Hard Cider Index

After reading the experiences about installing ADSL service from USWest, I hope I can provide some useful information to others with pending installations or who are considering signing up for the service.

USWest people are not uniformly trained on ADSL, and even those who are, are generally PC/Windows centric.

Within the 14-state area served by USWest, ADSL service is not uniformly available. In addition, USWest is offering some promotions that may differ from one area to another. If you are interested in signing up for ADSL service, going through the USWest web site, http://www.uswest.com/ is a good place to start.

When you sign up for the service, you must also designate an ISP. If your ISP supports ADSL then some of the information here, particularly about bridging and DHCP, will be determined by your ISP and may be different. My ISP does not yet support ADSL, so I signed up with uswest.net in a package deal that USWest calls MegaPak ™.

Installation services are offered and I would recommend that you accept the installation service. The technician that comes to your house will check out the line and make sure that the ADSL signaling is working correctly. The technician will also have a PC laptop computer and also an extra Cisco 675 bridger/router. The technician can use the PC laptop to configure the Cisco 675, saving you the serial cable hassle.

What You Get

When you sign up for service, USWest will ship you a Cisco 675 ADSL bridger/router. USWest insists on calling this an ADSL modem, although it certainly doesn't fit the usual definition of a modem. This is exactly the same unit as the NetSpeed 202/204, just renamed since Cisco purchased NetSpeed. Along with the Cisco 675 there will be some documentation, three telephone line filters, a female DB9 to RJ45 serial cable, a crossover RJ45-RJ45 10baseT Ethernet cable, a two pair RJ11-RJ11 telephone cable, a wall mount telephone plate incorporating a filter, and some extra short telephone cables.

The Cisco 675 is designed to connect to your computer via Ethernet. The crossover cable that comes with it is so that you can hook the 675 directly to your computer's Ethernet 10baseT interface without a hub. If you have a hub because you have a printer connected by 10baseT Ethernet and/or additional computers on a 10baseT Ethernet LAN, you have to look at the hub to see if it has an uplink connector port. If it does, the uplink connector port is a crossover port and will accept the crossover cable that comes with the Cisco 675. Yes, that does give you a double crossover, but it works and saves you the $10 for another cable.

If your hub doesn't have an RJ45 uplink port, or you just want to connect the Cisco 675 to one of the regular 10baseT ports, you must use a regular 10baseT cable that you may already have, or will have to purchase separately.

Although the Cisco 675 does have Telnet and Web interfaces for configuration, it is really designed for configuration via its built-in serial interface. The only problem is that this serial port uses a RJ45 connector! The Cisco 675 comes packaged with a female DB9 to RJ45 cable that is designed to connect to the serial port on a PC. So how do you connect it to a Mac?

Well, if you took my advice and signed up for the installation service, don't sweat it. The technician will arrive with a laptop PC, do the configuration for you with the laptop, and you don't ever have to worry about how to hook the serial port up to your Mac.

Once the Cisco 675 is configured, it is unlikely that you will ever have reason to use the serial port in the future. The serial port is not connected for normal operation, only for configuration.

If you do want to hook it up to your Mac, MacWarehouse sells an adapter cable Din8M to DB9M, 6 ft, ACC1312 for $9.99. You can then hook the adapter cable to your Mac modem or printer serial interface, and the Cisco cable will attach to the male DB9 on the end of the adapter cable. Other options would include adapter cables that are generally available at CompUSA where you can get a Din8M to DB25 modem cable that is a widely available Mac adapter cable, and then get a DB25 to DB9M adapter that is a widely available PC adapter.

Installation

The documentation that arrives from USWest is confusing and sometimes contradictory. In addition, the Cisco 675 Installation and Operation Manual covers all the features of the unit, but offers no examples or explanation as to under what circumstances one would use any particular configuration or option.

The one correct piece of documentation is a thin booklet entitled "MegaPak Installation Guide". I'll be referring to that later.

Follow the instructions and diagrams in Chapter 3 of the Cisco Installation Manual to hook the Cisco 675 up to your Mac. Remember, if you connect it directly to your computer 10baseT interface you must use the crossover cable that came with the 675. If you hook the Cisco 675 to an Ethernet hub you can use the crossover cable to plug into the uplink port, or you must use a regular 10baseT cable to plug into one of the standard ports.

The discussion on Microfilters on page 3-8 of the Cisco 675 Installation Manual is very important. The Cisco 675 will not successfully set up ADSL communications if even one telephone is connected to the line without a filter. Where you hook up the filters depends on how your telephones are wired and is another good reason to use the installation service that USWest offers.

