Having obtained an adaptor to unlock these, I dug one out of the cupboard where it has lain unused for the best part of two years, and within ten minutes it was unlocked. As BT originally fitted one of these, I know it's meant to match the DSLAM and therefore I was curious to know whether any improvement would be seen on my line. As regular
kitizens may remember, my line from the DP to the CAB is 100% Aluminium
Errors abound, and it won't support much above the 40/2 its currently running at.
Anyway, the modem was duly installed, along with a
Tenda 5 port switch (which was extremely badly received !) to allow access when online (Thanks
custard for pointing that out). Stats were grabbed using eDMT as I was disappointed to find most of the ECI's
stats page was not filled out. Initial readings appeared very similar to the
HG612, although sync speed was slightly less.
Further testing indicated that the
ECI was
not susceptible to a sudden SNRM drop when turning on my plasma TV. The
HG612 loses at least 0.5dB when it's turned on and this does not return until the set is switched off. Both modems were located in the same place, powered from the same socket and used the same xDSL cable from the frontplate. The test was carried out several times to ensure accurate results.
All however, was not rosy in the
eyrie. During a subsequent attempt to refresh the HTML page of the modem, it became apparent that connectivity had been lost. A telnet session was established, which connected OK, but attempts to send a command via the pipe failed, with no return of the
Alpha # prompt. Terminating the session proved to be the only way out. Rebooting would have cured this, however it was decided to leave things as they were as net connectivity was fine.
Sometime during the night (as I found upon rising), internet connectivity had been lost. Little LED's indicated a session was established, but no DNS resolution was possible and pings to google's DNS servers failed. The
HG533 was rebooted as this acts as the gateway, and although reliable, has been known to fall over once or twice in the past. Didn't help
At this point I
should have checked the switch, but instead I rebooted the ECI. When this didn't restore connectivity, I rebooted the switch, which did !!
This morning I awake to the same situation of no connectivity. The wife was incandescent !!!! She listens to the radio online via XBMC as VHF and DAB reception here can be rather poor at times. As she cannot listen to her favourite breakfast show, I get an ear bashing !!
This time I reboot both the
HG533 and the
Tenda switch but to no avail. Http connectivity to the
ECI does not work, and telnet produces similar results of logging in but 'piped' commands failing.
The result of this is that the
HG612 is once again responsible for connectivity. Looking at the stats, I can see that in the two days the
ECI was online, interleaving has fallen from 1380 to 849, SNRM is around 1dB better for downstream, at ~7.2dB, although I put this down to syncing at around 8.30am.
The
ECI, for me at any rate, just seems to be too 'flaky', falling over at the slightest opportunity. Of course, it may just be that the modem has a slight fault and as I'm not quite yet prepared to give up, I have another one that can be unlocked and pressed into service to see if it is any
better behaved. Two days of dodgy connectivity did not give me a chance to formulate an accurate opinion of which router may perform better and I would like to be able to leave the
ECI online for at least a week. Sadly, this particular router won't be online anytime soon.
(
Blackeagle apologises for the length and rambling nature of this post!! It is somewhat longer than I originally intended
)