In our household, two people each use their own laptop for work and play. The problem was that only mine had access to ADSL, the other was stuck with dial-up. As time went on, this became an ever more niggling issue, so I was delighted when the Alcatel ST570 came on the scene.

It is a slim box not much larger than a videocassette and combines ADSL modem, firewall, LAN router, and wireless interface. Ours sits on a shelf plugged into the ADSL line and the mains adaptor, and links by radio to two Toshiba laptops fitted with Orinoco ‘Silver’ PC Cards and running Windows 2000 (W2k).

I bought the 570 and the wireless cards from DSLSource, the day after I came across the review at ADSLGuide. I also found useful information at Alcatel and at Orinoco. The Orinoco cards are reviewed at Practically Networked.

Being new to LANs, routers and firewalls, I nearly panicked when I saw the bulky 300-page manual that came with the 570. Later I realised that this is a useful book in its own right. It is thorough and does a good job at making sense of a complex and jargon-ridden subject.

My first task was to install a wireless card in one of the laptops so that it could talk to the 570. I then set up the 570 so that it could access BT Openworld. Once that was working I installed the second wireless card and that was it. Everything was easier than I had expected. The 570 needed very little setting up to work with BT Openworld, the firewall needed no setting up at all, and the two computers conversed as soon as I had installed the two wireless cards.

The Orinoco cards come with a separate instruction sheet for W2k installation. It warns you to use the drivers on the CD instead of the ones built into W2k. The procedure went as follows.

1. I logged into W2k as Administrator, and inserted the setting up CD. This produced the Main Menu screen for Orinoco Wireless Networking, dated Spring 2001 - even though the manual was labelled ‘Winter 2001’.
2. I clicked the ‘Install Software’ button and then ‘Client Manager’. This offered to install ‘Variant 01, version 01.76’ and I accepted the default location, C:\filesmanager. It took about one second to load. I clicked ‘Finish’, and a Readme.txt file was displayed. I printed this out for reference and then closed the file. This produced the message: ‘Information: The driver for the card has not been installed. To start it insert the card.’
3. As per the W2k instruction sheet, I ignored this and clicked OK which restored the install menu. Next I clicked on ‘Windows 2000 Driver’. I accepted installation of the driver ‘WLLUC48’ in the default folder and it was installed immediately. I then clicked ‘main menu’, then ‘exit’, and removed the CD.
4. I then inserted the card - in the upper slot so the antenna bulge won’t impede insertion of a possible second card. The ‘Found New Hardware Wizard’ appeared. I clicked ‘Next’ and accepted ‘Search for a suitable driver for my device (recommended)’. On the next screen I ticked ‘Specify a location’ and navigated to C:\files.inf.
5. A click on ‘Next’ installed the driver and brought up the ‘Add/Edit Configuration Profile’ screen. The ‘Default Profile’ was of type ‘Access Point’ - as appropriate for linking to the 570. For ‘Network Name’ I entered the ‘Service Set ID’, which is printed on the label underneath the 570. Everything else I left as default.
6. The final OK produced a message ‘The control panel applet does not function correctly or an old version is used - OK’. Clicking OK on this finished the installation and a grey icon for ‘Client Manager’ appeared in the bottom right-hand toolbar.

Despite the warning, the card worked well enough to set up the 570, but later I encountered some inconsistent behaviour which ceased when I downloaded a more recent version of the software and driver from the Orinoco website (see later).

Following the instruction manual I proceeded as follows.

1. With the 570 switched off, I connected the ADSL port and the power unit. I then turned on the power using the switch on the 570. The power lamp flashed red a few times and then steadied at green. Then the ‘line sync’ lamp flashed green for a while and then remained on, signifying that the ADSL modem is synchronised with the exchange. The LAN lamp and the Line TX lamp kept flashing green every second or two as the 570 checked for LAN terminals.

