That is a poor excuse - the thermal grease should be as THIN as possible to get the maximum transfer of heat. With a flat ceramic chip and smooth heatsink it is only required to fill the minor imperfections in the two surfaces.

Don't shoot the messenger !

there are some compounds which have diamond dust in them!

That was a new one on me but makes sense. I suspect Graphene could do even better, although I'm not sure whether it could be delivered as a paste; a pencil and sticky tape might be better!

Dave

You know it wasn't directed at you ... you were just repeating te excuse you were given.

In reply to a post by DLS:

there are some compounds which have diamond dust in them!

That was a new one on me but makes sense. I suspect Graphene could do even better, although I'm not sure whether it could be delivered as a paste; a pencil and sticky tape might be better!

Dave

Graphene - carbon!

as for Diamonds - Wiki

Edited by MHC (Thu 18-Aug-11 22:24:30)

Graphene - carbon!

Absolutely - but with better thermal conductivity than Diamond or even Carbon nanotubes, and much better than Graphite out of the plane.

Thanks for the link.

Dave

Still a poor excuse cos there really is no need for a device like this to get hot enough to need such malarky, IMHO. It's only handling a single channle of data at no more than 40 mbits/sec. I have here switches handling 8 ports at gigabit speeds that doesn't get warm to the touch...

In reply to a post by ggremlin:

given that vdsl is supposedly backward compatible to adsl / adsl2 etc, what would happen if an adsl2 modem were plugged in instead ?

Presuming you could match up the other parameters, I guess you'd get an 8 meg service. If you want that, order ADSL!

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

There is a real risk if doing this change to custom hardware for third parties when wires-only is not supported, that people will report a fault, and when the Openreach engineer arrives, sees non-standard hardware and simply leaves, marking sheet to suggest fault is with customers hardware, and thus raising an expensive visit charge.

It is very important that when an engineer visits that if people are using their own VDSL modem, they have the original hardware working, and showing exactly the same problem.

Oh that's definitly an issue. With a busted system, the first thing anyone using third-party hardware should do is switch back to the official kit and try that - and only then report it if faulty. BT will charge a fat fee for a site visit to fix a fault if the fault is not within their area of responsibility - and they won't fix it!

Feedback.

OK - to try to put all in one place what I've learned over the last couple of days.

Dlink. I've not bothered looking. Given what the last few Dlink ADSL routers i've seen are like, I'd not consider it anyway.

Zyxel Prestige 870. Zyxel disti in the UK is not stocking this nor will they consider doing so until BT officially allow third party routers to be used and provide facilities for manufacturers to test their systems and work otu suitable settings to publish alongside the gear. The UK disti offered to source one for me on a strickt "no returns" basis with no guarantees and definitly no support. I'm not going to go there. Had BT enabled my local exchange I might've taken one to test out on my own line. I look forward to wires-only officially happening and have no doubt the P870 will be just as good as the P66x range we've been using for ten years on ADSL.

Thompson. I have a "Speedtouch" here we bought for line testing on problem cases as we were informed it's the router BT themselves use. But the UI is so dire, I'd never recommend one to a client. One of the networks we resell supply them as managed devices. Well, that's up to them!

Vigor 2750n. The UK disti say it should work with FTTC and offer a How To Page (see link) . I'm not clear if this amounts to them guaranteeing it's suitable or merely offering some assistance. http://draytek.co.uk/support/kb/kb_vigor_v2750_setup...

FritzBox. I have one customer using one but his initial attempts to get it working were unsuccessful, and he reverted to using it's PPPoE wan port and the BT router. I have forwarded him the additional info found here, but can't say if he'll try it or not. I also forwarded the caveats about the adverse affect of the line tests FB ran.

IN ANY CASE of course, it should be understood BT do not recommend and will not support anything other than their own supplied modem connected to the VDSL service, for the time being at least. I can only note that the GOOD news is they provide a modem and NOT a full router, so at least we're still in control of the firewall, etc., processes on our own kit inboard of the modem. Small mercies...

Thanks to all who contributed.

Totally different requirements. Switching is a simple process but the modulation and demodulation of the data is processor intense. It will get very hot with junction temperatures up at 70^oC.

It may be just a single channel at the output but to create that it has to look at several hundred input channels each of which has to be extracted from the full signal and noise, analyse the phase and amplitude for everyone of those at the same time and decide what that analogue signal corresponds to in digital terms. Whilst doing that it is taking an input digital signal and working out what analogue signal it should be in terms of phase, amplitude and carrier &c.