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buy a WRT54G, flash it w/ DD-WRT (sveasoft fork w/ no the GPL trickery), and setup QoS

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ZyXEL Prestige 660HW
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I've not had any experience of ZyXEL kit before - does anyone have any experience of using any of their products? From reading over the incredibly detailed manual it seems to have a very high spec for a £50 router.

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...the router resets and reboots. Rarely is too frequently, though. Also, it keeps losing MAC addresses from the authentication list, which is very unfortunate. I think this could very well be more of a firmware problem that a hardware one, but no newer firmware is available at the moment.

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I do tend to see problems with the Draytek's and long lines, so if you live out in the sticks miles and miles away from the exchange (5.5km+) I would give it a miss

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I'm in Milton Keynes, a 30-year old town with possibly the worst broadband provision in the country.

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Probably just the age to have lots of nasty aluminium lines.

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Why the shudder for ZyXEL?

Dunno, just a nasty feeling I get when I see one. Cheap and nasty things, maybe it's just the people who buy them that make me shudder

Ah! MK! I'll keep quiet, I know there are lots of BT haters in the MK community so I wouldn't want one of their spys dobbing me in.

As I understand it most of the nextwork is TPON (fiber to the cab and copper for the last 1km or so) I think the main problem is they can't get the DSL DSLAM's small ehough to feed all 300+ customers off one cab, if they could MK would be the best place in England for broadband as everyone could have 8Mbps+.

If you buy the Draytek make sure you can return it easily if it doesn't work, it is probably a good router, it is just I have seen quite a few of them, and in my line of work you get worried if you see more than a couple of brands more than once causing problems. Could be in my head I suppose.

Ali cable! BT Network! Still there! Dunno what you are on about Guv

Cheers

Cris.

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BTW - Do you rent those from BT?

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In fact, I had a BT engineer here today to look at a line fault. He spotted the router and asked "one of ours ?", so I said "kind of...".

Good job for you it wasn't me who came then. I recover our Routers back from ex-rental customers almost daily, leaving them with service or not. It comes under the classification of "UNLUCKY" in my book You want a BT router, you pay to rent it, no rent no router! Your SP has a duty to BT to return that router to us, even if the SP is BT in the first place I still take em

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..monitoring the faulty line for less than an hour his conclusion was "CPE kit fault"

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Do the DSLAMs not have the capability to monitor a line themselves over a prolonged period ?

Some do, but we don't use it as it is hard to tell what the customer has done to his modem during the test period, ie turned the power off. Our standard Woosh system looks at errors over a 15 minute window, but it is not 100% as a test. I'm not sure but I think the offical line of CRC's is about 150 in out 2 minute test period, personally I work to about 50

Cheers

Cris.

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In fact, I had a BT engineer here today to look at a line fault. He spotted the router and asked "one of ours ?", so I said "kind of...".

Good job for you it wasn't me who came then. I recover our Routers back from ex-rental customers almost daily, leaving them with service or not. It comes under the classification of "UNLUCKY" in my book You want a BT router, you pay to rent it, no rent no router! Your SP has a duty to BT to return that router to us, even if the SP is BT in the first place I still take em

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..monitoring the faulty line for less than an hour his conclusion was "CPE kit fault"

That is what I would have said, remember our kit is looking at ATM packets, not IP, I have a max testing time of 15 minutes in my testing method. If there are 0 errors in that time experience tells me I am not going to find a fault in the field so I am wasting not only your time but mine as well. Can you imagine how long it will take to find a fault in several km's of network if I have to wait a few hours to see the fault once, then move to the next point and start the test again. This is assuming all the copper tests are 100%.

My point wasn't so much that he only tested the line for an hour, more like I was surprised he had no way of tagging the line to be monitored over a longer period. If you have an intermittant line fault that only happens a few times a week then if you can't monitor for it then it is a pain in the arse for the customer.

I know this because when my first line was installed 4+ years ago I had intermittant sync loss problems and I spent a hell of a lot of time off work waiting for the engineers to diagnose the problem (I think it took 6 visits over a couple of weeks). The line would lose sync many times a day, but never when there was an engineer on site. Turned out in the end to be a lose connection in the cabinet at the end of the road being set off every time a big truck drove by...

At that point my router was still rented from BT, none of the engineers suggested the problem could be my CPE kit that time

I have generally been very happy with the robustness of ADSL, I just know that these intermittant faults can get worse. When my other intermittant fault started it only caused a few seconds of outage at a time, by the end it was causing an hour or so every time it went out.

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2 - 10 a week could be a line card being reset to prove another fault etc... How long does it loose sync for ??? At any fixed time of the day or random ???

It has been going on for quite a while now. It first started last November. At that point I would lose my PPP connection half a dozen times a day for a couple of seconds at a time. They started looking into it, but then it stopped happening after a few weeks (they didn't fix anything).

In February is started happening again, loss of PPP connection a couple of times a day. Two weeks ago they decided they knew what the problem was and they made a change of some sort on the card/DSLAM (a change that caused it to lose sync for a while).

Since then I don't get the PPP connection failing, but I am now getting loss of sync a couple of times a day every couple of days.

The times it happens appear to be random, it can be during the day or in the early hours. Most of the time the loss of service is only for a few seconds while everything gets restablished, occasionally it is 15-20 minutes though.

As sods law dictates, there was actually a sync loss event happening as the engineer was ringing on my door bell today, but of course 2 minutes later when he had his kit plugged in it was back up.

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Our standard Woosh system looks at errors over a 15 minute window, but it is not 100% as a test. I'm not sure but I think the offical line of CRC's is about 150 in out 2 minute test period, personally I work to about 50

The other annoying thing about the EN5861s (which I otherwise like) is that even with the fireware replaced with the "proper" factory firmware they still don't report line conditions, CRCs etc

P.S. I am happy to swap over the routers so that we can rule out the CPE kit, I'm just surprised there isn't a long term monitoring option that gets used

P.P.S. do you know anything about this "long grass" issue that is appearing ? One of my ISPs does pro-active monitoring of their customers lines, by pinging their routers once a second. It has uncovered a roll out of new kit/setup that is causing people to get regular 100ms latency for a couple of packets every 60 seconds or so. The way it goes is a bunch of people on an exchange get loss of sync at 3am one morning, next day they suddenly all have the 100ms latency issue (which causes things like VOIP problems).

I wish more ISPs would take such an approach. They often log faults on lines before the customers have even realised something has gone wrong. I expect BT Wholesale hate them...

It is called the "long grass" issue because when the problem kicks in it suddenly looks like someone has forgotten to cut the grass on the ping timing graphs.