2. A message above the Client Manager icon showed: ‘searching for Alcatel01D9D5 on Channel 11’. This is the default channel for the 570. I then pressed the ‘Association’ button on the back of the 570 to make it recognise and register the wireless card. After a few seconds the icon went all green indicating that a strong radio connection had been established.

3. I then started Internet Explorer and in /tools/options cleared the box ‘always dial a connection’. I entered 10.0.0.138 in the address line and clicked ‘go’. A warning message said ‘not available off-line’ so I clicked Connect. After about five seconds, the page ‘Welcome to World of ADSL’ appeared from the 570 and gave access to the various setting-up screens.

At first, setting up the 570 looks scary because all the set-up pages are pre-loaded with a large numbers of settings. However these are merely examples of the many ways in which it can be used so it’s all much easier than it seems. With hindsight, I could probably have just edited the appropriate existing entry. However, I followed the supplier’s recommendation and deleted the entries from pages RRP, CIP Interfaces, CIP Connections, and Phonebook, and then clicked on ‘Save All’ to get the message ‘complete configuration saved’.

Basically all you need to tell the 570 before it can connect to Openworld using ‘Routed PPPoA’ is:

· The VPI/VCI value of the virtual channel used on the DSL line [0/38]

· The encapsulation method [VC-MUX].

· The Openworld user name, e.g., name@hg15.btinternet.com and password.

This is spelt out in section 11.1 of the manual, ‘Configuration and Use - Routed PPPoA’. I got the bits in square brackets from DSLSource Quickstep Guide  and Setup, but it was more confusing than it should have been, because these pages describe a different Alcatel product. I then dealt with the various screens as follows.

No changes - I left both IP Address and Subnet mask as ‘not specified’.

I left the Password blank until later.

I entered BT_USB_SWAP (for example) as the name for the connection, 0.38 as the address, and ‘any’ as the Type.

Here the entries were: Interface: ‘myppp’ (for example); Destination: ‘BT_USB_SWAP’; Encapsulation: ‘VCMUX’; Protocol: ‘PPPoA’, User: ‘name@hg15.btinternet.com’ (for example), Password: the normal Openworld account password.

In the section ‘Other’, for Mode I selected ‘dial-in’ (meaning I have to activate the connection by using buttons on the ‘Dial-In’ page). ‘LCP Echo’ remained ticked and PAP un-ticked. Local IP, Remote IP, Primary DNS and Secondary DNS all remained unspecified.

PPPoE is not relevant so this page needed no changes, and neither did ‘Routing’. I left it showing: Sharing by Everybody, All Networks, and with NAT-PAT ticked.

I then clicked on ‘Save All’ to store the data.

I clicked ‘Dial-In’ on the Dial-In page. After a few seconds the State window changed from ‘Down’ to ‘Up’ meaning that the connection was established. Opening Internet Explorer then immediately brought up the default Internet site and I could browse just as I did with the USB modem - except with no cable tying down the laptop!

Once everything was working I entered a password for the router using the ‘System Set-Up’ page. Although the 570 subsequently demands that you enter name and password when you try to access it, this is no hassle because you can tick a box to have IE store the details ready for use next time.

Before I could send email or read newsgroups, I had to tell Outlook and Outlook Express respectively to use the LAN rather than the normal dial-up connection. After this both email and newsgroups worked as normal.

To set Outlook I selected Outlook/Tools/Accounts and double clicked on each email account in turn. In each case I selected the Connection tab and ticked the box ‘Connect using my LAN’. Previously it was set to ‘Connect using my phone line’. I also ticked ‘Connect via modem if the LAN is not available’ and selected the dial-up connection for use if Openworld via the LAN is not available. To set Outlook Express I opened Tools/Accounts/News/Connection and ticked the box ‘Always connect to this account using:’ and selected LAN from the pull down list of accounts.

Our connection usually stays ‘Up’ for many days at a time, so it is quite convenient to control the state of the ADSL connection with the ‘Dial-In’ and ‘Hang-Up’ buttons on the ‘Dial-In’ page. A link to the 570 on the ‘Links’ bar of the browser (IE) makes this quick and easy. However for non-technical users, automatic recovery from any outage is better, so later on I changed the mode from ‘Dial-In’ to ‘Dial-on-Demand’ in case it happens when I’m away (see Appendix). 

This works fine by default. DSL Cable recommends various links to security checking sites. I tried most of the ones listed and the system passed all of them with flying colours.

Radio range turned out to be adequate but less than I’d expected (based on using DECT phones). I had to put the router in the centre of the house instead of near the ADSL entry point and this meant I had to run an extension cable from the ADSL entry point to a central position on an upstairs landing. This was a nuisance but I then got a decent signal everywhere inside and several metres into the garden.

The house is solidly built (1911 vintage) with brick interior walls. I tried the router everywhere from cellar to attic but the best position proved to be right in the middle - both vertically and horizontally. At a measured range of 10 metres through one brick wall and one floor the signal is comfortably usable, but it’s only marginal at 14 metres through three brick walls and a floor. Working at the limit is not so good because the signal strength fluctuates drastically if anything moves nearby.

Range is about the same ‘card to card’ as from ‘card to router’. A computer-to-computer link through the centrally placed router will work up to twice as far as a direct link because the router is then effectively a relay station.

When the signal is strong the LAN connection icon indicates a speed of ‘11.0 Mbps’ and as you’d expect the radio link is far too fast to affect the relatively slow ADSL. On the other hand normal file transfer rates from one computer to the other are much slower than this figure might suggest.

In peer-to-peer mode, I got about 3.8 Mbps, and only half this (about 1.9 Mbps) when the two computers talk to each other through the router. This makes sense because, in the latter case the radio transceiver can only spend half its time talking to each of the cards, so the data rate has to halve. I got these figures by dragging the icon for a 6.7 MB (megabyte) JPG file from one desktop to the other. In peer-to-peer this took 14 seconds to complete, so 6.7 x 8 / 14 gives 3.8 megabits per second.

Presumably, data through the single wired LAN socket on the 570 to a single wireless card will go at the higher speed (i.e., same as peer-to-peer) because the radio in the card then has the full attention of the radio in the router.

The software supplied with the wireless cards (on November 2001) did a few strange things and on two occasions W2k suffered a blue-screen crash, the first ever in ten months of using W2k. There were no more crashes after I downloaded and installed the latest drivers and software from Orinoco.

Even with the new software, Client Manager called up from the icon does not always properly indicate which Configuration Profile is actually in use. Luckily there is no confusion because with ‘access point’ the icon normally stays green or yellow (depending on signal strength), and with ‘peer-to-peer’ it remains grey.

The ST570 does exactly what we wanted. Now, both of our laptops wake up with immediate high-speed Internet and email access, anywhere in the house, even in part of the garden - and all without wires. The hardware firewall protects both machines from intrusion, and as a bonus each laptop can back-up files on the other at any time. Google via ADSL has become an instant household resource and has ousted reference books as primary source of information.

Thirty years ago when the household telephone lurked in a draughty hallway, a phone call was ‘special’. But once the phone arrived on every desk or armchair, not to mention pocket, it became a different animal. I think it’s the same with computers and the Internet. There’s all the difference in the world between (a) having a single household desktop computer tucked away in the spare room, tethered down by a modem cable, the mains cable, and gravity, and (b) each person having wireless ADSL on a personal laptop that can roam the house. Maybe you have to try it to realise it fully.

At present, the cost and the need for special technical knowledge are still big barriers to this happening widely. But good luck to Alcatel! Introducing the ST570 has at least removed one of the technical hurdles.

Appendix 1.  Activating Encryption

You can set the Alcatel 570 and the Orinoco Wireless cards to encrypt data sent over the radio link between them using WEP (Wireless Equivalent Privacy).  However the Orinoco cards don’t support encryption for peer-to-peer links. 

