A Nice Surprise
I’ve been having some nagging problems with my DSL service with CenturyTel. The long and the short of it is that I have not been able to take advantage of the highest speeds CenturyTel offers.
I bought a Westell 327w11 modem on the advice of CenturyTel technical support. Modem kept disconnecting frequently, not to mention a pretty janky web interface. So I dug out my trusty old Actiontec GT701-WG that I was using on Qwest, dug up the DSL settings for CenturyTel, and got it up and running fairly quickly. The modem was slower because it was set for a slower, pre-ADSL2/2+ standard, but the connection was rock solid.
At some point since then, I upgraded the GT701-WG with the latest Qwest firmware, which was more recent than the “unbranded” firmware Actiontec makes available on their own site. The Qwest firmware just has a lot of Qwest branding on it and a rejiggered web interface, but you it still works with non-Qwest DSL services.
Today, in poking around in the web interface for this modem, I discovered that it actually supports ADSL2 and ADSL2+!!!
I immediately tried ADSL2+ and was getting the same results on the Westell, which leads me to believe there’s some other problem. ADSL2 seems to work just peachy. It’s slightly faster than G.DMT, but less speedy than ADSL2+. But at least it’s stable.
While I obviously need to spend some time with CenturyTel support to suss out what’s going on with ADSL2+, it’s a nice surprise to find out a piece of hardware supports something you didn’t think it did. Too bad I found that out after I bought the Westell modem.
