Tags: | dsl | modem | review | wep |

2007-03-01 00:00

Review of the 2Wire 2700HG-D Gateway Modem, Adventures in Wireless WEP cracking, and DSL Installation

I moved into a new place last September - being a total geek one of the first things on my mind was, who should provide my Internet service? My old address had cable Internet through Comcast, and my only other option was DSL. The DSL appeared to be a better deal at the time, so I ordered it. Since I hadn't pre-arranged any type of service I would have to wait a week or so for everything to be turned on and installed, but I had just moved into a building with 11 other residents, I should be able to easily jump on someone's wireless access point, right? Wrong - after firing up my laptop in the middle of the move-in day I was disappointed to find every wireless network signal in range was locked with a key - now what was I supposed to do for the next week!? After getting properly settled in to my new place I decided to further investigate my wireless possibilities, and was once again shown the same list of unfriendly locked networks, even after roaming from room to room with my laptop in the hopes of finding some weak signal in the bathroom, or the kitchen - nothing turned up. This is when desperation sunk in - so, playing the role of the desperate man I started the foolish task of trying to guess one of my neighbor's WEP keys; I chose the strongest signal, clicked on it, and when prompted for a password, put in the simplest 64 bit WEP key that came to mind - 1234567890 - and by the blessings of the nerd gods, I was in - that was their password! On the first of the wireless networks I tried, and my first guess at the password, I had cracked their WEP. I was even able to access their Linksys wireless router with a default username and password. If there is a lesson to be learned here, it's that putting the simplest possible string of numbers as your password is almost as bad as leaving your network wide open for the world to use. Luckily for me, my neighbors were naive enough to use such a simple password, and I was set for the next week or so, until I had my own Internet line installed.

Despite my early bit of luck, the streak did not last, because that night I decided to order DSL from Qwest, to take advantage of their "low price for life" deal - the thing I hadn't thought about before ordering were my modem options, and I was therefore talked into purchasing the newest modem offered through Qwest by the sales associate (who wants to cancel their order just to go research modems? I mean.. how bad could this one be, right?). It turns out, the 2Wire 2700HG-D Gateway Modem would be the downfall of my home network setup. Moments after setting it up in my computer room I realized my mistake in buying the modem - instead of a traditional firewall interface, the firmware only allows you to forward ports to an already recognized computer, only addressable by name. This meant that the computers connected through the five port switch in a different part of the room won't be recognized in the setup menu of the modem, only the switch is recognized. This effectively stopped me from forwarding specific ports to any of the computers connected to the switch instead of the modem, causing many applications to lose connectivity to the outside world. Any fully functional modem/router device would normally allow the end user to specify an IP address for port forwarding, but for completely misguided reasons 2Wire decided to cripple their modem to serve the lowest common denominator in the home networking world: the computer-challenged. While I completely understand catering to these people in order to lower calls to customer support and increase customer happiness, why do you have to put a previously unseen limitation on functionality? Why not allow the user both options? This, is a question only the folks at 2Wire can answer. My only hope is that their answer comes in the form of a firmware upgrade that allows me the functionality I expected and need for my network.

My complaints about the 2700HG-D don't end there - Another odd choice in interface design allows anyone who wants to see the setup for my network and Internet connection to just browse to the modem's IP address - they are allowed to see how everything is configured without being prompted for a password; the only time a password is requested is when the user attempts to make a change in the settings. Beyond this privacy/security annoyance, the 2Wire modem also likes to randomly drop the wireless broadcast - it is very common for me to be working wirelessly on my laptop and my connectivity with the Internet suddenly disappears. At first I thought this was a problem with my laptop, but it happens on more than one machine, and the connection remains down despite restarting the system. The only way I've found to make the signal come back is to either wait 2-3 hours, and it will sometimes restore itself, or to go to the hard-wire connected PC in my office, browse to the setup menu for the modem, switch wireless functionality to "disable" and then switch it back to "enable" - this gets the signal back every time, but it is a great annoyance to have to move to another computer and mess with settings in order to restore my signal. So, my advice to anyone out there who's shopping for DSL, don't but a 2Wire product - they aren't worth the hassle.

- Kevin
Kevin (at) Upcsite (dot) Net

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