ECI Modems

I have spent a few hours trying out various routers with three modems - Huawei 2B (unlocked), Huawei 3B (locked) and an ECI.

The two Huaweis reported very similar up and down figures with the Average HTTPx6 being around 50Mbps, the burst at 55Mbps and upstream being 16.4 Mbps average and 17.1 Mbps burst.

The ECI however was significantly faster, giving down HTTPx6 of 54Mbps and burst speeds of 60.1 Mbps (or more). Upstream was 17.9 Mbps avg and 18.5 Mbps burst.

Overall the ECI is around 10% faster - and I have a Huawei cabinet.


So, when is someone going to try and unlock the ECI to give access to the line stats? It has been extremely useful having the Huawei stats and bit loading available during a recent problem but I will probably change over.

I have also found that putting the BT Business Hub 3 in place (previously 2wire2701) gives even more! With the HTTPx6 average moving up to 59 Mbps and burst at 60.3 Mbps, upstream also rises slightly but is close to te capped speed.

There are two known ways of hacking the ECI modem. Both used to be on the HG612 asbokid blog, ut I can't find them there any more.

However he does have this link, which I haven't browsed but think it may hold both methods.

I think both methods have been used by posters on these forums.

That's what I thought, but could not find the details ... I may have even commented on the clothes peg method.

Looking for this?

link

There are rumours that the latest ECI modem cannot be used to obtain line stats and connect the router at the same time (LAN2 disabled).

There's this thread http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,11818.0.html for the new style ECI modem and this one http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,10635.0.html for the old modem.

There is also various monitoring programs, but I'm not sure on how well they work, take a look here http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/board,46.0.html

Sorry for pasting the URLs but I'm on my tablet and can't be bothered to tidy them up

Question:

What exactly is HTTPx6?


Empirical data does SUGGEST that an ECI modem does eventually produce higher sync/throughput speeds than the HG612, when connected to an ECI DSLAM.

After switching to a HG612, Interleaving more often than not kicks in after a few days & solid blocks of RSCorr errors can often be seen.
I/we suspect this is a more likely scenario for higher speed connections than those capped at 40Mb sync speed.

I/we don't yet have any comparison data that I am aware of from an ECI modem connected to a Huawei DSLAM.

At this time, the connection monitoring tools for ECI modems do not seem sufficiently robust or detailed for longer term monitoring.
So my own recomendation is to stick with the HG612 for monitoring purposes, in the knowledge that when connected to an ECI DSLAM, performance is LIKELY to eventually improve if switching to an ECI modem.

BT are apparently unaware of this, or are in denial, as I understand that installation engineers have been clearly instructed to use whatever van stock modems they have, regardless of the DSLAM in use.

Edited by Bald_Eagle1 (Tue 19-Feb-13 17:29:10)

HTTPx6 - It is the multi thread download that the new TBB Speedtester runs ... Six concurrent HTTP streams.



I have been trying various things trying to get VOIP working through Modem >>>> Business Hub 3 >>>> 2701 (DHCP off) >>>> Phone adapter and have failed, but comparing speedtests all day has shown the ECI to be faster than Huawei on my line with a Huawei cabinet!

Ah, that's interesting.

Was the speed improvement immediate?

How long has the ECI modem been connected?

Do you have any ongoing/snapshot graphs or data from the HG612 right up to swapping for the ECI modem?

Following a few days of stable connection using the ECI, do you fancy trying the HG612 again, in the name of research, just to see if it initially starts off at a similar speed to the ECI, possibly on fastpath.
It would be really useful to log/graph connection stats over say a week or so if you did decide to give it a whirl.

(The new more robust & quicker programs & easy to set up automated/unattended logging/graphing for the HG612 are now very, very close to being released).

We would then possibly be able to determine the differences in real life terms between the 2 modems.

It was immediate ... Huawei 2B ran several speedtests, disconnected and installed 3B, ran a few tests, disconnected, installed and powered up ECI and about 2 minutes to get sync, logon &c and ran tests. An immediate improvement on both UP and DOWN.


ECI was connected sometime after midday and is still in place. Same results as earlier.


I have a set of Huawei stats from this morning.

Remind me in a couple of days and I'll install and test the HG612 again.

the v1 ECI's stopped showing up on ebay around christmas, asboguy was going to send me a v1 unlocked but then changed his mind, it seems these v1s are now treated like platinum I expect because they becoming rare.

The v2 eci's unlocked are not that good. There is no gui, the telnet is very stripped down such as no error stats, the telnet also seems to eventually crashing meaning a modem reboot to bring ti back (not good), on top of that the 2nd lan port cant be used, the lan ip cant be changed, its problematic to get access to it without disconnecting the wan.

I agree the ECI seems better as a modem but if wanting unlocked access its a tiny shadow of the HG. After 3 weeks or so of using the ECI my BRAS rate went over 78mbit from 69mbit. Without having access to the error stats it looks very clear the ECI has lower errors on my line as 9 days out of 10 there isnt even a red speck on my tbb graph whilst with the HG there is 2-6 on most days (avg 1200 errors a day).

I think the best hope for the new ECI is if someone can get the v1 firmware on it, but there seems little motivation from people to go down that route.

Currently I am going for a 4 week uptime stretch on the HG to see if the dslam fiddles with my signal power again after decent uptime and a resulting upwards sync. But with what I suspect is a higher error rate it may not happen.

Edited by Chrysalis (Tue 19-Feb-13 18:29:30)