I’m looking for good quality network devices to get experienced with: something better than the “domestic devices” generally provided by providers in Italy to small companies but something less complicated and expensive than Cisco.
A friend suggested to me to have a look to Mikrotik devices. I’ve been looking at your website and everything looks quite interesting but I see you don’t produce adsl modems.
All my customers need to connect to adsl.
Your products look quite professional so I started looking for a professional plain adsl modem with no firewall, no router to connect to their routers but I can’t find any.
Unfortunately Siemens Speedstream 4100 is out of production now.
It was IMHO best ADSL modem ever, still got one working in my home .
From my experience at the moment Thomson/Technicolor modems are good choice: http://www.technicolorbroadbandpartner.com/dsl-modems-gateways/products/data-wired-.php
ST510/516 (in bridge mode) works with MikroTik RouterBoards perfectly.
Thank you very much for your suggestion, really appreciated.
I gave a look to Thomson’s devices. I’m glad to know, as you say that they are good but I have TG508 datasheet in front of me: honestly the case looks like a bit domestic to me.
Imagine this situation: small company with a decent small rack containing a server, a backup server, a router and the ups, everything well connected and “failure proof” (as much as possible with a small budget). I’d like to have a modem which respects this approach. It would be fantastic to see an adsl modem in a 1U case with a standard AC jack capable to hold, eventually, more than one modem (I guess that in 1U you can put at least 3 modems). Probably, since you say that Thomson products are good, it’s just about the external case and power supply connector.
I know that I might look too much demanding but for me it’s like to match a wedding dress with slippers. Am I the only one having this feeling? Am I wrong?
@dam
As I wrote earlier, IMHO Speedstream 4100 is best ADSL modem ever.
If you think that Thomson modems are crapware, buy one ST510v6 and test it.
I don’t want to to talk about TG508 because I never use it.
Sorry to bump in, but take a look at the issue from the modem’s manufacturers point of view:
ADSL is “per se” a non-professional home use oriented solution
the biggest clients are the ISPs that do home deployment and deliver them to customers
Now, why should someone develop a 1U rack mountable modem which can be sold in numbers reaching in the hundreds when the other “cheap” model is sold in millions? Because i don’t see a home user wanting a 1U unit on his desk. The development costs and tooling on the production line alone will surpass any potential profit. Not to mention that you have to set up the production line anew for every low number production runs (with additional costs).
So, the probability to get such an unit is low, if not zero.
But, if you keep a “cheap” unit in a rack on a rack tray and close the rack doors, it will satisfy most of the customers. And the power supply is not accessible.
On the other hand, there are third party rack mount cases designed for Mikrotik routers. You could adapt one of these to hide the “ugly” modem and its power supply (http://www.mikrotik.com/mfm). Maybe even put e.g. a RB450G and a ADSL modem in one single 1U case.
I can confirm that Thomsons are pretty good modems in terms of stability, working and build quality. We had few of them running for years until fiber came. They managed alot better with long crappy cooper wires than most of other modem brands we’ve tried. As they’re all powered by AC adapters, you’re not going to avoid using a transformer based power supply though..
Also you could try ZyXEL. I’ve had some pretty good experience with their ADSL2+ Prestige series. Btw, I’ve seen some industrial grade Cisco modems with metal enclosures. Far from 1U rackcasing, but definitely wouldn’t embarrace your rack Don’t think they’re that expensive..
@docmarius I agree with what you wrote. The only thing I’m not sure about is the small market: all over the world there are millions of micro companies: Italy is a good example. In Italy as a micro company, if you are not located in Milano or Rome there is no other option than ADSL (both for technical and economic reasons) so you have to stick with it. From my experience the reason why all these companies have “non-professional” devices in their network is because most of the technicians here don’t know/care/want to use them.
So I don’t know if the market is really zero as you say. Right now it is, I agree but maybe it could change if only there is the chance to change the situation and currently it looks like there isn’t.
About the development cost, I know how much expensive development of anything can be. In this case a good start would be to take a good modem board, like the Thomson one and do what Taduikis says (wrap it in something more professional). It would be really interesting to see if someone ever made a business plan for that …
@Taduikis Thank you for the suggestion about Zyxel and Cisco. About the last one I made a quick research some weeks ago with no results: now that you point it out I’m gonna dig more and report here results if I find something.
I would say that most of adsl modems work good in bridge mode. As long as you do natting etc in good router like Mikrotik Many adsl modems have weak processor and low memory, so they will come a bottleneck if trying to do nat etc. in them.
I have installed few cheap Tp-link adsl modems (8840T in bridge mode) and Mikrotik to do routing and wireless. Those tp-links have worked rock stable at least for year now.
I also suggest to do little traffic shaping in router that adsl line do not get fully saturated that there is little bandwidth to do dns queries etc. If line gets fully saturated then latency grows and dns queries start to time out and customer starts calling why their connection don’t work.
I also suggest to do little traffic shaping in router that adsl line do not get fully saturated that there is little bandwidth to do dns queries etc. If line gets fully saturated then latency grows and dns queries start to time out and customer starts calling why their connection don’t work.
Hello,
I live in Italy too and I have exactly the same problem.
I have many customers like:
bar/restaurants;
small offices, but also medium enterprises;
wifi shops;
All of them have only ADSL. They cannot afford SHDSL let alone T1 or fiber.
But I need to remote manage them so I need:
a one box product (less parts that can break);
good vpn choice;
powerful wireless;
watchdog;
directly manage wan ip.
All these features are covered by Mikrotik but not ADSL.
Please also note that I have ADSL connections that use IPOA (RFC1483 routed LLC) and so (please correct me if I am wrong) it is not possible to put an adsl modem in bridge mode and manage WAN IP directly via Mikrotik.
I thank you in advance for any help in one box adsl+mikrotik that also let me to manage directly wan ip.
Thanks,
Mario
PS: if you look I have another thread started by me where I ask basically the same thing.
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