The only DSL game in town

Yes, buy a router (wired or wireless to fit) and the routers WAN port will grab a address from your modem. The router will use NAT to forward traffic from any of the three PC's on the LAN side to the WAN port. Your ISP will never know the differance.

Adair

"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" hath wroth:

You're posting this from a Road Runner cable broadband connection and you don't have broadband? Huh?

Are you sure about that? It's possible you might be confusing this with the ISP only supplying one IP address, not one computah. In any case, there's not much that they can do about you connecting more than one computer, as an NAT router will effectively hide your multiple computers behind a single IP address. There are ways that they can detect more than one machine, but it's unlikely that anyone is currently doing that.

Who is the DSL ISP? URL for their TOS (terms of service)?

That was nice. Maybe you could consider that I'm posting from work, now; the DSL is for my home.

That's what I was questioning. I thought I remembered that, but am not a networking guru.

I beliefe the infrastructure will be provided by BellSouth, but they will not offer DSL to us. Only Earthlink offers it. Earthlink's terms of service state "one computer", unless you pay more (a bunch more).

In the nicest corporate fashion, they do not reveal that until after you've signed up. Then they send you additional terms of service documents. My read is that this is illegal, dishonest, and indefensible. But rather than fight them, I thought I'd go the route of using address translation, if that was the way to do it.

LLoyd

"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" hath wroth:

I was wondering if you were switching from cable to DSL.

Earthlink resells "bulk" DSL from various providers. However, there's a little trick they pull to make you sign up for their rather expensive home networking package. Basically, they sell you a fairly generic router and charge you approximately what it's worth over about a 1 year period. You don't really get anything that you can't just go to a big box store and buy.

Note that at the bottom of the page, it has a bit on "Already have a router?" which really offers the "home networking support" without the price of the router.

Just get the regular Earthlink service. You'll get a DSL modem with it. Plug in your favorite NAT router, and you're done.

Yep. I don't have anything nice to say about Earthlink's business practices.

You might find the following Earthlink and wireless thread of interest:

You'll get a kick out of their "expert internet service". I called the DSL support line, because the service had not been activated in the promised ten days.

I was told that there would be a delay to "provide facilities". I explained to them that a DSLAM had been sitting on the corner, hot, for over a year. I explained that I _have_ six pairs coming from that box. I was told again that I'd have to wait for facilities.

THEN the "tech" told me I had other options. They'd "be glad to sell me high-speed over cable." Sorry, there IS no cable on our road. "Oh... we have satellite high-speed." Sorry, that's ONE WAY "high-speed". I want DSL.

"You have to wait for facilities, but we can sell you instead our bundled DSL, video, and home-phone service." Uh.... doesn't that phone service use VOIP? "Yes". Don't I require DSL for that? "Yes".

How is it that you can provide DSL for that, and not DSL alone?

"Oh."

LLoyd

"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" wrote in news:4695231a$0$20546$ snipped-for-privacy@roadrunner.com:

That's what happen's with low-cost tech support personnel reading off of scripts.

I have found tech support for most services/products to be a total waste of time.

The router will have the public IP that you get from your ISP's DHCP server. Then your PC's on your LAN will obtain private IP's from your router's DHCP server which your ISP won't know about as long as you use NAT. As long as you're not using up a significant portion of your bandwidth by downloading a lot of files to all of your PC's at the same time I doubt that your ISP will have a problem with the number of PC's that you have attached. Besides, it's rather archaic for an ISP to have such a policy. However, if you plan to access your router wirelessly, then you have to make sure that your neighbors don't access your network by using WPA2 encryption and, if you're really ambitious, RADIUS authentication.

"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" hath wroth:

The last 2 times that happened to my customers, it appears that they enabled DSL on the wrong phone number. I'm still not sure if I should blame the ISP or Ma Bell (at&t) for typeing in the wrong phone number.

The usual buzzword is "lack of provisioning" which is a fancy term for the RT (remote terminal) isn't ready. I had an RT sitting in the driveway of one of my customers. Almost a full year before he was able to get DSL service. The problem was that the copper wires were going to a nearby box and nobody remembered to install a cross connect between the two boxes.

Nope. The DSLAM is usually at the CO (central office). You are probably looking at an RT or VRAD (Video Ready Access Device????). Duz it look like one of these?

or perhaps a U-verse box?

or one of the new shrunken U-Verse boxes?

It's the RT in the second shot. A local installer told me it was the DSLAM.

LLoyd

On Thu, 12 Jul 2007 07:12:14 -0400, "Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" wrotd:

Now *THAT'S* very scary...