asterisk20xx
join:2008-04-22
Marshall, TX
| Cannot connect to ISDN at all
Sob story here. I just bought a house that AT&T swore up and down my DSL would be available at. Turns out I'm too far away for DSL and they have no plans in the immediate future to bring it to my location. So I thought I was left with dialup or satellite so I thought I'd be stuck on dialup again. Satellite just has too high a ping time for any games.
I figured if anyone knew anything faster than dialup without terrible latency it'd be dslreports.... and so here I am in the ISDN forums.
I've read through pages upon pages here in the last 2 weeks. It looks and sounds good so I decided to take the plunge and had an ISDN line installed. I got an account with a local dialup isp that does ISDN, and I even managed to acquire a Cisco 804 ISDN router.
ISDN was installed in under a week. Router was delivered the day after install. And I signed up for an account with my ISP yesterday. And that's where the nice smooth ride ends.
No matter what I do I can't get connected. My account is definitely active because I can login on 56k dialup over both the landline and ISDN lines. I can make calls to and from both ISDN numbers. I added the 0101 to the end of my SPIDs. But nothing I do can get my Cisco 804 to dial.
I started out using Fast Step 2.5 to configure the router and after several hours of trying different things I gave up and tried using the Cisco Config Maker which was much less confusing but I still cannot dial in to my ISP.
I'm sure the problem is *something* to do with the router configuration I just don't know what. I will post my config when I get home and maybe someone here can help me. |
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bolt
Former Broadband Exile
Premium
join:2003-11-11
Charlestown, IN | I'll have to look when I get home, but I'm pretty sure I had two differet SPIDs when I had ISDN. |
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asterisk20xx
join:2008-04-22
Marshall, TX
|  reply to asterisk20xx
Here's my current config.
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bolt
Former Broadband Exile
Premium
join:2003-11-11
Charlestown, IN | I can't help you with the 804 setup. I never could get one to work myself. I checked when I got home but it appears I've gotten rid of most of my ISDN paper work, since I haven't had it for a couple of years. |
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asterisk20xx
join:2008-04-22
Marshall, TX | Do you (or anyone else) happen to know of a TA that might be a little bit more on the user friendly side? I'd prefer one with a router built in but I can always do internet connection sharing over a crossover cable if I really have to. |
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bolt
Former Broadband Exile
Premium
join:2003-11-11
Charlestown, IN | I used a 3Com TA. It was easy to set up and use. Since we had a hub, we just used Internet Connection Sharing to share the connection. |
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Steve Mc
@Level3.net
| reply to asterisk20xx
I had similar symptoms when I got ISDN. I was able to get ISDN to connect only by manually selecting a 56 k connection speed on my modem. It was still IDSN dual channel, just slower. I complained to the phone company but they were/are clueless.
After a few months I went through the phone company hassles again to try and get them to put the correct long distance provider on my second line. After they fixed this, I noticed that I could connect at 64 k!
I recommend Eicon Technologies "Diva Lan ISDN Modem" (hard to find) and 3Com "Office Connect ISDN Lan Modem" Model 3C892A (easy to find on ebay but you will need to reset it once a day to keep it happy (I have a linux script if you get that far)). I've tried everything except Netopia and I personally find the GUI based setups more intuitive to my 54 year old mind than trying to relearn the somewhat cryptic CISCO (or AT&T or Netgear) commands every few months when I get curious about my modem. |
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mark42
join:2006-02-07
USA
 ·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| reply to asterisk20xx
Call ATT and get a service person over to check it out from your house. They have a laptop like device that can dial and test the isdn line and switch.
Also, compare your config to the dozens of configs listed on this forum. Just do a little searching to make sure you are set up right.
Faststep is easy to use. If it seems hard, then you are probably doing something wrong.
Let us know how you make out.
--
CellAntenna CAY1912 Panel antenna, Cyfre CA-819 amp, Linksys WRT54G3G-ST router, Pantech PX-500 data card. |
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asterisk20xx
join:2008-04-22
Marshall, TX
| I've looked at a ton of different configs and I'm still not sure what on earth the problem is. FastStep was easy to use, but it would never dial out when I used that. While using the Cisco Config Maker I could at least get it to attempt to dial out on channel 1 (but never 2 or both) . During the testing part it said failed contacting the ISP. If I hook up a phone cord from either of the 804's phone jacks I can dial into my ISP like that. But that's just plain 56k over 1 line.
AT&T did a test on the line when they installed it (twice actually) and the voice quality on ISDN is great compared to my POTS landline. I did call them and they did a remote test and said everything was working correctly. So the problem shouldn't be the line and it makes me wonder if there's a problem with the 804 itself.
As best as I can tell the 804 is not dialing out at all and it makes me wonder if it's dead or dying. My ISP does have a cisco certified engineer and they're checking the 804 and the config out to see if they can get it working for free. I should know by tonight whether they can get it to work or not.
If it works I'll let you guys know and post my config for others to use and to try to figure out what was wrong with mine. If it doesn't work the cisco guy at my isp says he has a few modem only TAs that he knows work and he'll sell me one of those. |
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asterisk20xx
join:2008-04-22
Marshall, TX
| reply to asterisk20xx
The Cisco guy was able to get it to work great! It seems my problem was trying to connect over the Dialer interface instead of the BRI0 interface. Here's my config:
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mark42
join:2006-02-07
USA | Congrats! You now have a solid connection. Best of luck. |
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