Belkin FTW, but PPPoE = Fail
I believe Belkin has trumped Linksys as the new standard in networking. Their new routers continue to impress me with ease of installation and also with the amount of features in the control panel. It comes with WPA encryption enabled without any setup required to get securely, wirelessly connected to the web. The friggin’ even thing comes out of the box with the power and ethernet cords already plugged in to the router. It could not possibly get any more plug-n-play.
That is, unless you are plagued with an ancient DSL connection requiring PPPoE authentication. My mom got DSL in the year 2000 when I was 13 years old so I could play Everquest all day without hogging up the phone line. Until now, she was somehow still limping along with the exact same modem and wireless router that she got on day one. After numerous calls to AT&T and their refusal to upgrade even her modem, I finally just bought new equipment and upgraded her myself.
Little did I know how much of a headach DSL’s PPPoE would cause though. I have never jumped through so many hoops to get wi-fi up and running. PPPoE stupidly requires you to login with a username and password, and also requires very specific configurations in both the modem AND the router to get them to work in harmony.
After quickly realizing the router wasn’t going to auto-configure the modem, I started off hard-wiring the modem into my laptop and setting the modem to PPPoE and plugging in all the login and IP credentials. Seemed logical. However after returning to the router, tweaking various settings, and resetting both devices probably 20 times over the course of an hour, I finally discovered the modem needed to be set to “Bridged” and the login info has to be established ONLY on the router side.
After all was said and done though, the connection difference is remarkable. Here is the before and after speed tests:
I about spit my coffee across the room when I saw she was running on a 0.83megabit connection earlier this week. I knew it was slow, but 0.83 is unheard of! And AT&T is charging $28.00 a month for that! 2.77 mb/s is still relatively slow, but the difference in connection speed and stability is like night and day.
I guess i’ve been spoiled with 6 years of plug-n-play 15 - 30 mbps cable modems. Moral of the story: Upgrade your 10 year old hardware. Or just switch to cable internet:
