[NTLUG:Discuss] DSL Availability / netfilter

[Mark Bickel]

> From xrauschu at ti.com Wed Jan 10 06:59 CST 2001
> From: "Rauschuber, Chris" <xrauschu at ti.com>
> To: "'mark.bickel at ericsson.com'" <mark.bickel at ericsson.com>
> Subject: RE: [NTLUG:Discuss] DSL Availability / netfilter
> Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 06:57:13 -0600
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> 
> Where did you buy the equipment?  I can't find the routers for less than
> $300.  If it weren't for that, I'd probably be willing to pay $60/mo for
> service.
> Have you looked into IDSL availability? Both Covad and Northpoint are
> providing this option from some C.O.s. 
<snip>
> We're using a Flowpoint 144 IDSL router.
> 
> Good luck,
> Mark.Bickel at ericsson.com

We have Covad as our DSL provider (Northpoint had no POP in our CO as
of August last year). We have Firstworld as our ISP, mostly because of
the dialup network access from 5000+ nodes in US plus U.K. & Ireland 
(when we travel). We have had some service problems with them though:
Planned and unplanned outages, DNS down, and a mail server that truly
sucks at times. The IDSL transport part has been quite stable however.

So we got the router from Covad, and got charged (IIRC) about USD 250
for it through our ISP, in addition to a one time installation charge of
USD 60. We eventually (3 months later) got a USD 195 rebate from Covad.

Interestly, Firstworld gave us two static IPs, and the FP144 router was
delivered configured as a bridge, which is fine since I use a dedicated
firewall as my router (an embedded low-power SBC I assembled runs Linux).

The Flowpoint has some (limited) capability to provide filtering and NAT,
but that requires additional COMMERCIAL CLOSED-SOURCE SOFTWARE which 
YOU MUST PAY EXTRA FOR. I'll pass, thank you.

Linux is free. Life is Good.
Mark.Bickel at ericsson.com
mbickel at firstworld.net