Need Aggressive DSL Modem

My Speedstream 5861 was quite agressive at reconnecting. My westell

2200 is less agressive -- if it doesn't succeed quickly, it sleeps for a few minutes before retrying. On the otherhand, the 2200 is a better modem, so it holds the connection under circumstances that the 5861 would lose it.

My advice -- get the modem with the best modem functionality, one that handles poor signal quality well. Based on reports, the speedstream 5100b (SBC version firmware), and the Westell 6100 appear to both be good choices.

If they are not agressive enough about reconnection (I assume you are talking about PPPoE connection here), then put the modem in bridge mode, and let your router handle the reconnection.

Thanks for the comments, Neil.

But does it ever oversleep and just stop trying? And can you tell whether its efforts in retraining are as successful as on a cold start? The biggest gripe I have with the Netgear is that in situations when it does not renegotiate it often can still connect after a power cycle, which suggests to me that its negotiation algorithm used during retraining is less effective than that used in an initial power-on training.

Thanks again.

Tony

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I have similar gripe about the Netopia 3341-ELK that Earthlink provides with its DSL service. It has no problem downshifting in DSL speed, or disconnecting DSL Sync, as necessary, but will not upshift, or re-sync DSL. (BTW, PPOE re-connection is usually quick, given a good DSL sync). What I have found works quickest to restore Sync or full speed is to disconnect phone line from modem for a few seconds. I do this routinely while booting up PC. By the time Windoze boots, modem is sync at full speed.

This tells me the modem is purposely designed to not try upshifting unless there has been a total loss of signal. Unless the user notices a loss of response time, the modem (and EL) doesn't care if it has drifted down to 128/128, even if I'm paying for 128/1536.

Most modems of the analog dial and leased line variety had the ability to re-negotiate speed up or down on the fly, why can't DSL ??

--reed

If it loses connection when I am not around, the logs show it reconnecting within 5 minutes. When I am around, I'm not patient enough to wait the 5 minutes, so I do what I can to hurry things along.

Power cycling does not speed things up with the 2200. If I power cycle without first disconnecting, then it will be slow to reconnect, probably because the prior PPPoE session was not cleanly closed.

My 5861 would sometime fail to reconnect, even though it was agressive in trying. That was mainly when I was having line issues. It would apparently have errors when picking up its peer MAC address after a resync. If it has the wrong MAC address (usually

0:0:0:0:0:0) it will never succeed in negotiating PPPoE. Eventually it dropped the DSL connection, resynced, and would usually succeed then. But that might take a while. Power cycling would speed that up. I haven't seen that since I fixed the wiring problems that were causing the intermittent line noise.

I'm currently very impressed by my little ActionTec GT-704 DSL modem/4 port router. Purchased at COMPUSA for 69.99

Pluses..

It's a 2.4.17 Linux box using a TI's AR7 CPE system on chip which includes a 150Mhz MIPS processor & ADSL 2/2+ DSP.. I can telnet into to Actiontec Box and login as root :-) Note: Enter user id 'admin' and then enter web interface password. Very fast, My DSL speed running at least 30% faster than any the other DSL modems I've tried to date. It's also rock steady (Thanks to uLinux OS, not a single crash). Not one DSL retraining cycle yet, which is amazing for my 15Kft DSL line. Low ping over dsl loop packet loss.. Way lower than any other DSL modem I've tried. (Even with lightning strikes in area).. Low power consumption. ~5 watts.. Handles subnets. Source code for most components avail.. US tech support..

Minuses..

Web Interface is little primitive. Some work to get it to loop back server ports..(Iptables) Could use better logging.. (requires more iptables incantations)