The diagram on page 3-8 of the manual illustrates a common wiring scheme where the telephone outlets throughout the house are daisy chained one to the next. In this case, you must install a microfilter between every phone and its wall outlet. If you have a wall mounted phone, that's why they supplied one filtered wall plate. If you have more than 3 phones, you may need more than the 3 filters that came with your installation kit. You can get more from USWest, or the technician will also have some additional filters.

Another way that telephones can be wired is that each telephone outlet in the house may have its own wire back to the telephone network interface (that's the box the telephone company provides that's generally on the outside of your house). If you have a lot of wires (or the same number of wires as you have telephone outlets) coming to the telephone network interface, then you may have this type of wiring scheme. In that case, the technician can install a junction block with a single filter between the telephone network interface and all of your phone wires, EXCEPT the wire that goes to the outlet you will use for the Cisco 675. There must NOT be a filter on that line, or it won't work.

If you plug the Cisco 675 up to the phone line and the WAN LED blinks green and never shows steady green, then your filters are not properly installed (or you could have line problems). Another good reason to use the installation service. When you first turn it on, the alarm light will go on briefly, the WAN light will blink, but if everything's OK it should shine steadily within about 30 seconds or so.

Configuring the Cisco 675

At this point I am assuming you have installed the Cisco 675, connected via Ethernet to your computer or your Ethernet hub, connected it to the phone line and gotten a steady green WAN LED, and have the serial port connected to your Mac modem or printer port.

Configuring the Cisco 675 via the serial port requires a terminal program. The one I used is ZTERM that's available as shareware and downloadable over the net from a variety of places including download.com. Configure the terminal package to use whatever port you've hooked the serial cable up to, and set the serial interface to a speed of 38400, no parity, one stop bit.

The instructions in Section 4.5 of the Cisco Installation manual on how to logon to the operating system contained in the Cisco 675 are complete and easy to follow. Simply press RETURN several times until you see the login: prompt from the Cisco 675.

If the prompt doesn't appear after pressing RETURN several times, try unplugging the power from the Cisco 675, and then plugging it back in (that's the only way it can be turned on or off) When the Cisco 675 is powered up it will send "HELLO" through the serial port. Whether you see the hello or not, try pressing RETURN again until you see the login: prompt.

The following now applies to configuring the Cisco 675 for use with USWest.net. You may get different instructions from your ISP.

The whole discussion in the Cisco 675 Installation Manual about the various things that can be set up is very complete so far as the commands and their syntax, but is utterly lacking in why you would do any of them and of no help at all in which ones you should do.

This is where the "MegaPak Installation Guide" comes in. Look in Section IX Appendix-Cisco/NetSpeed External DSL Modem Configuration. The ONLY thing you have to do is set the Cisco 675 to RFC1483 bridging mode. And then don't forget to WRITE the change to NVRAM and reboot the Cisco 675 or turn it off and then on again for the change to take effect.

That's all.

You don't need to set an IP address for the Cisco 675, you don't need to configure the WAN 0-0 or eth 0-x ports, or any of the other stuff that's documented in the Cisco 675 Installation Manual. Don't be confused by the fact that USWest will also have sent you a stapled set of pages titled "MegaBit Services User Guide" that says that you will need an IP address and subnet mask from your ISP. When I set up to use uswest.net, I didn't need any of that. Again, if you are using a different ISP, they may tell you to do things differently.

Configuring Your Mac

This assumes that you are using Open Transport and the Mac TCP/IP control panel.

Open the TCP/IP control panel and select ConfigurationsÉ from the File pull down menu. You will see a file selection box. Highlight Default, and click on Duplicate. You will get a dialogue box asking you to name the new configuration file. I named mine USWEST.

After naming the new configuration, click on Make Active. In the configuration dialogue box select Ethernet as the connection option, and DHCP as the Configure option. No other entries are required. Click the close box, save the changes, and reboot your machine. Technically, rebooting shouldn't be necessary, but my machine doesn't always request an IP address from the DHCP server when I just close the control panel.

You should now be up and running. You should be able to run Netscape and experience the rather breathtaking speed of ADSL. You will have to configure Netscape, or whatever programs you use for email and news to the USWest.net mail and news server names. One brief side note, the documentation I got from USWest giving my logon name, password, mail server and news server, gave incorrect names for the email server. I had to call uswest.net technical support to get the correct email server name. Since the server name seems specific to my city, I won't list it here, as yours will most likely be different. Just be aware that if your documentation lists "mail" as the server name, it's most likely wrong.

I hope this helps cut through the confusing mass of documentation and misinformation. Setting up the Cisco 675 is really quite simple, but the filters are so essential that I think it pays to use the USWest installation service.

Rick Geiger was Manager of Advanced Development of the Apple II Division at Apple in the early 80's, and General Manager of the Amiga development. Rick is now chief Technology Officer for Itron developing largest wide area wireless IP networks in the world for utility meter data collection.