Adventures with Stahub's Maxonline MOL Ultimate 100Mbit/s FAT GREEN PIPE!

I got my Starhub Maxonline account for 3 months already, which I contracted with them for an entire year with 30Mbit/s down and 1Mbit/s up. I KNEW they were going to increase it to 100Mbit/2Mbit and sure enough, they did.

Only problem was that my existing modem, my old DOCSIS 2 Motorola SBV5120 couldn't give me the 100Mbit/2Mbit. I had to get the DOCSIS 3 Motorola SB6100 modem to achieve that kind of bitrate. But my account was already provisioned for 100mbit, and every day which passed was another day I kicked myself for paying full fare for 1/3 of the performance I was entitled to.

This was a great strategy Starhub had for sucker nerds like me, so I set off to prepare to get the SB6100.

Not an easy task though. The SB6100 did not have VOICE capability, and since I was on Starhub's VOIP Digital Voice service, by itself, the SB6100 can't make it. A quick enquiry told me what I had to do - keep the SBV5120 to use it as VOICE only, and buy a new SB6100 for the Internet bandwidth. Easy enough unless you're a sucker nerd like me - I worried about the signal quality, since keeping the SBV5120 would necessitate another split of the cable, with proportional losses.

This was what I planned:

| (from SCV)
|
|
(splitter1)---------(cable modem)
|
|
(splitter2)----------(VOIP for Digital Voice)
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
(6 way to room outlets for video)

Now I set off to buy a top grade splitter and found the Monster splitter. It cost me S$60. Here it is... a little different from mine, but sufficient to illustrate.



• Ultra low-loss, high-performance video signal splitter for TV & satellite
• 5 MHz - 2 GHz bandwidth is digital ready for splitting DSS & TV signals
• Internal impedance-matched network for accurate 75 ohm load to all outputs
• Precision die-case, 24K gold-plated contacts
• 24K gold-plated contacts ensure high conductive, corrosion-free connections

After doing the change from Regal 2-way splitter to Monster 2-way, this is the result:

Signal strength from the single layer Monster 2-way splitter, increase from 82% to 86% (somebody please tell me, why I split the signal, should half, why still get such high number? Is BS izzit? I don't have meter, so I use my HD set top box to test the signal)

Practical differences:

+Highest DL speed from 30 tries increase from 28Mbit/s to slightly higher than 29 Mbit/s (from utilities.starhub.com)
+Before this, I use 3 way splitter, everytime I press START, I only have a 30% chance of the download proceeding to 100% ... most of the time stuck halfway. After my change to Regal 2 way aplitter, I achieved 100% success, but sometimes need 8 steps of the download bar, sometimes need 6 steps. After change to the Monster, maximum steps is 7 steps, sometimes 6, and very rarely 5 steps. PLEASE NOTE HOWEVER THAT STARHUB INCREASED MY THEORETICAL BANDWIDTH FROM 30MBIT/S TO 32MBIT/S. SO ALL MY RESULTS MAY BE INVALID LIAO.
+Signal quality STAY at 99-100%. No difference between Regal and Monster for Signal Quality. Signal Quality got no difference across all my splits, even the 2nd layer split also SQ is about 99-100%.

Result:
1) Technical wise, not worth S$60. The changes are so marginal.
2) Psychological buff of seeing a nice big gold color splitter, priceless. Achieved.

OK so I went ahead and bought the SB6100, when I got it, I relegated the SBV5120 to a 3rd level split - the phone still worked, so ... fine.

After a very very hard day, where I kick the hell outta myself for stupidity, here are the results for my new SB6100 modem:

speedtest.net figures:


Surprising thing is the incredible upload speed. The Ubicom based router I have detects 3030kbit/s uplink speed, which I thought was wrong, until I saw the speedtest figures. This is the happiest thing, because the downlink speed is something like `too much' at this time, and the great upload speed will help achieve more download speed.

Starhub figures:

Connecting to Server ...
Logging on to Server ...
Starting download
Download Successful !!

Download Stats:

Transfer Time: 9782 milliseconds
Total File Size: 83886080 bytes

Top speed attained: 68.44 Mbps

All these tests done with the normal idiotic overconservative WinXP settings for RWIN with no frame multiplier. I can achieve more speed - up to 83Mbit/s with Starhub util and 37Mbit/s for speedtest, but with these my upload speed cannot be consistent.

As for why I was stupid, I hardcode a lot of numbers into my ubicom router instead of autodetect, so for half a day, I worked with a hardcoded 30Mbit/s down and 1Mbit/s up figures based on my old connection.

Only after I slept a bit then woke up at about now, I thought of it. Sorry starhub for spamming your mailbox and calling you up so many times. I am an utter idiot loh!

After going to www.dslreports.com and optimizing my RWIN and putting a timestamp on all my TCP/IP packets, this is what I got:



Starhub:

Connecting to Server ...
Logging on to Server ...
Starting download
Download Successful !!


Download Stats:

Transfer Time: 8312 milliseconds
Total File Size: 83886080 bytes

Top speed attained: 78.81 Mbps

Real world: It took me like less than 5 seconds to download the 50MB Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0: x86 (KB928416) ... LOL!

This was a successful installation, and it was every bit as I expected. But its effect on me is profound, I find myself thinking of all ways on how to use the connection. It's a real change if downloads don't take any time at all relatively.

Anyway, money well spent!