posted on Apr, 6 2007 @ 01:03 AM
I know firsthand. I switched from Roadrunner to SBC/ATT, etc. I had plety of problems , first with the actual connection in some remote location
(that took two weeks for them to discover and fix), then the fact that routers tend to not work well with their modems. The router tries to change
the local IP every so often or maybe it is a glitch. I went through that dozens of times and had to go through the whole 30 minute process of
reconfiguring the modem and router.
It is a pain. I finally held the customer support rep hostage on the phone while I ranted for 5 minutes of how bad their service was. I actually
made this poor woman hold her tongue while I went on and on about their crappy product. She tried to interrupt me and I tortured her by overtalking
her and making her answer questions about why I should not just drop them.
Fortunately, I ran across some articles about this and figured out you have to set up your modem to run in bridge mode, which essentially lets the
router do all the switching and thinking and makes the modem into a slave to the router and not the two competing for how to handle things.
Unortunately, I don't have a link nor does ATT and SBC give any advice for 3rd party hardware or software. Likewise, Linksys (my router) will not
give advice on how to properly make it work with an ATT modem, so their is no official literature on how to setup your hardware properly.
I would suggest googling "SBC router bridge mode" and print up how its done. It is a little complicated and must be followed exactly. I still had
trouble following the procedures but by happenchance got it working without problems for 5 months now.