One of the UK's best-respected broadband providers has raised concerns about the reliability of the world's most popular ADSL chip.
Zen Internet has uncovered a potential problem with the Texas Instruments AR7. The chip is at the heart of about a third of routers in use worldwide today - including Linksys and Netgear kit.
Zen has told its customers not to buy models that contain the chip because they provide an unstable connection.
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Incomplete list of some of the dozens of routers that contain the chip:
could be true this I was doing a adsl wireless installation with a linksys router and I could not get the router adsl light to stop flashing, I used another type of router in the end that connected no problem
My Actiontec GT-704 is as stable as a rock(AR7 chipset), uptime since last config change 91days. And I've got one of the worst lines in DSL hell..
So far this modem is of the best (S/N wise.. connection reliability, performance), I've ever run into (verses 6 other DSL modems)..
P.S. Their is a nasty DNS bug in th eGT-704.. But I've shut off that service.
Meanwhile, Bellsouth/AT&T keeps on splicing in more and more junk into my 11,500ft underground loop. BS measurements now indicate that it's a 26,000 ft loop.
BT's weak point is that it uses the defective PPPoX protocol on top of the ATM bridging functionality. .
That makes the whole setup highly vulnerable to anything less than a perfect connection. BS/AT&T compensates for this built-in weakness by increasing the interleave factor(Noise profile) to 16 milliseconds.. (which sucks big time.)
Note to gamers: A 16ms interleave ratio adds 32ms to the round trip time of any packet sent to/from your IP address..
And each time their is a packet lost, the PPPoX connection is broken and must be re-negioated/restarted. (Big time disruption. several seconds + TCP timeouts & retries)
Fortunately, I've got a bridged (no PPPoX), 2ms interleaved connection through Covad.. and a few dropouts don't bother my low latency connection to the net.
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