DSL Finally

My landline phone was installed last Jan 14.

My DSL was installed last Jan 20.

Since this is an extra landline phone in a house where all the phone cables are set in the walls. The phone company SBC inquired about the wiring and said if I need work on that area, they can help. And there is a charge of $125. Wow, that is P7,000! Just to do wiring. That wiring thing is free in the Philippines. And it is simple for me to do it myself. So I said do not do it and I will do it myself. So last Jan 14 they installed it in the phone terminal box outside on the wall of the house.

Getting the Phone to Work

Since work is 8:00am to 5:00pm on weekdays and I am a bit far from work. I get home and it is dark already. So I choose not to fix it during these times. Weekends would have been perfect but just did not have the time sometimes.

Last Jan 21, our company let us go home at 2:00pm and that gave me enough time to get things connected.

But the terminal box had two extra connections not one. One of them was probably dead. But I got a real cheap $14 phone and some old wires to test them out on the box and call the number to get the right connection terminal.

Now for the internal wiring, there was enough for two more phones, I tried one, and went to my room upstairs to test it and there was no dial tone. Went down stairs and used the other set of wires, and still did not work.

I ask Papa if he had a multi-tester (VOM) so I can test the connection. He said he does not have one. So I decided to use a flashlight. I just joined all wires together and on the other end used the two wires acting as a switch of the flashlight to test the wire connections. I tried all combinations, which is 4! (Not an exclamation point, 4! meaning 4 factorial. Which is nothing but 4x3x2x1.) All gave no light. I was thinking since this is only a 1.5V battery and long wires, maybe the resistance ate all the voltage in the process. But I had a long roll of phone wire with me to test it out. And it work. So it meant nothing but the connections are broken somewhere.

And all of the wiring was inside the house, and I did not want to mess around with the walls. So I just made the wires pass outside the window, all around going down the wall to the phone terminal box. And it served me fine.

Getting the DSL to Work

In my old company Action Online, we had PLDT DSL, and where I worked at Informatics, we had BayanTel DSL. And I configure everything up myself. I’ve played around with Windows 98, 2000, 2003 and XP. Internet Connection Sharing, Wingate, ProProxy, AutoNet, SOHOConnect.

So I just unpacked everything up and connected everything. I saw the DSL LED on the Modem light up and I just said, great, the DSL signal is there. So I just need to hook it all up.

But no matter what, I could not get it to work??? I have been doing this for a long time and it just would not work. Although everything came with an installation CD, I decided not to use it. Since I don’t want excessive softwares installed on my computer. But since everything was not working, I then decided I need to run the CD that SBC Yahoo DSL gave.

It was quite a long installation with a lot of questions. The usual profile questions, your phone number, and even your a Modem Access Code which is a set of numbers on a sticker below your modem and everything then worked. Why did they have to make it that way? The only reason I can see is to keep track of you. Your profile, and your modem info. Aside from that it runs a lot of programs upon start up.

-The SBC Self-Support Tool
-Yahoo Browser in the System Tray
-A file called MotiveSB
-A file called IPClient by Visual Networks
-A file called IPMon32 also by Visual Networks

It makes Yahoo Browser the default browser and make SBC Yahoo DSL your homepage in all browsers. It also makes you SMTP not work anymore of you are using some other SMTP since Port 25 is blocked for some reason. Microsoft’s Internet Connection Sharing cannot be configured on a second LAN card since it will disable the DSL connection. If you share the connection itself, it disables the connection too. So it is forcing you to use a router/switch and not just a hub.

Basically, how I see things overall is they can just detect which modem on which account if being use. Not because they want to spy on you or what, but I guess if you do something crazy and hack into something or do anything greatly bad, and the authorities request access logs from them, they have something to give.

Unlike how I had it in the Philippines, as long as there is a DSL signal and a DSL modem, you are online. And you can share the account endlessly as long as you can configure it.

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