Yesterday was the day that my new DSL service started. So I turned on the power on the DSL modem and noticed that DSL LED light was solid steady. Hooked up the network cable from the modem to my laptop then started Chrome, and I got an error saying “browser not supported”. Started IE browser and this time it worked. After signing up for account activation in the IE, boom, the internet connection started working!

The old wireless router setting in LinkSys WRT54G didn’t work with the modem at the first try (I just connected the network cable from the DSL modem to the WAN port on WRT54G). It was set up for the cable modem which didn’t have a router. The SpeedStream DSL modem has a router and supports DHCP among other things like DMZ and Firewall. It seems overkill to configure two routers for home networking. I decided to scratch the WRT54G router settings and use it as a switch and wireless access point. So I disabled the DHCP server in WRT54G and connected the network cable from the DSL modem directly to a numbered port in WRT54G. I tested my laptop with the existing wireless connection setup (same SSID and Passphrase) and it worked nicely.

I have run a flash testing program from DSLReports.com and it showed that my downstream speed was around 5.6MB/s, slightly lower than the advertised 6MB/s, and upstream speed was 315KB/s, lower than the advertised 384KB/s with US latency of 36ms.