With the Wireless page displayed on the 8100, I ticked the WEP Encryption box, and used the Randomise button to generate a key.  This displayed a ten-digit (40-bit) hexadecimal number as in this example, d9:b:e8:1:a7, and with the leading zeros suppressed.  I chose to enter the code into the Wireless Card prior to clicking Apply on the 570 (because doing that hides the code number forever). 

I clicked on the Orinoco Client Manager icon, then on Actions/Add Edit Configuration Profile.  I selected the Access Point profile (still called ‘Default’ in my set-up), and then clicked Next until I reached the ‘Set Security’ page.  I ticked the ‘Enable Data Security’ and the ‘Use Hexadecimal’ boxes, and then typed in the number as d90be801a7.  (The different format means you can’t use cut and paste).  I then used Next to skip through the remaining pages and clicked the final OK.

At this stage the card was still not using encryption, because it remained in contact with the still-unencrypted 570.  When I clicked Apply on the 570 page, the LAN icon immediately indicated ‘Unplugged’.  Presumably at this point the 570 was using encryption but the card still wasn’t.  So I then clicked on the Orinoco Client Manager icon again, used Action/Select Configuration Profile to display the two profiles and clicked on the Default profile.  The connection then came back immediately and everything worked just as it did without encryption. 

A minor surprise was that the documentation for the 570 says that the ‘Key’ field on the 570’s Wireless page will show ‘a random amount of asterisks’ (sic) but mine was blank when I looked at the page later.

Appendix 2.  Using ‘Dial-in’ Instead of ‘Dial-On Demand’

Although the system works fine with Mode set to Dial-in, it’s better for non-technical users if there’s no need to go into the 570 set-up pages to restore the connection after an unplanned interruption.  Dial-on-Demand mode allows for this.  To change from Dial-In to Dial-on-Demand:

1. Drop the connection by clicking on Hang-Up on the Dial-In page.  (Changes won’t take effect if made while the connection is Up).
2. Navigate to the PPP page, click on the cone next to ‘myppp’, and then click on Other in the Detailed Configuration section. 
3. Use the drop-down to select Dial-on-Demand, and clear the Idle Time Limit box. 
4. Click on Dial-In.
5. Click on Apply, and then on Save All.  

Despite step 4, the connection will not be Up at this point, but it will become so the first time a computer on the LAN ‘demands’ it.  If the connection later drops out for any reason, the 570 will attempt to restore it on the next ‘demand’.  I confirmed this by pulling out the ADSL cable and again by interrupting the mains supply to the 570. 

Clicking the Hang-Up button terminates the connection and stops any ‘on demand’ connection until you click the Dial-In button.  Once you do this, the entry in the Link box changes from Idle to Trigger.  When Trigger is displayed it means that the 570 will make the connection on the next ‘demand’, at which point Trigger changes to Connected. 

I found that turning off the mains at the 570 while a Wireless link is established upsets communications when the 570 comes back on.  Re-selecting the correct radio profile at the Orinoco icon (even though the same profile is already selected) restores it, and so does restarting the computer.  

Appendix 3.  Problems With ‘Idle Time Limit’

Changing to Dial-on-Demand cost me far more time than all the rest put together.  I found the relevant documentation incomplete and things didn’t always work as they were supposed to.  For example, Step 4 in the procedure I describe in Appendix 2 is not mentioned, but without it the connection won’t restore if the power to the 570 is interrupted.  Also I could not get the Idle Time Limit option to work properly. 

I would like to set a value of about fifteen minutes.  With automatic email collection at two-minute intervals, the connection would then stay Up when the computers were in use but would go Down when both were turned off.  This way the connection address would change occasionally and enhance security.  However, no matter what I typed into the Idle Time Limit box (I assume the units are seconds but I could not find this defined anywhere), the connection never seemed to drop out.  I must be missing something…

© David Tong. Last updated 26/11/2003 06:42 .