Looking for good quality DSL modems

aronesz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 17, 2011
Messages
389
Greetings,

Will be moving to an apartment in the city, and unfortunately the apartment management doesn't allow any ISPs on their property, so I am limited to DSL over phone lines or whatever the apartment management exclusively has (is very poor downstream speeds in comparison to local ISPs such as MediaCom). AT&T could get me 6mbit down, whereas the apartment management's exclusive internet connection can only get me 3.5mbit down.

*sigh*

I have a very good DD-WRT wireless-N router that I bought for about $120 a year or two ago. I love it, and I want to keep using it. I've noticed that there are a lot of modem+router combos for DSL, which I do not like or favor well.

Thus, I seek the [H]ard product recommendations. Suggestions very much appreciated!
 
Does the landlord not provide a modem? Most dsl providers provide the modems. In fact it's pretty hard to find a decent dal modem. It's not like cable where everyone can buy their own. On my dsl I have to use their 2wire.

I do have a westell dal modem kicking around though if you are interested.
 
DSL... going the way of the Dino... and to think all the money invested in DSL equipment by Telcos.

Fiber to the home and D3/D4 cable is the way to go. If they even make a D4.

To be honest I have seen one or two for sale at Microcenter however I am not sure if your telco is going to support them. There really isnt anything nice about a DSL modem. They all do what they are supposed to do nothing more really. I used to see DSL/Wifi combo devices but those also seem to have phased out.
 
I have a tiny little dsl modem that came with centurylink. when I got the service, their cs actually said that only their routers would work with their modems, blah blah blah. Well, I specified just the modem and not a combo. It was setup so it would internally nat, but with a single port. I imagine if just connected a switch, this little pos would be nat'ing for my whole lan. I checked the built in web interface out and found out the nat could be disabled and instead of assigning the connected machine a 10. Lan Ip, it would give it a wan ip. Cut the nat out of the picture entirely. Now, I could connect it to the wan port of any soho router, but I already have a fedora box setup for nat. With my nat box, this little pos actually performs perfectly. Imo, home routers never perform as well as an old pc repurposed for the job, but making this little thing perform a task I don't even trust a soho router to perform maximum efficiently sorta blew me away. Point is, as long as th modem is only performing as a modem, I don't think it will bottleneck your connection.

Also, for latency, dsl > cable.
 
I can ping from my edge router to comncast next hop, their router, in less than 10 ms. Id say latency is pretty good.

Generally yes dsl is better latency but it def does have bandwidth.
 
going from my 50/10mbit comcast connection to a 10/1mbit dsl connection, i dropped like 10ms latency to game servers. going from a soho router to my built NAT box also had dropped latency by about that much. that was a bit before i got the 50mb connection.

anyway, with dsl and my nat box, i ping to east coast servers and texas, from florida in the low 30s. i hit chicago from florida in the low 40s, and some euro servers in the 90s! west coast generally 70s. these are unreal engine pings, which seem to be around double what i get in source engine; ie, a lot of my CS:S pings are 20s. i've seen less, though!
 
DSL is moving to IPDSLAM, and most of those require an ISP supplied modem as they authenticate on the network via a custom installed certificate.
I have ATT U-verse Internet service at home and am stuck with the Motorola NVG510
I would wait to purchase until you have the service installed.
 
DSL modems are pretty much all the same. I do contract work for a CLEC and they were using Westell modems and Lucent Wirespeeds. Then Zhone. And now Comtrend 5072 modems. The Comtrends are pretty damn nice actually. They have a built in web page, whereby you can see pretty detailed information about the DSL connection, with stats, and ability to run BER tests, which is nice in diagnosing loop issues. I haven't seen any 5072 modems go bad. The 5071's had some bad power supplies and some died after awhile. Zhone's were the same way. Westells too.

If you really want to spend money, you could get a Cisco router and an ADSL WIC. I doubt it would be any more solid or faster of a connection than using a cheap Comtrend or whatever brand modem. Cisco would give you more diagnostics and CLI access obviously however.
 
No... Not all dsl modems are the same. Many need to have specific ISP firmware flashed on them for them to authenticate with the ISP properly. 2wires are one example.
 
I've had good luck with Zhone for DSL modems. They've got several models which can be configured as a basic modem.
 
I've only ever had a problem with one before, and it was a Westell.
 
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