I'm in ur modems steeling ur interwub packs.

Had such fun trying to get my home network sorted. Having just moved house and waiting far too long for Optus and of course Telstra to provide DSL service to my place, I've been disappointed.

Recent issues have included:

• FTP dropping out.
• Quick speeds when tested but web pages taking a long time to load.
• Slow downloads. As in stop watch slow.
• Failure to connect to work VPN
• random outages.
• Slow DNS

The first thing I have done is switch to OpenDNS. This has removed my dependency on crappy Optus DNS, which appears to be built on a single 8086 connected to the interwebs via IP over Morse. That has immediately sped up getting to a site.

Next problem was identified when I was trying transfer a zip file of training material to our downloads.kjross web server, to allow the printers access. Filezilla has always worked for me, the settings were unchanged but it was bombing out after 200k. I had another 8100k to go. After trying Ilisys mirror FTP areas and trying for 2 hours, I gave up and used wireless which worked. That showed me the only difference was the physical connection.

I reckoned it was the POS Sagem modem. I got it free from Optus when I signed up, and I had also found out it doesn't support VPN pass through which is a pain.

I still had a D-Link DSL502T vA kicking around, and so to make sure it worked properly I upgraded the firmware with the modem kicking and screaming for 3 hours, to V2.0oB12. The exe failed miserably numerous times, and the web update failed 9 out of 10 times, then it just worked.

Reconfigured the modem to sit in front of my DI624 wireless router to provide an onion firewall setup, and it all worked. Speed test showed me the speed was slightly slower at 12Mbps down from 14.5Mbps, but that doesn't mean squat as the D-Link is FASTER. I don't get it. Web pages load visibly faster, and I was able to FTP the 8MB file in seconds. No dropouts, no failures mid transfer.

If someone knows why Sagem produces a modem that allows you to perform FTP but only in 3k chunks I'd be all ears. Also seemingly preventing VPN passthrough without providing a config change just doesn't make sense.

While I thought the old 502T was past it, the new firmware and extra configurability has proven it was well worth keeping as a backup modem. Sagem = So gone.