HomeFusion

[bosn]

I live about 40 miles from Nashville, Tn. Had HomeFusion installed at my home today. So far, could not be more pleased. I live in a rural area with no cable or DSL & my only option was with so-so 3g with MIFI 4510L. Did lose connection once today (for about 4 minutes while I re-powered my HomeFusion router) vs many times a day with MIFI. Checked my download speed just prior to writing this. (16.51 Mbps & 17.37 Mbps) I am used to getting less than 1Mbps, so you can imagine how I feel !II Crossing my fingers this keeps up. For those who are wondering if you should try HomeFusion when it gets to your area, I definately say "Go for it".

[commonsense101]

nice.. looks a tad pricey for me but good to hear a success story for once

[John_Getzke]

Good news indeed.  Keep us posted if your experience changes. 

[jcharriso51]

About 4 months 4G LTE service became available in our area.  We are in a rural area and it was a great leap forward and we are happy with the service. Now Homefusion has came out and so I contected Verizon to see if they had a way to migrate existing customers to the new service.   The results were dissapointing to say the least.

There were two basic options..

1.  Add homefusion to my existing contract.   The Homefusion installation charge in that case would jump from $200 to $399.00 and I would be paying for both services.    Not good..  ( Turns out that $399.00 is the "regular" price of the Homefusion install not the promotional price)

2.  Pay the FULL canncellation charges on my current contract and then re-sign up as a new customer under Homefusion. The cancellation charges and the new service once again hit $400.00   .  Still not good.

I think this kind of policy is crazy.  Several people  in my area signed up for LTE service strictly for home use and Verizon is missing an oppertunity to quickly expand the Homefusion footprint and gain more income.  I think its fair to say that very few people will pay $400 to move to the new service..   There needs to be some middle ground. After all we would still be Verizon customers.   Its not like we would be going to ATT or Sprint.

I am glad the original poster has had good luck and high performance with the new service.   I wish I could join in.

I plan to honor the term of my contact and re-evaluate the situation when it expires in 2014. Hopefully there will be some competition by that time.

[ConundrumIV]

I don't think Verizon has any intention of installing Home Fusion in any more homes than they have to. I just read an article about Verizon and its home Fusion service, in this article it states that Verizon is only interested in making the appearance that they are releasing this service to the masses. Apparently as part of another older agreement Verizon had to show that they were contributing to new technologies and were a big player still in offering cutting edge technology. They according to this article are only using Home Fusion as a smoke screen to apease the politicians. Apparently lots and lots of people are being told they qualify for the service then get stone walled for a few weeks, then finally are told that they do not qualify for the service. I myself requested the service, was given the silent treatment for 3 or more weeks to only told they dont offer it in my area. I am dead center in the middle of their 4G LTE service area. Verizon is my only option, as I do not have cable or any other services available here on our 200 acre farm. Yet low and behold, I get 4 bars of signal inside my home on the 4G LTE network. However, they wont install the Fusion service. More of the same, fraud and thieves. If I can locate the article I will post it. So instead of having a 30GB plan for $110 I have to pay $130.00 for 20GB and now purchase a 2nd MiFI device just to be able to add any more data on the plan. So to get an additional 20GB plan on top of my original 20GB I have to purchase a 2nd device in order to get the additional usage GBs. enough usage per month.They are getting an additional $150.00 or more out of me each month because of these tactics. The home Fusion is basically $10.00 pe GB when you go over, the MiFI is $15.00 per GB overage and they only offer a 20GB plan instead of a 30GB like the home fusion. This is my sole internet access I have no other choices.

[schillit]

would love to know what the ping times are as well if someone could post that.  I am hoping since it's fixed LTE, it might be slightly better than what we see on the phones?

[bosn]

Just now tested (Speedtest.net)

Ping time - 85ms

Download - 35.89

Upload - 1.82

Note that average download somewhere between 15 & 25

[Matt_m]

Curious, do you get a public IP address or private?  Can you use your own router or do you have to use the one built into the 5 gallon bucket-antenna? 

Anxiously awaiting nationwide rollout of this and 4G coverage in my area.

[bosn]

Sorry. Really cannot answer either question. Unsure what my IP address is. As for the router, kind of doubtful if you can use your own. No need to however, as a real nice router is included in the installation package. Mine is sitting on my desk.

Have had this system for 12 days now & have lost connection with the internet only twice, and only then for a couple of minutes. Checked my speed again just prior to this writing.

Ping: 85ms

Download: 18.77 Mbps

Upload: 1.6 Mbps

Rarely do I get a download speed of less than 10 Mbps. It ususlly bounces somewhere between 20 & 30. Have gotten as high as 38.26 Mbps.

[Matt_m]

I think I answered my own questions looking at the FAQ and How To information on Verizon's site.  There's port forwarding settings.  For those to be useful, you'd need a public IP address.

[nateg]

You can use your own router/firewall but you must put the Verizon router in "bridge" mode. This will allow you to simply pass through to your own device.

  The Verizon modem has the ability to do most anything that a typical netgear or linksys can do. As a customer, you have complete access to the router config.

You do get a public IP.

[dbw77]

Hi,

I just got the home fusion setup today, works great, but I want to use my existing LAN and Firewall and skip using the homefusion router stuff...

Can you provide any info on how you got the bridge mode setup. I am not sure where those settings are in the Home Fusion router and I don't want to mess things up.  If you have instructions or  pointers on how you set it up, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

Dave W

[John_Getzke]

User Manual for Home Fusion Router:

http://support.verizonwireless.com/pdf/homefusion_user_manual.pdf

Chapter 3 shows you how to access the Admin page (GUI) for the router.

