Sonic.net

I have a couple of questions about the ZTE ZXDSL 831 II bridge I use with my Sonic Fusion internets access:

1. I recently upgraded my house's wiring (previously I was capped at ~8 Mbps down and ~1 Mbps up), and the ZTE bridge now consistently says that the "max attain" rate is in the range 13800-14200 kbps. After being uncapped by Sonic, the modem is only syncing at 11 Mbps, far below the max attain rate. Is this normal? Are there settings that I can tweak to improve the actual connection rate?

I saw this graph posted on Sonic.net's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid= ... =1&theater . Based on my distance of ~5000 wire distance feet from the CO, the average sync rate is ~13 Mbps, which is below my max attain rate, but well above the 11 Mbps that I'm syncing at. I'd like to wring a few more Mbps out of my connection if possible.


2. I have the phone line connected to the ZTE bridge, and then the ZTE bridge connected to my AirPort Extreme wireless router. This works fine for internets access.

However, to access the modem's configuration page, I always have to physically connect to it via an Ethernet cable. Navigating to 192.168.1.1 in my web browser results in a connection timeout (my wireless router serves up 10.0.1.* IP addresses, not 192.168.1.* ones).

From doing a bunch of Google searches, I've come to understand that this is because the ZTE is in bridge mode which makes it transparent to any connections except when physically connected. (I'd never heard of this mode before.) It seems that you can set the modem to a different mode by going to [Advanced --> WAN --> Connections --> br_0_35 --> Edit --> pencil image --> Next] where there are a number of different options.

My question is: what are the settings that will allow me to both access my ZTE bridge modem wirelessly and still connect to the internets properly? I can mess around with them myself by trial-and-error, but if anybody has any knowledge or experience in this area, they'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

-- Simone

1. The modem I use usually has around a 1 Mbps difference, eg 10 Mbps Max, 8.8 Mbps sync. Perhaps the chipset has some effect on the behavior, my cheap modem is TrendChip based. I think the ZTE uses a Broadcom chip.

Since you are already uncapped, you can ask support to change your line from fastpath to interleave for more speed. And perhaps try lower SNR settings (eg 6 dB, 7dB) to see what level of stability is acceptable.

2. Accessing a bridged modem (web interface, telnet) in front of your router.
WIth open source firmware like DD-WRT, Tomato, etc you define a 2nd WAN interface with an address in the same subnet as the modem. If your modem is 192.168.1.5 then you'd like the WAN side of your router to have the Sonic public IP, and a second IP like 192.168.1.1 And the LAN side is 10.0.1.x for your example.

with recent Tomato firmware, it is a fill-in-the-blank on the screen
http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?th ... ost-138477

ignore the PPPoE in the DD-WRT picture
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Ac ... figuration

Not sure if any commercial consumer router firmware can do this.
You can also achieve this by wiring two regular routers (do not need DD-WRT, Tomato)