D-Link dsl modem on AT&T dsl

Last year I was working on getting my Cousine Carolyn Sue's home network up. AT&T dsl. There were phone line quality issues; I strung some new wire, the company put in a new box on the side of the house. We got reliable service with the Motorola Netopia 2210 modem.

Hooking up the Tivo to the network required stringing ethernet cable and taping it to the floor. This is not an optimal solution but we settled for it.

Wi-fi with DSL: I had installed a wi-fi access point in my house to work with a Netopia modem but for some reason we chose to get a D-Link dsl modem with router and wi-fi built in. The model we bought in 2009 was the 2640B. Attaching it to the phone line resulted in a web browser returning a strange detour page from ATT.net requiring downloading of software to reset the password. This looks a lot like a hijacking attempt but it is the way they do it.

Couldn't get it to work and I didn't want to spend the time on the phone with AT&T tech support. That D-Link sat on the floor for more than a year.

Last week Cousine Sue got an iPad and needed a home wi-fi signal. I resolved to return to the problem of getting the D-Link 2640b to link up with the AT&T signal. It is difficult and little help is available.

I went thru the same procedure as last year, disconnecting the Netopia and hooking up the D-link and getting a redirect page from the AT&T network. This time I invested the time in calling tech support.

I actually got a helpful tech support guy. He spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with me; he was knowledgeable about the different models of Netopia modems (the newest ones are crippled to make NAT and routing very difficult).

The problems with getting the D-Link to sync were thus: the wizard scans and searches for usable signals but reports that all of them are busy. Skipping the wizard reveals multiple VPI and VCI assignments available but in use.

(I think those were the names of the ports, I am writing this at home and do not have perfect recollection; I'd never worked inside a DSL modem before. The D-Link allows access to vastly more settings than the Motorola Netopia.)

Searching help forums didn't give a lot of information. D-Link knowledge base had nothing helpful. I finally found one post (somewhere) that referred to leaving the old modem turned off for a day before hooking up the new modem. Hmm. From this hint I started to glean that the busy ports were still thinking that they had to talk to the netopia.

SOLUTION:
I synced up the Netopia then held down the reset button on the back of the unit. Just as it began to wake up I disconnected it and hooked up the D-LInk. Booted it up, logged into the D-link and set the ports to 8 and 35. Save and reset. After booting up the D-Link it came up with the I light on!

Perhaps someone else will find this useful.