Chapter 5 shows you how to configure the network and the devices it is attached to.

There really is no need to maintain the old network with this device, it should come equipped with everything you need to support your network.  However, if you really want to bridge the two networks then I suggest looking up something called "Cascading".  Its pretty simple and only takes a few minutes.  

When you cascade two routers togeather you configure them so one is the default gateway/primary/master and one is an access point/secondary/slave.  In this scenario you would want the HBR to be the default gateway and configure your old router to be the access point.  There is no need to make any changes on the HBR.  All you really need to know is what the IP address of the HBR is and the rest is a matter of configuring your old router.  When they are on the same network and agree that one router is the boss then they will work togeather without issues.

Cascade Routers:

http://www.wikihow.com/Cascade-Routers

http://www6.nohold.net/Cisco2/ukp.aspx?pid=80&vw=1&articleid=3733

[dbw77]

Thanks, but I need more detailed technical info on this router, the advanced settings don't give me everything, and there are several settings which don't make sense about the Coax, Broadband Network etc, and I cannot see any intuitive way to just bridge the Broadband conneciton which has external IP to the LAN side without routing.  

I appreciate the into you provided, however I don't want double NAT and I want to use my own FW which has more advanced capabilities, so I just want the raw Internet connection into my own device.

If anyone has done this or has instructions from Verizon or more insight let me know.

Also does anyone know what the model/manufacturer of this device is? Maybe there is more tech info from the manufacturer rather then Verizon, I saw some of this stuff on the Fios pages but not about this specific router.

Thanks

[John_Getzke]

dbw77,

I think what you need to look into is the feature called Static NAT on your HBR.  You can find the steps to configure this option on Page 71 of the User Guide that I posted above.

With Static NAT enabled you can allow direct internet access to a specific device on your home network.  Presumably this means that you can work around NAT and provide a public IP for a device like a webserver, IP security camera, VPN clients or hosting XBox live games.  It might be what you need to enable your bridged connection to your personal FW and network devices.

Take a look at it and let us know if it helps or not.

[dbw77]

Hi John,

Thanks for the thought, however, I have some specific things I want to do, for example, use a better SIP ALG which requires an external IP.  The Static NAT still does a NAT, of the public IP to an internal private IP.

What I really need is to just get on the subnet of the broadband connection, which means somehow bridging that connection to the LAN port of the device.  I talked with Verizon, and though they know what I mean, even the Home Fusion support people don't have ANY info on this router and/or know how to do what I want. It seems possible, but I just don't have enough info about how they have it configured.  Everything I try doesn't work and I have to reset the router to factory.

If anyone else wants to just use the Broadband connection and pass it to their own router/firewall please let me know if you were able to to it and what the configs of the HBR/HBA are.

Thanks

[WebMan]

SIP ALG?  I thought that setting is reserved for voLTE.  I love my HF system, just on the base that it works like a charm.  I never see below 20 megs on WiFi, and the speeds are about 45-50 megs hard wired.  Where I live, I have Charter Communications, and Verizon DSL.  So, this was a cool alternative.  Only thing that I had a problem with is customer service not knowing about the HF "data only" plan.

[vittorio88]

Static NAT is for assigning static IP's to devices on your network. NOTE: it is only useful if you paid verizon $500 for this service.

[ansongarcia]

dbw77,

Have you figured out how to pass through the IP so you can put the address on your own device/firewall.  I'm just about to order Home Fusion and need this ability.  Funny thing, I work for Verizon (on the Wireline side) and have a lab at home where I have servers and applications that we sell.  I go to customer sites and take a router with me that is configured to VPN back to my home Firewall (Cisco ASA) so I can access everything remotely and demo our applications.  I am in the process of moving out to the country and the only access I will have is 4G.  I already have a free 4G router from marketing, but there is no way to turn on static IP on this one.  I need to buy Home Fusion or a regular contract and get a static IP .  I have found that I can do this on a regular 20GB contract by buying a MIFI or Jetpack and then buying a Cradlepoint CBA750 router from 3GStore.com.  This has the ability to plug in the sim, and bridge the WAN over to the Ethernet side so I can put the IP on my device.  Getting a static is a one time fee of $500.  My problem/delima is I rather puchase Home Fusion and do this, but as I unsderstand so far we don't offer the static IP on the Home Fusion.  You can only get a static on the 10 and 20GB non Home Fusion contract.  Let me know what you have tried and I will do the same.  I'm trying to hook up some people that are trying to do this and share some experiences.

[dbw77]

No I tried even looking for docs for the device and there is no real documentation on the wierd special configs they do, and it is not clear how it is working internally. I tried a bunch of things that looked obvious, but it always breaks everything and I have to reset to factory settings.

I just double natted and use my own firewall, which at least get's me most of what I want but it would be better if they would just provide instructions on how to bridge the LTE connection to the LAN side of the device if possible, but they don't...

[vittorio88]

For starters, "bridge-mode" usually refers to a particular protocol for PPPoE which is usually only useful for using a DSL router/modem/switch as a modem instead of a router/modem/switch. There is NO bridge mode for Homefusion because it doesn't use PPPoE to dial a connection. It connects automatically on startup.

Now, if you want to use your own router there is a different way.

You need to set a static IP on your own router on the WAN side to 192.168.1.2

You need to configure the homefusion to point to 192.168.1.2 for DMZ.

You need to disable the HBA firewall.

I also enabled Dyndns on the homefusion HBA to get a correct public IP address for my hostname.

You can configure the cantenna (HBA) through the router (HBR). What you need to do is disable the HBA's firewall (My Network>LTE Edit Connection> Settings> Disable Fiewall) and enable DMZ pointing to 192.168.1.2.

Good luck!