Hi, you may not know me. That's fair, this is my first blog after all. You can call me The Testing Guy. For most of my life, computer has been a major part of my life and my passion. I eat, sleep computer. I play games, do homework, read news, watch Youtube on it like most people. I have also done a lot of experiments, odd projects on computers and various hardware throughout the years, but never documented them. May be because of laziness, or maybe it's just easier to remember the things you really like to do (and also the things you really hate too). After an meeting with my friends yesterday, I have come to realize that:
- Most of the people from my background have also done various personal jobs like that.
- That a lot of projects I've done sound like magic to everyone else, including my family, despite them coming off as sometimes rather mundane.
So today I decide to write a blog about my various adventures (and misadventures) in past, present, and maybe future.
Like most folks around the world, in Vietnam, we watch television. In particular, we watch it through cable. There are many cable TV providers in Vietnam: VTV, HTVC from the government, SCTV of Saigontourist (yes, a tourism company is also a cable provider), VTC. There are ISP like FPT, Viettel, VNPT who also wanted a piece of television business and started jumping in. My family chose SCTV, because it was one of the first companies to provide cable TV, and has stuck with them since. My grandparents also chose them as the cable provider, along with the Internet service they provide as a combo. The reason for the included Internet is that on weekends, we visit our grandparents and need some connectivity for our Facebook and Youtube video consumption. My cousin, who is working towards her college degree, also lives with our grandparents and needs Internet to do her homework. Their speed is about 35 Mbps symmetrical (up and down speed is the same), which is not much compared to my fiber at home, 150 Mbps symmetrical, but is good enough for the purpose. They provided us a router and a modem.
According to my findings, the modem is a mplus CBC383, a Cable to Ethernet modem from Korea. And the router is a standard-issue TP-Link TL-WR841N, a 2.4Ghz 300 Mbps Wifi router you'll likely find cheap at a used market somewhere.
SCTV installed it for us and it was working. So all is right with the world. Or is it? A common wisdom I picked up over the years as a somewhat network enthusiast is that you should never use any equipment provided by your ISP. That proved to be true in this case. We installed the Internet portion back in 2019. During its lifetime, I have cursed it numerous time as it disconnected, it hung, forcing everyone to use 4g from their phones as substitute more than once. I did try to go into the configuration page of the router to change and/or reset it (the modem's is inaccessible). So by 2022, I had enough. I decided to replace the TP-Link one with another one from my house. That one was previously replaced by an Asus router.
This is the TP-Link Archer C50, a 2.4/5 GHz 1200 Mbps Wifi router. Anyone reading the specs might find that it only has a 100 Mbps WAN for my 150 Mbps fiber. The story is I bought this back in 2014 as a replacement for a Tenda router. After replacing this with an Asus one, Mr. Archer is left without a job. So I gave him a new one. Because the Internet of SCTV is only 35Mbps symmetrical, it's a non-issue.
I pulled the plug out of the WR841N, installed Mr. Archer in by plugging the ethernet cable from the modem to the WAN port, access the router's configuration page and change the wifi's name to match the previous router's settings and done.
Fast forward a month, the Internet at my grandparents' house has improved dramatically. Of course there were hiccups here and there while browsing Facebook. I figured it was because I hadn't put something in correctly so back to the config page I went. This time to DNS Settings.
I first tried Google DNS (8.8.8.8), because that's the first that comes to anyone's mind whenever they think their Internet is slow. A short while later I changed it to Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1) because when I ping it, response time was 17 ms, much faster than Google's >60 ms. It did improve the situation, and made the Internet a bit smoother overall.
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