I saw this (old) post regarding those cheap speedtouch modems and would like 
to share my experience of them.

We've used a Speedtouch from a few months after ADSL was available in 
England and now my opinion has turned round. We did have worries at first 
about the thing drawing too much power off USB, but I hear it's been fixed 
now.

As for the issue of latency I'm sure it should have an impact but I haven't 
seen it yet, which I do find odd I must admit.

We now have a dedicated ~£120 US robotics hardware router (got free) and 
it's always going wrong. We're considering going back to the Speedtouch with 
an old p90 running Smoothwall (though I would prefer m0n0).

These modems are cheap (often free or probably <£10 on ebay), so many don't 
fancy paying £60 for a replacement.

Having said this, I don't like the way the firmware is loaded, the USB 
connection, the way smoothwall hangs until a successful dial + dialing 
process in general + the lack of confidence in it even though it's served me 
so well. I guess having Speedtouch support in m0n0 would feel like dirtying 
a piece of engineer beauty that is such a BSD based mini OS!

In summary, just don't write these modems off.

I believe USB support is still a problem (getting bigger; wireless usb, 
bluetooth?). Perhaps someone could summerise the situation for anyone who 
may have found this thread via google? I'm not worried about this as I like 
m0n0 as it is (less hardware support is slip stream and there are 
alternatives if needed), but it would be nice if a visitor to the website 
could more easily answer the question "will my hardware work with this".

---
From:  Fred Wright <fw at well dot com>
Subject:  Re: [m0n0wall] Speedtouch ADSL modems
Date:  Thu, 10 Jul 2003 12:57:42 -0700 (PDT)

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Manuel Kasper wrote:
>On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Frans J King wrote:
>
> > Was wondering if m0n0wall supports Speedtouch ADSL modems and if not
> > whether it was at all feasible to build PPP support plus the BSD user
> > mode drivers into m0n0wall.
>
>You mean Speedtouch USB ADSL modems, right? Well, they're not supported at
>the moment; m0n0wall wants to talk PPPoE over real hardware Ethernet

Don't you mean PPTP?  AFAIK the STs don't support PPPoE, which is too bad
since it would avoid the client/server PPTP conflict that another user is
having.  BTW, that's with an Ethernet-based ST, which works with m0n0wall.

>I don't like USB, 2. net45xxs don't have USB, 3. I don't have a SpeedTouch

I'd only use USB for networking as a last resort, if for no other reason
than the latency (though it's not *quite* so significant on a relatively
slow use like a cable or DSL modem).





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