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Last spring, I decided that faster Internet would be worthwhile. DSL2 provides up to four times the speed of regular DSL, so it was the obvious choice.
My household has only four people, but we use 15 devices, and all of us enjoy watching videos at various times. Stepping up to DSL2 would only add $10 (Canadian, including tax) to the bill, and Internet access would still cost less than our land-line telephone.
A guy from the phone company had to make some changes, and once he did that, our old DSL modem didn't work at all. Luckily, my ISP sent us a new modem/router pronto. It worked, and Speedtest showed that our download and upload speeds were actually faster than the 25/10 mb/s the ISP advertised.
The faster upload speed is actually relevant to me. I sometimes run a remote desktop into my home PC from a remote site, and the 1 mb/s of DSL meant that it was not very smooth. Ten mb/s fixed that in a big way!
Then the problems started. After anywhere from 6 to 48 hours, the router would completely crash. The only solution was to cycle the power, and re-establishing the connection took from three to five minutes. That's not something you want to happen in the middle of an online banking session. As well, some computers (running Mint Mate) did not automatically reconnect, so they had to be rebooted.
The problem got worse, until it was happening six or seven times a day. I called my ISP, Velcom, a small regional ISP near Toronto: “this is intolerable.”
That got a welcome response: “yes, we understand. We have changed brands, we'll send you a new modem/router, then you return the old one to us.” They sent it by Canada Post, which took five days to move the package about 60 km.
It was worth the wait. The Technicolor TG588v required the expected amount of setup, and then worked flawlessly. One quirk was that the setup page is at 192.168.1.254. I'm used to 192.168.1.1.
It's a few percent slower than the other unit, but still well within the range. We can all watch videos at the same time, with no stuttering, and web pages appear immediately. System updates download faster than ever. I haven't downloaded a new Linux ISO yet, but I'm confident that it will take just minutes.
DSL2 via Technicolor TG588v: