Gigaclear, Genexis DRG 700/7000, Linksys. And Upgrade. Have I got this correct ?

4jbl7

Two years ago we subscribed to Gigaclear when it cabled the village. Pot in the road, box on outside wall and Genexis DRG 700/7000 on the inside wall. No other cables, wifi is ok. From what I understand the signal down the Gigaclear fibre optic cable is received by the Genexis box and converted into a wifi signal, then this wifi is transmitted by the Genexis box. Am I correct in this understanding ?
The reason for asking is that we want to upgrade to a faster package but Gigaclear now supply Linksys Velop boxes and tell me that this has to be "bridged" ?? to the Genexis box, it does not replace it. So wireless wifi is now ethernet connected wifi, something of a retrograde step !
If we want to upgrade then is this the only solution as I gather that only the Genexis box can "decode ??" the Gigaclear optic signal and convert it to something that another box (in this case Linksys) transmits ?
Thanks
Brian.

matelodave

You could look at the answers given on the ISPreview site that you've also posted to as they'll probably be the same.

The fibre is terminated in the Genexis FTU (fibre terminal unit) and the DRG 700/7000 is mechanically connected to it and as you say it appears to be an all singing all dancing fibre terminal/modem and wif router,

Unfortunaely it's probably now past it's sell-by date and possibly unable to be upgraded. The software is probably several years out of date which means that to get the latest technology the best they can do is use it as a basic optical terminating unit/modem which presents a wired ethernet which then gets connected to a separate wifi router.

I'm guessing that Gigaclear my have had an original contract with Genexis and had them made to Gigaclear specs but over the years they have been overtaken by the pace of technology an possibly Genexis or Gigaclear have decide not to support it anymore (much like what happens with mobilephones and other technology - the shelf life ifor technology sn't very long nowadays)

It seems that you either remain with the service that you've got or put up with having a separate wifi router if you want faster speeds.

Most other FTTP providers have a separate ONT whuch terminates the fibre and does the conversion between optical and ethernet and then present a gigabit ethernet connection to either a modem or a wifi modem

[Deleted User]

4jbl7 said:

The reason for asking is that we want to upgrade to a faster package but Gigaclear now supply Linksys Velop boxes and tell me that this has to be "bridged" ?? to the Genexis box, it does not replace it. So wireless wifi is now ethernet connected wifi, something of a retrograde step !

If we want to upgrade then is this the only solution as I gather that only the Genexis box can "decode ??" the Gigaclear optic signal and convert it to something that another box (in this case Linksys) transmits ?

Not a retrograde step at all, in fact by the sound of things the Wifi will perform much better with Linksys Velop as it is a mesh system with multiple access points.

Don't worry about the ethernet cable between the Genexis and the Linksys, that will not be the bottleneck in your internet, it will be as fast as the external fibre. Your Genexis system already converts the fibre optic signal to ethernet and sends it to the internal router and bridges it to wifi internally anyway so no extra "signal conversion" is actually occurring in sending it via Ethernet to your new Linksys.

You will also be able to position your wifi access points more optimally as well, combined ONT devices tend to be mounted near the floor in a corner of the house which isn't great for spreading a wifi signal around the house.

Generally I'm a big fan of separating the network components anyway for better performance because each dedicated device specialises in one job and can perform better than an all in one device.

4jbl7

Thanks to both for taking the time to give me a complete and understandable answer.
We will have a think about what we want to do next.
Cheers
Brian.