Considering buying Spectra. Need some advice

[varkey]

the thing in my case is that i prefer to pay two different service providers 750 each than 1500 to one service provider.
two connections mean that there is less chance of me ending with a dead service.
right now i have excitel and abs connected to the load balancer. i would love to replace abs with spectra when they start giving connections at my place. but i would prefer to pay a lower price for 100mbps than 1gbps which is more of a marketing gimmick as it would never even get utilized fully in the first place. i am not going to stream youtube/netflix at 4k in near future because i do not have compatible hardware. i do not have enough people using internet simultaneously at my place so at best i would be consuming like 1% of the speed 99% of the times. as another user of spectra pointed out, it is also practically impossible to achieve 1gbps on international servers. and popular services like netflix and Amazon prime just do not require this much bandwidth even at best content quality.

Yep, that makes sense. Which load balancer are you using btw?

To be honest, I just wanted to try Spectra's offering and see how it performs. Cause Act is pretty good in my area. The un-metered bandwidth from Spectra makes the data usage cap a non-issue, not that I download a lot and do not plan to do either. Its just one less thing to worry about and can use as much as you actually *need*.

But then as they are throttling torrents, its a bit of a downer. I think I remember reading somewhere that Act also does throttling, but I have never experienced it.

 

[Sushubh]

using edgerouter x. upgraded from a pretty shitty TP-Link which is now lying useless.

well yeah. if spectra can deliver stable connectivity and reasonable speeds without illogical blocks and throttling, i would love to switch to it as my primary connection and move excitel as backup. excitel and abs which i am currently paying for are both unlimited so unmetered usage has no temptation for me lol.

you really should consider getting a VPN connection. even if just for downloading. i started using a vpn for torrents few years ago and it has been just great. now i just have to deal with p2p sites being blocked by these internet companies. though turning on vpn in browser usually just take 2 clicks so it's a minor annoyance.

 

[gopichandpai]

@varkey do they give public IP or private IP? Also please let us know IP renewal period. Is it once in 24 hours or 12 hours or it won't change as long as you don't restart the router

 

[varkey]

the one thing i am very interested in finding out about spectra is the number of websites that are blocked. p2p websites for instance. what i love about excitel is that most of the services load fine on https. i do not have to turn on vps for them. i also pay for an airtel adsl connection mostly for the landline but when i do end up using their internet, i end up hitting a blocked website so frequently that i just do not get tempted to switch to vfiber on their platform and pay more for the internet component.

I tried a couple of sites, it seems to be like you said. Over http/80, I get a block page, but if I use HTTPS it goes through.

 

[varkey]

@varkey do they give public IP or private IP? Also please let us know IP renewal period. Is it once in 24 hours or 12 hours or it won't change as long as you don't restart the router

It's the same NAT nonsense like Act, we just get a dynamic 10.x.x.x private IP address. I asked the service engineer whether they can provide a dynamic public IP and he was clueless, asked me to contact customer care.

 

[varkey]

using edgerouter x. upgraded from a pretty shitty TP-Link which is now lying useless.

well yeah. if spectra can deliver stable connectivity and reasonable speeds without illogical blocks and throttling, i would love to switch to it as my primary connection and move excitel as backup. excitel and abs which i am currently paying for are both unlimited so unmetered usage has no temptation for me lol.

you really should consider getting a VPN connection. even if just for downloading. i started using a vpn for torrents few years ago and it has been just great. now i just have to deal with p2p sites being blocked by these internet companies. though turning on vpn in browser usually just take 2 clicks so it's a minor annoyance.

Interesting, will check out the Edgerouter X. Did you get it from India? How much? Seems to be selling at $50 in US. How does it compare to a Mikrotik Gigabit router, any experience?

VPN Will check that out. But I mostly use private trackers (which thankfully aren't blocked yet) so the blocks haven't really affected me much, except when l needed to get things from the public trackers and torrent search engines.

 

[Sushubh]

Over http/80, I get a block page, but if I use HTTPS it goes through.

should be fine i guess. do keep an eye on your torrent usage. if you notice that it is being throttled somehow. would also affect private trackers.

 

[Mak4]

Speedtest.net results from a wired device connected directly to the D-Link router. Tests were done using sivel/speedtest-cli as the only wired device I have right now is a head-less NAS device (so throughput may have been affected due to hardware limitations on my side too)

How are pings and speed to servers outside India?
Could you try opening command prompt and pinging a server outside india such"ping sgp-1.valve.net -t" or "ping 203.117.172.253 -t" and let it run for 10 minutes to see if there's any packet loss ?

 

[igloo]

@Sushubh Edgerouter X review plz?

 

[Sushubh]

not sure what to review. it is a pretty old and very popular model so there should be lots of proper reviews out there.
i only got it because i was not happy with the size of the TP-Link router i was using. this one is insanely compact. a friend was coming to india from states and he asked me if i wanted anything. at usd 50, this made a lot of sense.
it is somewhat complicated to configure compared to regular routers. but seems to be quite stable.
i am running it in load balance mode which means that both connections are used at the same time.
but internet goes down for as long as a minute when one of the two connections disappear (abs mostly). so it's kind of annoying. tp-link had the same problem but the time duration was very low.
there could be configuration changes that might fix this. but it's kind of complicated as you have to find scripts online and run it on the console. user interface does not really offer a lot of options for load balancing or failover configuration.

in short... i only got it because i had an option to get it at 50 dollars. i like it because of the small size. it does work fine as a router for both load balancing and failover. but only get it if you understand what you are getting and what you would use it for. and be ready to read a lot of online articles to find out how to implement advance features as not everything is accessible from the backend user interface.