From: sherlock@vsnl.com Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:17:20 +0500

I had one of my clients install MTNL ADSL broadband 256kbps. It has been up for about 2 months. So far it is working very well and has had almost zero outages. It has worked far far better than i had expected and beats any of the private isps. The bandwidth varies between 220 and 224kbps. With occasional drops to 216kbps. The dns is sloow but not a problem with a local caching dns.The MTNL engineers were very enthusiastic and spent several hours learning how to set up the dlink adsl modem.Apparently dlink / mtnl dont train their people. Any one with any more experiences before we can recommend it to all.

I have MTNL TriBand out of their Khar(W) xchg. As you said it is good when it works but I have experienced a few outages and was not able to get thru to their support. On the positive side, during the aftermath of 26/7, my ADSL service was unaffected though my landline on the same wire pair was OOS for 7 days. If your clients can live with some outages then I guess it is a cost effective solution. If you have the luxury of a Linux server, then use bind, dhcpd on it rather than on the DSL modem.

As for support, I got to know the linesman responsible for the neighborhood. Thru his chain of command I am able to get some support. I have found the engineers at Khar are quite knowledgeable about IP networks and were helpful.

Regarding the 502T modem, I ran into a couple of weird behaviors:

1. Need MSIE to program port forwarding rules! I cannot not program any port forwarding rule using Firefox (Linux and Windoze) or Konqueror. 2. When the config pages are accessed with Firefox, some of the icons on the various pages do not load; over a period of 10-12 days it's DNS relay would stop working and withing 2-3 days thereafter it would stop working completely. Only a hard reset of the unit would bring back it's functionality. DLink was not able to resolve the issues over the phone.

Finally, I took the unit to DLink Tech. support center @ Malad West. The tech. support came back and said nothing was wrong with my unit, that she was able to program a whole bunch of port forwarding rules. When I asked her what browser did she use - the answer was MSIE! I brought it back and using MSIE I found that the config pages play much better with MSIE than Firefox - wierd.

Anyone else experienced similar behavior with DLink 502t?