Which Speedtouch for long lines?

With an attenuation of 53 and SNR of 11 to 15 I want to decide which router may give best performance after a move from fixed speed (1Mbps) to Max.

People seem to speak well of Speedtouch but I hover between a 546v6 and a 585v6 - anything to pick between them?

At present I have a Netgear DG834v2 and Netgear WG602v2 running a mixed ethernet and wireless network. The DG834 holds sync well, but I am attracted by the fact that SNR on the Speedtouches can be tweaked by DMT if necessary.

If the 546 and 585 are as good as each other, then I would go for the cheaper 546, as long as the WG602 wireless access point would happily work with it - anyone tried that combination?
Thanks

I can't see there being much difference TBH, they both use the Broadcom chipset which many people, myself included praise.

I have a 546(v5) and it has been solid as a rock. I bought it because like you, I wanted better stats for MaxDSL. It replaced a D-Link G604T which would sometimes report the SNR margin below 0.
In the end, I decided not to bother with the MaxDSL lottery, but am pleased I bought the 546 anyway. My SNR margin with the 546 is always 20+ ... I'd definitely use it for MaxDSL anyway ..

The G604T is now used as just a wireless access point. DHCP is turned off on that, and the Speedtouch assigns addresses to the wireless clients. I can't see why the WG602 couldn't do that either ... unless someone says otherwise.

The 585 would be nice for an all in one soloution though.

Edited by Gari (Thu 02-Nov-06 20:18:53)

the 834 may be the best on the long line, FWIW.

A couple of weeks ago I replaced my speedtouch 580 with a 585 v6 and the stability of the 585 as been great and as not disconnected ones on its own, I was lucky if the 580 stopped connected for more than 2 days. It also gave me a slight increase in connection speed and with the advice from Yarwell on using the DMT tool and SNR I

If been using a 585v6 for almost 3 months on MAX. May Attn is 59 and before MAX my SNR was somewhere between 16 -> 21 (on a 1Mbit service)

I've not been impressed with the wireless performance at all so I've gone back to using my Belkin wireless AP which works perfectly throughout my house.

The modem part of the 585 is great. It hold sync and a working connection even when the reported SNR drops as low as 2.5, downloads slow down a lot due to the number of errors, but general web browsing is fine.

DMT is an added reason that I went for the 585, the ability to mess around with the target SNR, the graphs, the line monitoring (and re-sync) and the interesting information it provides (a lot that's not all that useful to me, but still very interesting )

My only regret about the 585 is the relatively poor performance of the wireless functionality. The web gui is great, back it's not all that bad. I've not been able to manually set a static IP address or manually set the DNS using the GUI.

Edited by fredfox (Fri 03-Nov-06 07:56:27)

Although most poeple seem to have had good experiences with the Speedtouch 585 it has not worked for me on my 7km marginal line and I have currently abandoned it in favour of my old BT Voyager 205. Although the Speedtouch synchs well it often does not connect to the internet, and shows a red cross against the ATM icon with the message "Could not send loopback cell".

Following advice in these forums, I have tried 2 different firmwares, used the DMT tool to increase the SNR margin but without succes. This is all the more annoying when I read of other experiences praising its performance over long lines.

The BT voyager modem synchs at a lower speed and whilst it does drop the connection regularly ( an ongoing long line problem), at least it does reconnect reliably when it resynchs thus proving that a connection is possible.

But as I said at the beginning, most poeple seem more than happy with it and I bought it as a result of several recommendations in these forums

the 585v6 will allow you to keep the dmt graphs with 6.1 firmware.

the difference is they both should be equal stability but the 546 with 6.1 firmware has ddisabled debug commands.

Have you tried the Speedtouch with the spectral shaping switched on? (it is off by default):

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/460118.html

Thanks

Gavin

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Have you tried the Speedtouch with the spectral shaping switched on? (it is off by default):

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No I've never heard of it ! I'll take a look over the weekend. Thanks for the link.

That's for the 510..