same price as outside India. I'm thinking of getting this one, has lot of features similar to the Edgerouter X, but configuration might be a pain.

 

[varkey]

Btw thanks to the guy who comes to clean the house, I had an experience with Spectra customer care already. So while cleaning, I am not sure what he did, but it apparently broke the fibre where it was spliced.
They use a FTTH home termination box, something like this -- Ningbo GMF Telecom Technology Co.,Ltd. and apparently the spliced fibre broke off.

Anyway I noticed that the PON (passive optic network) LED was RED (instead of the usual GREEN), waited 30-40 min (at the time I wasn't aware of the cause, and nothing seemed amiss from the outside) and seeing that it wasn't gonna come back online, called customer care at around 1 PM. Described the problem and a ticket was opened, was promised that the service would be restored within 6-8 hours. Got a call from a Delhi number around 2 PM, and I repeated the same thing that the PON LED showed that the link was offline, and was told the fibre team would come and check it shortly. By 4 or so, the fibre guys came and checked, the fibre optic power meter couldn't detect a signal at all, they then used some sort of LED device which sends a red LED light over the fibre, and could see that light was being emitted from the spliced area indicating that there was a break.

They re-spliced it and everything is back to normal! 😀

 

[gopichandpai]

Do they provide static IP? If yes, how much do they charge?

 

[igloo]

There are also the Mikrotik RouterOS based devices, RB750GR3 for example hEX Ethernet Router RB750Gr3 and is easily available in India for around the same price as outside India. I'm thinking of getting this one, has lot of features similar to the Edgerouter X, but configuration might be a pain.

is that site reliable ... ordered anything before ?

 

[varkey]

is that site reliable ... ordered anything before ?

Yep, they are authorised resellers of Mikrotik, Ubiquiti etc. I have ordered from them over email (and NEFT transfer) as the product wasn't available on the site.

You can contact them over email and place the order as well.

 

[varkey]

Do they provide static IP? If yes, how much do they charge?

Apparently not in my area (Not sure how the area matters) You can try chatting with them on their site, pretty responsive.

 

[Sushubh]

errm. is it already answered if the ip provided is public or nat?

 

[varkey]

^ NAT 🙁

 

[Sushubh]

right. it's a shame that they are not offering static ip on payment if they are not even offering public ip in the first place.
though i guess, a 1gbps connection is pretty prone to misuse with static ip available on it.