מחיר של בלון גז ביתי קטן

On getting a Belkin wireless gateway/router to work with Bezeq ADSL using Alcatel modem

It has been long time that I was planning to connect to the Internet over a broad band connection. I even bought a Belkin 54g Cable/DSL Gateway Router to allow me to hook several machines to the Internet at once.

Yesterday I finally got my ADSL modem (an Alcatel ADSL modem) from Bezeq and an ISP account with Bezeq International. Making my computer connect to the internet required a call to Bezeq's ADSL support who where giving me just the minimal information I needed to connect one machine, nothing more.

Bezeq's ADSL help desk told me to change my Local Area Connection (under Start->Connect_To->Show_All_Connections) setting from the one I use at work (dynamic IP via DHCP) to use a fixed IP address of 10.200.1.1 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. I asked them if I can go about without touching the LAN configuration I use at work, and to this they said that they do not support networking. Then they went with me though the setup of a VPN connection (a VPN type) and gave me the host name to use: "10.0.0.138 RELAY_PPP1" (without the quotes) - this support call was completed by me testing the connection using a test ID they provided. Now, they told me, I should be able to use the user ID and password to connect to my provider.

In another call with Bezeq, I asked for minimal details on how should I go about connecting my Belkin - what kind of connection they set up, are there special parameters I need, etc. I was answered that they have a service called WowNet which uses a D-Link wireless gateway router that does what I want - they sell it for something around 750 NIS with some monthly support fee. I explained to them again that those equipments are mostly equivalent and that I am willing to pay for support if they are willing to help. The support person asked for a moment to check and returned with a resounding NO. They cannot help me with this, it will not work.

Since I already had the Belkin, I set out to look for a solution. Fortunately, I rather quickly hit upon an article by Doron Shikmoni which provided step-by-step instructions for setting up the Alcatel modem so that the Belkin could use it. You can find the excellent article at "Using PPPoE with Bezeq ADSL Network". It worked like charm for me.

The nice thing about this solution is that once you deploy it on the Alcatel modem (it is fully reversible), you get PPPoE support which makes it trivial to set up the gateway router. The gateway router now does the dialup and the rest of the machines connected to it need no special configuration at all other than a simple LAN connection with dynamic IP addresses. This means that Linux, Mac as well as other systems that support DHCP can connect with virtually no setup.

It is unfortunate that Bezeq does not see the need to help their customers. I can understand that this will complicate the support handbook but then, Bezeq even did not publish a text-based how-to document to help people around this issue. I personally know of quite a number of people (mostly are technical) that gave up after long hours of futile attempt and discouraging answers from support.