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 Posted:
Mon Feb 21, 2005 6:06 am Post subject:
Fresh Verizon DSL Help For Newbies |
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Stuck on a problem with a brand new Verizon DSL installation? Perhaps I
can help. Here's notes I made from my installation and my neighbor's
installation. I got it working on both of them.
* Note that I'm speaking about a Westell Wirespeed 2110 modem here from
Verizon home DSL.
* Verizon will ship you the DSL modem, but you're not ready yet. You go
to the website http://www.verizon.net/whatsnext to see your service
ready date unless some other piece of literature or phonecall comes to
you from Verizon. Usually your service ready date comes about 5 to 7
days after you receive your modem.
* Now, you may receive a recorded message saying that your service
ready date has happened, but don't trust it. If you don't see a solid
light on that modem in the middle light, then you probably don't have
DSL going yet. You can even call Verizon and depending on who you speak
to in a given day, one person will say, "Yeah, it's hooked up now," and
then another will say, "No, it's not hooked up yet." It's a tossup.
More than likely you'll not get hooked up for about 15 to 16 days after
you receive your modem. That's what happened to me.
* My Win 2000 laptop's hard drive crashed on the day my DSL came in.
Darn it, had to use my wife's Win 98 laptop and didn't feel like
installing W2K on it. Unfortunately, Win 98 is a pain to troubleshoot
networking problems with, so I don't recommend you use that while
trying to set this up. Luckily, after waiting through an hour with the
Verizon startup CD in troubleshooter mode, it told me my Dial Up
Networking wasn't installed. It was installed, I noticed, but I
uninstalled it, then reinstalled it, then reran the Verizon startup CD
and all was well again.
* Do not plug this thing into a hardware-based firewall/router yet if
you have purchased one. It won't work. Instead, do it straight from PC
to modem until you get it going, then set it up for your
firewall/router.
* Do not use an Ethernet hub. Instead, go direct from your Ethernet
card in the PC to the Ethernet jack on the modem.
* They give you a USB cable to use that instead of Ethernet. If you
don't have an Ethernet jack on your PC, then use the USB. Note that the
USB connection will be a little slower in speed.
* Suddenly I came home around my 15th day after modem shipment and
found the modem light was not blinking anymore, but was solid. I used
the Verizon CD and ran the setup. Besides the Dial-Up Networking
problem that it showed me how to overcome, I was up and running very
rapidly on the day that solid light was on.
* Now you can hook up your firewall/router if it supports ADSL PPPoE
(PPP over Ethernet). You'll have to explicitly write down all your
settings from the WINIPCFG.EXE or IPCONFIG.EXE /ALL commands, along
with your Verizon username and password, in order to type this into
your firewall/router configuration web page screens. I plugged up my
firewall/router's WAN port to the DSL modem.
* Someone on the Internet recommend I use CAT5 cable for one pair of
wire from the demarcation point on my house. Since I know a bit about
phone and LAN wiring, I decided to take this on, although I wasn't yet
used to DSL. What I learned was that a typical demarc will have 4
screws per line. Two screws are all you need for a phone line. The
other two are free to be used for ADSL. That's where the CAT5 cable
should go, using just 2 wires from that CAT5 cable. The other cable can
be ordinary telephone wire. Make certain that on the other end of the
CAT5 cable you use the same pair of wire. And I don't recommend you do
this unless you understand how fragile CAT5 and phone wire cable really
is. Crimps can not be yanked out like you do a water house. I also
recommend pastic conduit pipe ($4 every 8 feet from Lowe's) under your
house from the demarcation point to the point of entry into your home
office.
* However, did that wiring work? It did, but it didn't improve the
bandwidth, unfortunately. I got about 680K no matter which way I
plugged things into the Y splitter. This is probably due to the fact
that I'm too far from the phone switch bank downtown. However, 680K is
good enough for live video, live music, and can deliver some great
downloads pretty fast. You know that 900K would have been better, but
I'll take what I can get -- especially since it's only $29.99 a month!
