Tale of Two Hubs

Bell Canada, here in Toronto, is hopeless bureaucracy, just like my old company.  That's the trouble in Canada, everybody is or wants to be a monopoly.  Nortel and Blackberry went down this route, but they still had to compete outside our ice walls.

So, I have 25 mb service, with unlimited download, so I can run a Tor relay.  I've had trouble with 'Sync no Surf' for a long time.  The other day the sync stopped entirely.

I had this modem.

Very old and a dangerous router.  I put it in 'bridge mode' and had another router.  Of course, that gives you trouble when you have to run the gauntlet of first level support.  The Bell guy came for an hour or two, tried everything, and eventually changed the street port.  Then it started randomly disconnecting.

So the second Bell guy comes, which means the first guy gets a 'rework' on his record.  Poor fellow.  This guy tried 3 of these modems and they couldn't even get a sync.  By the main test, my line is perfect, with a capacity 3 times the current use.

Finally, he made further internal contacts and found that for my service I get the 'new' modem.

This one was actually made this century!  The time wasted to this point was 3 times the cost of the modem, but if you just yell a lot, they'll charge you $200 for this.  This modem works perfectly, and I've slammed it with my hardest downloading test, which always blew the old modem.  I could probably go back to an IP phone, if I wanted to, but if you lose your Bell phone number, you are in worse support hell.

This still has a stinky router with almost no options.  But if you plug in a fully configured router, it knows enough to get out of the way and act like bridge.  I now use tp-link generic router with openwrt.

Update:  Still solid.  This is absolutely essential.