Independent information on fiber, mobile and ADSLThe 1 Gb fiber puts the hardware of Movistar's HGU router to the test, a piece of equipment that was designed 5 years ago and has already seen 4 speed increases.We analyze your hardware to assess if it will be able to deliver gigabit over cable and Wi-Fi.Movistar's 1 Gb fiber is now a reality, culminating a career that began in 2004 with the first ADSL speed doubling.16 years after the duplication of ADSL from 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps, we are talking about gigabit speeds over the Telefónica network for the first time.Clients with 600 Mb now browse at 1 Gb, a speed that represents a new challenge for routers and devices.The Global Device Development Center was established as a new unit within Telefónica specializing in the development of its own hardware in 2015. Its first product was the HGU router, launched at the end of that same year, a device with oversized hardware for connections that the operator marketed at that time, with fiber in the market of only 30 Mb. Since then it has become the reference router of the brand installed in 87% of homes with Telefónica fiber and in its device of more successful, with 8 million units manufactured.During this time it has changed its name several times.Although we continue to call it HGU and it has also been presented as Movistar Base, the operator currently refers to it as a Smart Wifi router.It has been the protagonist of successive speed increases, to 50, 100, 300 and 600 Mb, holding up in the face of the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth and connectivity needs of Movistar customers.However, the new increase in fiber speed to 1 Gb can put the hardware of the equipment in trouble.The manufacture of the HGU was left in the hands of two companies, so that Movistar avoided depending on a single manufacturer and made them compete with each other to offer the best conditions.This has meant that today we have two HGU brands: MitraStar and Askey.The exterior appearance is exactly the same and inside they have almost the same technical characteristics, but with some difference that you will surely be interested in knowing.Movistar has recently started using the new generation of HGU routers, the MitraStar GPT-2741GNAC and the Askey RTF8115VW, but they do not bring any hardware improvements.You can see them in this article: Which Movistar HGU Smart WiFi router to choose?This is how the 4 models that exist differThe heart of the HGU is the Broadcom BCM68380 chip, a low-cost SoC with 2 32-bit 600 MHz RISC cores, which integrates the functions of GPON ONT and gigabit ethernet switch.On the one hand, the radio part is taken care of by the Broadcom BCM43217TKMLG for the 2.4 GHz band, with WiFi n and 2x2 MIMO.On the other we have the Quantenna QT3740BC for the 5 GHz band with WiFi ac and 4x4 MU-MIMO.In total we have 6 Wi-Fi antennas inside.2 for the 2.4 band and 4 antennas for the 5 GHz band.Both teams are practically traced, as you can see in the table in which we summarize their most important components and comparing the photographs of their respective boards, although you have probably already noticed a first important difference.While all the components are the same and there is only difference in the brands of the flash memory, both of the main processor and of the 5 GHz radio, in the RAM of the main processor the MitraStar brings just twice the capacity of the Askey, with 256 MiB, in addition to a higher clock frequency: 800 MHz compared to 667 MHz for the Askey.Another detail that can be seen in the photographs is the connection of the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi antennas to the board, with U.FL connectors in the case of the Askey, which would make things easier if you want to do a hack with the antennas. external, and with cable soldered with a good glob of tin to the plate in the case of the MitraStar.To take advantage of all the flow that a fiber connection with 1,000 Mb can offer, we are going to focus on three main elements that can compromise performance.The first is the GPON optical interface.In the HGU it supports 2.488 Gbit/s downstream and just half that, 1.244 Gbit/s upstream.While the download seems loose, the upload begins to find its limit with the 1 Gb fiber.It's next link is in the ports of the local area network.The four of them are 1000Base-T (IEEE 802.3ab) supporting transfer rates of 1 Gbps, but it must be taken into account that the different layers in which the data packets are encapsulated leave a real speed of 940 Mbps. trend of recent years in which the fiber gave a few megabytes more than those contracted.Finally we have the 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi networks. With Wi-Fi n, a 2x2 MIMO configuration and 40 MHz channel width, the HGU band 2.4 could offer us up to 270 Mbps theoretically, but the reality is that we probably have connected some client that does not support that width, in addition to how difficult it is that in our neighborhood there is so much spectrum without interference, so we can expect a real maximum of 91 Mbps for all connected devices.As soon as we have a neighbor in the same or adjacent channel, the speed will plummet.For its part, the 5 GHz band with WiFi ac, 4x4 MIMO and 20, 40 and 80 MHz channels is another story.If your Wi-Fi client device supports 80 MHz channels and has 4 MIMO antennas, in theory it should be able to reach 1733 Mbps on the physical layer and deliver just over 1200 Mbps of real speed.Since most Wi-Fi clients only support two MIMO streams, you'll have to settle for exactly half.In the forum you can find HGU users getting 600 Mbps over Wi-Fi in good conditions.But the question is who needs to download at 1 Gbps on a single