Dragging up an old thread...

Last week, our home DSL died for no apparent reason. After much waiting on hold with AT&T, they concluded that our DSL modem (a cheapo Motorola box they sent us ten months ago) had gone belly up. They then proceeded to be bureaucratically unable to send me a new one.

I ended up getting a Netgear DGN2000. For $120, it's got 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n with two external antennae, a four port 10/100 switch, all the usual Firewall/NAT support, and a built-in ADSL modem. So far as I could tell, nobody makes a box like this with a GigE switch, but I can always gang a GigE switch onto this, to speed up any ports where I might want the speed.

I like the idea of the integrated DSL modem for one big reason: I get useful log data from the low-level DSL handshaking process. That, along with all the high-level stuff, now shows up nicely in my syslog. Beforehand, my old router was speaking PPPoE to the DSL modem and all I'd be able to see was "connection dropped" with no information as to why. Hopefully, this time I'll be able to learn more if/when things get wonky.

(Does anybody else but me find it odd that most wireless routers out there now support 802.11n with theoretical speeds well north of 100Mb/s, yet GigE hasn't become a standard feature to actually let you get data in and out that fast?)