moRe: [Scottish] Broadband Question...

[Claudio Calvelli]

I'll add my £0.02 troll tax...

William Anderson:

> Praps you found a bad batch?  I've yet to see a Speedtouch that *didn't*
> work once you get your head round the firmware bit, and this is going
> back years too when we had loads of USB modems at SmoothWall for
> testing.  Speedtouchen work, so perhaps you're just shit at configuring
> them? </troll> :)))

I've received a number of free ST330 with various ADSL connections,
and they all worked as far as their design allows. And the manufacturer
does provide the firmware alone ("for Linux users" as their website
says) if you don't want to download the whole set of drivers / extract
the firmware from the CD. (Of course I've gone and bought a router
as soon as possible)

There are design problems, but mostly due to the fact it's USB rather
than a real, grown up, ethernet design.

Using USB 1.1 and trying to get a reliable 8Mb out of it is
simply stupid (the alleged 12Mb/s is a lie - go and read the USB
specification, if you can stomach a 950 pages book coauthored by M$
to see what I mean - but as an executive summary, the bit encoding
means you can rarely get more than 10Mb/s, and when you remove protocol
overheads you are lucky if you get 8Mb/s, and to top it all you can't
even assign the whole bandwidth to a single device - so that's your
8Mb/s being nearly impossible by design).

Also, being USB powered and therefore limited to 500mA, it cannot
always provide sufficient output power to cope with a bad line. Again,
a router with a decent power supply would have no problem with that.

> </troll> :)))

Yeah, same here.

C