computer?The advantage of the giga is in sharing that flow between all the connected equipment, although the router links with each of them, whether by cable or Wi-Fi, are slower.And in that aspect the HGU seems to continue to measure up.Movistar spoke for the first time about the successor to the HGU in the summer of 2018. At the 2019 MWC mobile congress, it even advanced the launch dates, ensuring that by July of that same year they would launch the Smart Wifi 6 amplifier and in December the new xHGU .The amp was actually released in June 2020, just a year later than planned.The new xHGU uses a Cortina Saturn CA8279 as its main processor with an XGS-PON optical interface that can deliver 10 Gbps downstream and 2.5 Gbps upstream.In the radio part, it is equipped with a Quantenna QSR10GU-AX Plus chip capable of managing dual-band WiFi 6 with 4 antennas at 2.4 GHz and 8 antennas at 5 GHz.If we add the one-year delay that Movistar's Smart Wifi 6 devices have suffered, we find that the xHGU should arrive together with the 1 Gb fiber, which would allow the current HGU to start thinking about a dignified retirement.It is possible that the appearance of the final xHGU has changed during all this time.In this thread you have one of the candidates proposed by @EmuAGR: Possible technical characteristics of the future Movistar xHGU on the Askey websiteThe comparison forgets the quality and stability of the firmware.Where Askey is superior to MitraStar.The Askey, since the n53, has Wifi issues with many devices and corrupts many DNS requests, especially on iOS devices.They tried to solve it with the n54 and n55, but nothing at all, to this day the error persists.With the n55_5 they had to fix a bug that was blocking the TV on UHD decos.Since they don't use xpon with 1gb there will be more bottlenecks...I have 2 contracted fibers and I already saturate the pon port of the entire neighborhood with an upload speed testI think that the most logical thing would be for them to announce the xHGU in December or January, coinciding with the beginning of the gigabit commercialization.In addition, it would fit with what they indicated that customers should request the free increase to the new speed, which could come in handy so that not everyone updates at the same time and xHGUs can be produced and sentReading the comments on Movistar's tweet about the speed increase, I came across one in which a Telefónica worker states that the update to XGSPON and the xHGU router will arrive later.twitter.com/magdep/status/1333030888297406471?s=20Great comment you found.By the way, I don't know if it has already been reported here or not, but I just did a little more research on his Twitter and it turns out that it is confirmed that the famous router that was speculated here would be the xHGU or not (one that had been found on Askey's page) is indeed the xHGU.The article published here a few months ago Possible technical characteristics of the future Movistar xHGU on the Askey websiteWell, what a discovery I made in the end… :PIf I'm not mistaken, and as you say here, GPON networks have a bandwidth of 2.5 Gbps.That bandwidth is divided among all the users of that fiber (128 theoretical, I read that in Spain they do not exceed 64) and the GPON network distributes the downlink traffic with time division of the traffic it has.Come on, if right now there are 4 users of 600 megabytes doing a speedtest (or a maximum speed download) just at the same moment they are already taking the fiber to the limit and if a 5th is added, the user will begin to notice a degradation.This is so, right?In truth, a user has all the bandwidth available in his time slot, simply that the distribution over time (we are talking about ms) is reduced to his network speed (if for 1/4 of a second I receive packets at 2.5 Gbps and for 3/4 I get nothing, I end up getting 2500/4 = 624 Mbps) and if there were 5 users that speed would exceed 2.5 Gbps that can be distributed and would imply that they would be given less time to each user and its effective speed will be lower.The thing is that although they have told me "yes" around here and that is also what I have found, at some time someone has told me "no, it is not like that, everyone has the maximum bandwidth", but in this case in the GPON network would imply that if there are 64 people downloading at 600 Mbps in those time intervals (let's say they spend an hour downloading all of them) they would be passing 38 Gbps through the network, and it does not fit with "2.5 Gbps to be distributed by a time division [intelligent])"What you say is correct, with 4 users of 600Mbps, if they do the speed test at the same time, the download is saturated.And also in upload there is 1.5Gbps, so the upload is already saturated with 3.The operators play with oversubscription so that the deployment is profitable for them and that is why the same PON port is shared, as you say, between 32/64/128.Imagine if they had to throw a fiber from your house to the central for each one... That's why they can't guarantee 100% bandwidth all the time.The GPON does not work as neither of them supposes.With 4 users downloading at 600Mb/s the port is not saturated, you need many more.But if the PON has 2.48Gbits and the OLT sends the traffic to all the ONUs in broadcast mode, a single client could reach those 2.48Gbits, but when there are more than four concurrent, it is impossible to maintain the 600 Mbits sustained for all of them .What kind of magic do they use to make it so?GPON does not work by giving "all the bandwidth" to a user at a given time.Hence the misconception you make when you think that with 4 users at 600Mb/s you saturate the port, because THAT IS NOT how the protocol works.A correction to the published article: the