I-Stream success with a cheap PCI modem

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Got it all installed today. I had the PC already configured with the modem so I was online within five minutes of the nice man from Eircom leaving.

The card is this one here and I got it from Dabs - they sell it as a "no name" part under their Dabs Value pseudo-brand. Be careful to check the mfr code on Dabs just in case - anything sold as "Dabs Value" is whatever they can find for the lowest cost that does the job. At some point in the future they may change supplier.

It's installed in a standard PC running Linux 2.4.19 kernel. The drivers for the card come on the CD in source form (with a small blob of pre-compiled object code). My only problem with it was of my own doing - I'm using gcc 3.x while Normal people use gcc 2.x. The PPPoE stuff is a little tricky, but you have to deal with that if you go for the USB modem anyway.

There doesn't seem to be any performance down side, but it's hard to test on a contended service. PIngs to INEX are about 60ms. When I brought the card up first at around 2pm I was getting about 75KB/sec. Right now it's down to a third of that (single threaded download) :-(

The driver isn't zapping much CPU time. The card is installed in a 700MHz VIA C3 machine - think Celeron but less - and I'm still showing 98% idle CPU.

spongebob

Are me figures right here

UK£33 for Card
UK£20 for Delivery

add Vat@17.5%
(UK£9.30)

Total UK£63 or about €100 cash , delivered to your door. and thats if you order nothing else, ya could fill a truck with DABS for the one delivery charge (I see BIG monitors here).

What would €ircon charge for a DSL modem again?

Would this work with the Eshat DSL offering...technical standards wise.

M

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Originally posted by Muck
Would this work with the Eshat DSL offering...technical standards wise.

Should do, but doesn't ESAT supply a modem as part of the service?

the Guru

Which DSL product are you using
I take it that its enhanced as Eircom will not sell the other
products with the Modem.

With the ESAT DSL in Limerick they have launched I think it is slightly different as they Have a 2m Download @ €1500 Conx and €400 per month (nice) there smaller products are cheap and Also in the Tipp and Kilkenny area Chorus have the Best deal with €50 per month for 512k download and a cheap Install before the end of october.

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I'll have to suspend judgement on this modem for the moment - I'm seeing high error rates that are impacting performance adversely. I'm losing 30% of MTU-sized pings to the DSLAM. TCP hates that sort of messing so the effect on download speed is a lot more than 30%. Dunno what the cause is yet, but the modem is one of the many suspects.

And yes, I'm on the Enhanced service, though I've heard rumours that if you push the issue hard enough - and if you're lucky enough - they'll let you on the lesser services with your own modem. I didn't try, but I may not be staying on the Enhanced service indefinitely.

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False alarm. I've got it running now with 0% loss and 105kByte/sec data transfer rates.

I've decided to blame gcc 3.2 either directly - miscompiling the driver code - or more likely indirectly - a big blob of the driver is pre-compiled proprietary code built with gcc 2.x. Mixing gcc 2.x code with 3.x code is reputed to result in much unhappiness.

The card now resides in a dual-processor Pentium Pro machine (2x200Mhz). The box runs Red Hat 7.3 upgraded with a plain 2.4.19 kernel and updated ppp & rp-pppoe packages (so I can use kernel PPPoE rather than the userspace rp-pppoe stuff). I don't know how stable the setup will be over time but it's been running sweetly for two hours. I plan to leave it alone for a while then duplicate the software setup on the original machine and move the card back there.