A New User Experience

[Lee Revell]

On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 21:31 +0800, Michael T. Richter wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-26-07 at 12:11 +0200, Quim Gil wrote: 
> > Ins't the problem that ADSL modems are generally tightly linked to the
> > ISPs providing ASDL connection and the modems they sell (normally with
> > firmware inside)? At least this is the situation in Spain.
> 
> I don't know about Spain, but I do know that in Canada and China both
> I can connect to any DSL modem using Windows or various routers by
> just giving three values and nothing else.  I also know that the Mac
> can do the same trick on a variety of providers in Canada.  Whatever
> magic is underlying it is something that Just Works on these platforms
> without fiddling endlessly with bizarre command line permutations.
> 
> So whatever they're doing in my Netgear router, for example, or in
> Windows?  That's what we need to be doing in Ubuntu.

Verizon in the US only uses PPPoE for the initial account setup.  Once
you've used a Windows box to activate your account, you just plug into
the modem with Ethernet and get a NATed IP from DHCP.  The modem does
all the PPPoE stuff.  Works with every OS including Linux.

It sounds like we need more hardware details to debug this.  Is it
really that common for ADSL providers to require the host to use PPPoE?

Lee