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After being a Shaw TV and Internet customer for several years, I recently made the switch to Telus Optik TV and Telus Optik High Speed Turbo Internet. While I’m very happy with both the Optik TV and Internet so far, there have been a few bumps along the way. For example, the other day I hooked up a DD-WRT powered wireless router to the network and experienced an IGMP multicast packet flood when I turned on the TV. In this article I show you how to use ebtables to block an IGMP multicast packet flood on a DD-WRT WLAN when watching IPTV.
What is Telus Optik TV and Internet?
Telus Optik TV is the fancy marketing name for Telus’ IPTV service. Telus Optik High Speed Turbo Internet is the fancy marketing name for Telus’ VDSL internet service. The two services are closely related in that they are delivered into your home over the same physical line. Once that line enters your home, it is connected to a VDSL modem-router combination device, which is responsible for delivering both services to your computers, television set-top boxes (STB) and personal video recorders (PVR).
Currently, Telus uses the Actiontec V1000H VDSL Modem Router as the VDSL endpoint device. Because both the IPTV and internet are delivered over the same physical medium, they share bandwidth. One of the V1000H’s main jobs is to manage this sharing so that you can watch high definition TV programs while simultaneously downloading files and surfing the internet. For the most part, the Actiontec does a great job of this sharing as I have not noticed any glitches with the TV while downloading big files.
In addition to being a modem and a router, the V1000H is also a wireless-N WiFi access point. By default, the V1000H’s WLAN is bridged to its (wired) LAN so that they share the same subnet addressing scheme (192.168.1.0/24) and broadcast domain. As far as I know, you can’t put the WLAN on a different subnet than the LAN and you can’t change the subnet addressing scheme either (unless, perhaps, you hack the V1000H or put an unsupported firmware on it).
Anyway, as I said at the start of this article, I like Optik TV and Internet but there have been some problems here and there, one of which is IGMP multicast floods.
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Thanks for taking some of the mystery out of Telus Optik TV.