For you, you might have a better or worse situation. My neighbor only
got 480K because she's even farther away from the switch bank, but hey
-- that was still much better than the 56K she was struggling with
before.
Now on to my neighbor...
* She had the DSL cable plugged into the Ethernet jack. That won't work
and in fact it's not good for the hardware. Please read the jacks on
the back and look at the end of the cables. RJ-11 is the DSL cable
jack. RJ-45 is the Ethernet cable jack. They sort of look the same but
the RJ-45 is wider.
* Her house was on daisy-chain phone wiring instead of each phone
jack's set of wire being pulled to the demarcation point on the house.
This will work, but it will slow down the bandwidth a little. They also
had some advice on this -- only plug a filter on the first jack in the
daisy-chain that is closest to the demarcation point. No more filters
will be necessary in this kind of wiring.
* We decided at first to skip her house wiring. Some phone companies
(like ours) put a demarcation box outside the house that has a
customer-servicable area. We used a flat head screwdriver to open it
and pinched the plastic jack cover to view the wire screws and the
RJ-11 test port. We then ran the DSL modem direct on the test port,
skipping the house wiring that comes off those screws entirely. What we
found was that the DSL modem's middle light went from blinking, to
blinking faster, to a solid light. Yay! We had connectivity to some
degree. Now it was up to the software to complete and to figure out
what was up with the house wiring.
* We were pulling our hair out with the software after that. We found
that the troubleshooter would kick in and it would sit there for more
than hour. We aborted it. After about two takes of this, I ejected the
CD and found the problem -- it had baby mouth goo on the bottom of it
from her baby! Duh-huh. I then used my CD and surprise! It worked.
* Okay, so once the software was installed, the MSN Premium
installation bombed out. This also happened at my house. If you really,
really want MSN Premium and the gunk that comes with it, then call
Verizon tech support and they'll get you going. Otherwise, you don't
really need it. For us, we just use Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird to
get everything we need. For Spyware protection, she uses Spybot in her
XP along with the built-in firewall. For me, I have a triple-firewalled
Linux config with multiple devices and I don't have to worry about it.
And not only does Verizon give us an email address, but we both have
various email addresses we use on the Internet like those you can get
with mailsnare.net, hotpop.com, or hotmail.com.
* So then we moved to getting the house wiring thing fixed. We found
that all she needed was a DSL filter on the first jack in her house
past the demarcation point where she had her first telephone plugged
in. After that, by means of the daisy chain, all the other phone
devices were filtered. Then, we moved to her office and plugged the Y
connector in. We plugged the DSL cable into one part of the Y, then
plugged her regular phone into the other part -- and without a DSL
filter on the regular phone line part since she already had a filter
put on in this daisy-chain configuration in her house. In your case, if
you have a direct line from the demarc to each jack in your house, then
you'll need filters for every regular phone device you use.
* Make certain not to plug the DSL filter into the line for the DSL
modem -- that won't work.
* Oh, and if you're REALLY a newbie -- note that you CAN use the DSL
Internet at the same moment you use your phone line. This is because
the phone company runs 4 wires to your demarcation point per line. Two
are used by the phone. The other are used by your PC.
* She wasn't getting the bandwidth I expected. She was getting the
400's. We used CNet's Bandwidth Tester website to check this. This
either has to do with the fact she's too far from the central switch
bank, her house wiring is low grade or has a kink in it, or she might
just need a direct pair of wire from her demarc straight to her home
office. Anyway, 400Kbps was good enough for her and we were done.
* I still recommend to anyone to get a hardware-based Cable/DSL
router/firewall and then maybe even extra precautions and software
inside Windows or whatever operating system you use. For instance, on
my cable/DSL router/firewall, Verizon DSL's service is still permitting
hacker attacks that I see in my logs. These attacks also impede your
bandwidth. It's a bad, bad world out there. |
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