ADSL Breakthrough with a slice of humble pie.

Posted on March 10th, 2007 by grinthock.
Categories: Cisco Sucks Department, Murphys Law Department.

So after writing my previous note and thrashing Cisco, as many people do on a constant basis, I started researching — AGAIN. I was specifically told this card can do 8MB down, and was told by a Cisco person I know, and she knows her shiat!

I was able to find out that depending on the IOS version of your router — the default clockrate for the ATM interface associated with the ADSL wic is actully 2500 (sounds familiar) so I went in and swapped it — and now the new ADSL card is giving me numbers like this

I guess a bit of murphy’s law is at play here, as soon as I finally give up and write my article the problems get’s fixed. For the purposes of google, the command to fix it was “clock rate aal5 8000000″

So of course me being even more stubborn and wanting to tell myself I was not blaming this hardware completly in vain, I put the old card back in, the one with the known distance problem to see if that card will operate correctly.

So I guess this is me taking a big bite of humble pie, but it all started harmless enough – however — why in gods name would the default command for clock rate be so low — I mean it auto negotiates it anyway, it’s kind of like putting a brick under your accelerator pedal in the car, there’s just no reason to do it.

Oh well — now i’ve completly wasted my time – well not really, I learned a lot about ADSL troubleshooting from a very low level, and i’m definatly geared with the knowledge to troubleshooting line related issues in the future, so it’s not a total loss, however at the end of the day i’m glad Cisco’s gear was able to step up to the plate and prove itself…

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When enterprise hardware doesn’t cut it….

Posted on March 10th, 2007 by grinthock.
Categories: Cisco Sucks Department.

A few months ago I started on this crusade to figure out why my DSL performance sucked.

Now first — let’s discuss what I consider “Suck” is… I was getting about 1800 up / 650 down…

That in my mind, is suck, especially when my service is 5000/800 I should definatly be seeing better speeds like that — and no it’s not congestion, or something else on the network. I changed cables, switched MTU sizes, all sorts of things. What I didn’t change was my modem. Why? Well, i’m using a Cisco 2651XM, with one of these.

So we are talking serious enterprise hardware. I engaged a favor by calling in a friend who happens to work for the same company as I, and he did a check up on my line, testing it with all sort of fancy gadgets — various scans told me that it was MY modem that was at fault.

Information in hand I starting looking into the problem, first I started using the “Speedstream” modem that I knew worked, and connected it to the FastEthernet port on the router for now, and used that, but that sucks, and isn’t very interesting or fun — besides this “consumer” hardware couldn’t possibly be as high performance as my high end enterprise hardware.

Performance with the ADSL Modem itself tied into FastEthernet0/1 was like this

Pretty damn respectable if I do say so — I can definatly live with that — but why can’t my precious Cisco hardware keep up?

I contacted someone at Cisco who told me that the ADSL cards made before a certain date have issues over 10K feet, (about 3KM), now i’m not that far from the CO, but you never know, line conditions, so I started to look around for another ADSL card — not an easy task. A friend of mine found one, and the date code showed it was well into 2 years after the fix was made.

Back to the speed test we go…

Now that’s better — but still, not as good. After fiddling with DSL line settings, various MTU, all sorts of things, I couldn’t affect change in my performance, and i’m back to square one with the ADSL modem.

It pains me to think that a card the WIC-1ADSL an $885 (CDN List) WIC card can’t outperform a $30 ADSL SpeedStream modem. Why? Can’t seem to get an answer, nor will I in the near future, as unless i’m willing to purchase support on the router, Cisco of course won’t troubleshoot it. So yet again, another display of when Enterprise hardware is more expensive, has less performance, and is all around not always the best option to go with… When will they learn.

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