DSL Woes

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Sat Jul 21 22:55:55 2001

It was thus said that the Great Richard Erlacher once stated:
>
> Nevertheless, if you have any questions about ISDN and the quality of service,
> I'd say it might be useful to ask him. Everyone else I know who once used ISDN
> has gone to DSL or some other level of service. My neighbor has a really
> high-bandwidth microwave link to some obscure ISP and he tells me he's getting
> the equivalent (in bursts) of DS3 rates. I've yet to visit his newly organized
> facility, but with the hardware I've seen him bring in over the past half-year,
> I don't doubt his claim.

  I used to have ISDN and it was very easy to set up. BellSouth came out,
hooked up a third line [1], and that was the end of their work. I ran the
cable inside and configured the Ascend Pipeline 50 to work on my end, and
the Ascend MAX on the ISP end [2] and had 128kbps up/down and never had a
problem.

  Around '94 or '95, ISDN was flat rate, about the cost of two phone lines
($50/month) so it was cost effective back then to have it. Around '97 or
so, the billing rates changed and only the first 300 minutes or so were flat
rate, then BellSouth charged by the minute. It was easy enough to avoid
the minutely charge rate by having the ISP call *me* up, so that's what I
did.

  At that time, I had 32 static IP addresses to play around with [3].

  That came to an end so I went with Velotel for IDSL [5] as that's all I
could get to where I live.. 144kbps up and down and five static IP
addresses for about $65/month and I could still control the reverse DNS (to
a degree, I had to send in the records). Unfortunately, they used
Northpoint as a DSL provider. _at_#$@#$!

  I then picked up Telocity and for some odd reason (I think they actually
use BellSouth DSL) I could suddenly get ADSL at 1.5Mbps down and 400kbps up.
Wonderful! Except for the single static IP address, which sucks (when you
are used to, and using most of, 32 static IP addresses), but has given me
the chance to play around with Linux as a firewall and router (on a 10yo 486
Compaq with three NICs [6]).

  -spc (And Linux itself is almost, if not already, 10 years old 8-)

[1] I had a voice line and a modem line. I didn't want to loose the
        modem line until ISDN worked, and afterwards, a friend of mine
        offered to pay for the modem line if he could dial into me and go
        out my dedicated ISDN line.

[2] I worked at the ISP 8-)

[3] I also fixed the routing the supposed Network Admin set up. I
        figured 32 addresses wouldn't be missed. I even set it up so that
        I controled the reverse DNS for those 32 addresses [4].

[4] Details available upon request. It's a neat DNS hack.

[5] It's ISDN but without the ISDN tarrifs. I don't pretend to
        understand this myself.

[6] One for the Internet, one for my half of the network and one for
        my roommate's half of the network.
Received on Sat Jul 21 2001 - 22:55:55 BST