I upgraded my ADSL account with TPG recently to ADSL2+. I was very excited to see what speeds I could get. When the line was activated, I quickly bought myself a new modem router. The Netcomm NB9W had favorable reviews and seemed to have everything anyone would one, with wireless and VoIP capabilities thrown in.

Having installed countless number of ADSL modems for non-techy friends, I thought the NB9W would be pretty straight forward. Plus the phone line in, plug my network cable in, go to the web admin page and enter my TPG username/password and I’d be ready to rock-n-roll.

But I could not connect to TPG. The line would drop out and cause the NB9W to hang. After 2 hours of experimenting with different things, I gave up and read the User Guide, only to find out that you were supposed to connect another phone line to the LINE Port, even if you did not intend to use the VoIP features. When I did that, I could connect!

I was pretty excited, and began to configure the router with my port forwarding rules, then configured the wireless network settings to work with the other computers in the house. But as I started to use the NB9W, it was very unstable.

Basically, it would hang, and while it could still dish out IP addresses, no computer could access the internet and I could not access the web admin page. Only by pulling the power plug out and restarting the NB9W would get it to work, but then once again the same thing would happen periodically.

I could not isolate the problem to anything in particular. I upgraded the firmware to no avail. I suspect it may be due to the fact that I daisy chained another network switch to it, and that somehow the NB9W was designed to work by itself. Of course, this is another one of my own theories that has no scientific merit.

Fortunately, I was able to return the NB9W for a full refund, even though I had to practically dance naked to get it.

At the moment, I’m running my connection with a NB5Plus4, on loan from friends who are also waiting to upgrade to ADSL2+. I’m in the market for a new modem router, but have no idea what to get. The DLinks and Netgears are pretty out-of-date and the Billions are looking good.

What are my speeds like with ADSL2+? A miserable 4000/512kbps. More on that another time… I’m trying to see what I can do to fix it and will blog about my experience when I’ve given up or gotten it to work.