Using the 3COM OfficeConnect Wireless 11g Firewall Router with the BeThere ISP
I am currently using BeThere as my ISP. They are pretty good, you can get upto 24Meg DSL and there’s no port blocking, throttling or any of that non-sense, and they’re a reasonable price. Alas I only get just under 2 meg down (in central London!) and just under 1 meg up.
They give you a free router which is a re-branded Speedtouch box. It’s very flexible but only if you’re prepared to telnet into it and alter the config via the command-line. Mine served me pretty well, until the BBC brought out the iPlayer. It has a terrible habit of crashing when streaming flash audio or video from the BBC’s iPlayer. This was an irritation, but now that all video on BBC sites and BBC Radio’s ‘listen again’ use the same flash delivery system, it became untenable as a router. (I believe that BT’s Home Hub router is having similar issues at the moment.)
So I decided to move back to my ever-trusted previous router: a 3COM OfficeConnect. I bought it years ago – and although it was more expensive than your average bargain-bucket router it’s never failed me, is rock-solid and surprisingly even supports ADSL2+ (even though I bought it back in… the early 2000′s.) If you’re going to buy networking kit – 3COM isn’t a bad bet, they know what they’re doing.
Anyway – I had a little bit of a tough time getting it to work with BeThere (who don’t use PPPoA like most DSL providers in the UK) so I thought I’d document what I needed to do to get it working.
In order to get one working with BeThere you need to use the following settings:
Protocol: Dynamic/Fixed IP in 1483 Bridge Mode
IP address: (my static IP address)
Subnet Mask: (my subnet mask)
Default Gateway: (my Gateway address)
VPI/VCI: 0/101
Encapsulation: LLC
QoS Class: UBR (not sure if this is correct, but it’s the default)
PCR/SCR/MBS: 4000/4000/10 (again – the defaults)
DHCP Client – not checked.
If you don’t have a static IP, then you can probably leave the IP address/netmask/gateway empty and just check the DHCP checkbox.
If you do use a static IP then you can get the relevant addresses by calling BeThere customer support.
Oh, by the way – if like me, you have a static IP address and want one of your LAN machines to be the public face of your network (place it in what router manufacturers call a ‘DMZ’) then the OfficeConnect will gladly let you do this – but it simply won’t work unless you turn the firewall on. If the firewall is disabled then you won’t be able to connect to that machine from outside the LAN.
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