XGS-PON standard (UTU-T G.987.2) announced by Telefónica will have a symmetrical 10Gbps bandwidth.Source:As speeds of 300Mbps and 1Gbps become standardized, GPON networks will saturate the current GPON network.Therefore, it will be very useful to introduce the xHGU with XGS-PON interface.Fortunately, both GPON and XGS-PON standards are designed to coexist in the same 1:64 fiber optic branch, so there will be no problem in gradually migrating 1Gbps connections to XGS-PON, without altering the operation of the routers at all. and older GPON-based ONTs.Another advantage that the xHGU router has is that it will have WiFi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax), which can be used by the most modern mid-high range smartphones and network cards, and in turn will free up a bit of the saturation of the band used by WiFi. 5 (IEEE 802.11ac).Lastly, it is very likely that the xHGU has a 2.5GbE port, which although now it would hardly be used (except with a 2.5GbE network card, to "shear" the 1000Mbps and even go a little further than contracted, as until now with 600Mbps), leaves the door open to having connections higher than 1Gbps in the future.For all of the above, for me it IS necessary to introduce the xHGU by the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021, and it can also coexist with the HGU for those users who contract 300Mbps, or 600Mbps in the case of O2, or NEBA connections.Without any need to increase connection prices, since XGS-PON is prepared to coexist with GPON without any problem, and it should not affect at all those who already have their HGU or even the ONTs that they started installing at the beginning, maintaining the same prices and improving the global connection quality by migrating data traffic from GPON to XGS-PON.Other countries like France, Switzerland, South Korea, etc… are already making the move to XGS-PON.Much importance is given to the fact that GPON implies distributing 2.5 Gbps among 64 users, but little is said about OLTs, which, as far as I know, have 4 uplink fibers at 10 Gbps.If an OLT supports a maximum of 16,000 clients, do the math... With only 10% occupancy, the GPON ratio is already exceeded.Everyone forgets, playing with other factors to achieve those aggregation ratios.Statistical multiplexing, that's right, I don't know why you get downvoted.What surprises me is that with 2.5 Gbps so many people can be served, I suppose that although the 64 possible clients are mentioned, many CTOs remain at half capacity.Yes, I had already thought about it.But it is more comfortable to directly think about what a fiber supports (which is already heavy to see the ratio).If it were infinite, then the pot itself would also saturate.Although well, I (on other topics) already see more and more ports of 40 and 100 Gbps).The Askey RTF8115VW is missing, which, although it does not have as much distribution as the others, is the one that has been installed mostly during 2020.That comes imported from surpluses in America, to be avoided as much as possible.Well, it's the one they installed on me in October.I've been with Vodafone for a year but previously I was with Movistar, I had the MitraStar and it was much better than this one, the cable and Wi-Fi connections worked correctly but with the Askey it's another story, with cable I have connection cuts and the Wi-Fi coverage is a lot worse.Let's see how I ride it so they can change it.Very good article, just one question.In 2015, Movistar had been offering 100Mb fiber connections for years.I seem to remember that at the end of 2012 I already had 100Mb fiber with the Huawei HG850 ONT and the Comtrend WAP-5813n Router.The ONT was only Fast Ethernet, so the contracted megabytes could not be used 100%, in addition, the telephone line went separately through the traditional copper pair, there was no VoIP, which they had to migrate about a year ago to all customers who still kept this system.You also have to keep in mind that you can't always put the HGU you want in any installation.There are cases in which, depending on which card model you get in the OLT, a MitraStar works for you and an Askey doesn't.Or vice versa.And it may happen that in the same block of flats the opposite happens to you because the other neighbor's fiber is assigned to another card within the same OLT.I hope they work harder with the hardware compatibilities that are to come...With recent firmware there is no incompatibility of OLTs.To this day, at least in my province, installers continue to find HGUs with these problems.Of course, no idea of ​​the firmware version with which they arrive.When it happens, the change is made, the idont is put on the other HGU and it starts without problems.Good morning, In my specific case, having O2 with 600Mb, the MitraStar crashed every few minutes as soon as I used the internal network "intensively" (read NAS, Torrents, Mkv 4K, etc...)I called O2 and requested the change to Askey, which since the change date (two weeks ago) works perfectly for me.It is curious that the Askey works better having half the RAM and being also slower.What makes having a good or bad SW team working on the device.I have the MitraStar and for now without major problems (I preventively restart the router every X days, and I have outsourced the Wi-Fi to an AP to reduce the workload and better reach the whole house), but if I end up buying a NAS and I see that things are starting to go wrong for me... I think I'll take your recommendation.Will it be possible to configure it in single-user mode to connect a neutral router behind it?Will they have the option to order just one XG(S)-PON ONT?Thanks for the article.Very illustrative and well exposed.Moderators |Standards |Legal information |We enter for affiliated purchases