[ale] BellSouth ADSL Experiences

[joshy]

Well, i've spend hours and hours doing indepth research (okay, i just went
to google and searched on bellsouth, alcatel and 1000) and come up with
some interesting answers.

it seems that bellsouth used the cheapest modems known to man (no
surprise) and that the Alcatel 1000's are known to have a sync/no-surf
issue, very similar to what i've been experiencing.   the fix is to either
get a new ADSL modem or to have bellsouth upgrade some firmware. (it
wasn't clear if they are updating the ADSL modem's firmware or the DSLAM)

more details are available at
http://www.mynetwatchman.com/kb/2000/06/26002.htm



on the general issue of dealing with bellsouth's fast access service can
be found here:

http://personal.atl.bellsouth.net/sdf/h/b/hburgiss/dsl/survival/

it seems that Bellsouth is phasing out DHCP with it's longer lease times
and always on status in favor of PPP over Ethernet/ATM which 'dials up'
bellsouth instead of always being connected. (of course it's not really
dialing anything, so it may be functionally the same). bellsouth only
supports their own equipment, but they should be able to work with most
3rd party equipment (such as Linux boxes running PPPoX or Linksys
firewall/routers).


other good stuff can be found at:

http://Cable-DSL.home.att.net/
http://www.dslreports.com/

hope this helps others struggling to deal with BellSouth. I'm thinking of
switching to Mindspring, but since BS still owns the actual lines, I'm not
sure what good that will do.

- joshy


On Tue, Aug 08, 2000 at 02:30:03PM +0000, joshy wrote:
> 
> I was wondering if anyone else has been experiencing frequent connection
> loss with BellSouth's ADSL connections.  I have an Alcatel ADSL modem
> connected to a Linksys router. Everynow and then the connection goes down
> and the only thing that will bring it back up is to reboot the
> router. Previously I had the ADSL going directly into my
> workstation. Every now and then I would have to restart
> networking.  Before then I had the ADSL going into and old 486 with 2 NIC
> cards. Again, I would have to restart networking every now and then to get
> the connection working again.  Sometimes I have to restart it twice a day
> and sometimes it goes for weeks without problems.  Has anyone else had
> experiences like this?  I'm using a Linksys 4 port CableModem/ADSL router
> and an Alcatel 1000 ADSL modem.
> 
> thanks,
> - joshy
> 
> 
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