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[Weaver]

Thanks to Burakkucat’s help, I've managed to get hold of one (poss more) of these modems on ebay. I see kitz has written a page about them, and Burakkucat has already been incredibly kind and prepared me a lot of handholding material to get me going with one. Unit should be here next week, with any luck. I have downloaded the user guide that Kitz linked to.

q: What can anyone tell me about these devices? Any experience? (I'm posting this in public so others can benefit / contribute, but Burakkucat has done a huge amount of work for me already giving me a guided tour, what a star!)

The one I have on order looks pristine, so I'm wondering if it is new, or nearly so - q:  is that possible?

Age: The manual mentions the date 2005 so some of the ebay modems out there might be as old as god, so I’m wondering about how to be wary with ebay purchases in case I end up with one with geriatric capacitors or some such. q: any thoughts?

I could perhaps do something about alternative power supplies in case they crap out, as has happened with some devices in my experience. e.g. Linksys SOHO WAPs.

Firmware: I'm wondering what to do about updating firmware to get the best modem performance or fix critical bugs.

Q: I wonder how much I need to worry about security re access from the WAN side? Hopefully not at all?

Q: Manual mentions use of TFTP for firmware updating. This is going to be a nuisance as I am iPad-only these days since I am largely confined to bed. Not sure what to do about that?

Security, as for LAN-side access, am not going to be concerned with that as the modems will remain isolated from access from the main LAN by the way my router is set up, and in any case the modems won't have suitable IP addresses anyway that are included in the LAN subnet range.

[ejs]

They appear to be such an old model that I can't really see any useful purpose in starting to use one now.

[tubaman]

Weaver,
I'm not sure why you are after these, but there are a couple more on Ebay right now - just put "MT882" into the search and you should find them.
 

[burakkucat]

They appear to be such an old model that I can't really see any useful purpose in starting to use one now.

They are quite useful as a pure modem, for those with G.992.{1|3|5} service. Granted the firmware originated from Opal (before the TalkTalk acquisition) and the default IP filter rules are horribly garbled -- a right pig's ear -- but nothing that a configuration adjustment can not fix. 

Hence the one I was given, around ten years ago, remains in the grotto for occasional particular/special usage.

[ejs]

What about support for relatively modern ADSL2/2+ features, such as the optional extended upstream framing parameters, INP levels greater than 2, monitored tones?

[Chrysalis]

Weaver doesnt need those as he is stuck on a 20CN exchange.

[j0hn]

Weaver doesnt need those as he is stuck on a 20CN exchange.

He's on 21CN and uses ADSL2 now.

I thought your current D-Links performed really well on your very long lines Weaver?

[ejs]

And being a relatively recently upgraded exchange, it will have a fairly modern Broadcom-chipset DSLAM/MSAN.

The current D-Link modems haven't really been compared to anything else, possibly they achieve high speeds at the expense of stability, which may not matter if you want to manually change the DLM's target SNRM every week.

[Weaver]

I am on 21CN, since the end of 2015. Yes the D-Links perform extremely well in terms of sync speed. The jury is still out as to whether they are a bit tooo crazy and aggressive. The verdict depends on whether the very low SNRM levels experienced are causing a noticeable problem, as occasional very short bouts of packet loss a few times a day are being recorded. I would like some kit with monitored tones though, having recently being enlightened by kitizens that that is why my SNRM goes down (rapidly) and never recovers again, because the modems give up on a tone that may become useable again later but they just ignore this opportunity. (Santa, SRA please too.) I think I can generally get away with some unreliability as I have so many modems that outages usually get covered up, although a couple of weeks ago I did have a streaming session on an Apple TV 4 fail completely because one modem dropped (out for a half hour or so) and my throughput was insufficient with just the remaining devices.

I am just trying an experiment, with Burakkucat’s invaluable help, to see how the modems compare.