hooking up DSL

Factual Questions
1

I am about ready to start blaming the black helicopters :slight_smile:
I want to establish a DSL connection at my house. This shouldn’t be hard!
Except that Bellsouth (ATT) pushes their modems down one’s throat. They want $75 for a very nice modem/wireless router. Except…
They apparently have limited the wireless access point to 1 computer unless I pay them more money. And a LOT of home network information (MAC addresses, local LAN IP addresses) seem to be available to the WAN. Anyway, I don’t like it. Nothing to hide, but why expose yourself to someone else making a mistake and accusing you of something bad? So I want my own router and modem on DSL.
So far, it hasn’t worked well. I tried 3 different routers (Linksys, DLink and Netgear) and while I can talk to the routers directly (all this is over wire) and I can talk to the Westell (ATT) modem directly, I CAN’T get packets to go through my 3rd party router to the Westell modem. I can’t access the modem web page.
I configured one place (my child’s apartment) to do what I want with no problem. But I had a 3rd party modem.

I did get my Netgear router to work on my Dlink cable modem, but can’t achieve that with the DSL modem.

Has anyone successfully done what I plan to do with a phone company modem? Specifically Westell?

Tech Support is predictably useless. I call the phone company and they can’t help me with other equipment. I call the equipment supplier and they can’t figure out what is wrong. I have no expectation that tech support will assist in this effort.

2

The web site www.dslreports.com has some great info on the settings needed for various providers and modems, as well as some forums with very knowledgeable and helpful members.

I know I had to configure my DSL modem to use “bridge mode” or something like that to use my own router. And I had to enter my user name and password into the router’s PPPoE setup.

3

Thanks
I have been to DSLReports. I will look through the site some more.

Bridge mode, Gateway, Router. At one time all these terms had definite meanings. Now each manufacturer implements parts of each system in their hardware and picks a name. Makes it hard to keep up.