None of the other threads in the immediately recent past are really good fits for this, but the TL;DR of this is that I tried a C1000a for troubleshooting and was quite disappointed.
I mention it a lot, but just for the background, I'm on a 1.5 megabit plain ADSL line, my distance is probably 2000-3000 feet from the DSLAM, and my normal device is an ActionTec Q1000, which I bought outright from CL when I first started with them at my previous house. I like the Q1000 because it has 802.11N wireless networking and four gigabit ethernet switches. I only have like three or four wired computers running most of the time, so it meets my needs efficiently and in a single device.
While troubleshooting some line issues last year, CL sent me a PK5001z, which proved useful for its logging functionality, and "officially supported on your type of circuit" status. (Odd, but whatever.) I put it back away as soon as the line issues were straightened out.
Between then and now, I also picked up a C1000a and configured it with my credentials and port forwards just to have on hand. I figured it had to have picked up some new firmware functionality and that it was probably otherwise about the same as my Q1000.
Under good line conditions, I actually suspect that it would be fine, but I'm both trying to monitor my stats (works fine), and log device retrains, at which the C1000a-D I have on hand is completely useless.
For starters, the log never realized it was any time other than 1970. It logs wireless and ethernet connections, but not DSL retrains, and in fact, even the stats page never acknowledges a retrain, even though the device experienced several. (My actual issue is that my upstream SNR is sitting at 6.0DB, so I'm trained at 1536/700 and I'm experiencing frequent retrains. Just shy of 20/day -- which makes an already painful connection that much worse.)
Anyway, that was painful. I'm also trying to track my usage. I typically don't bother, but I figured, if I need to troubleshoot some other things, why not track usage too. The C1000a shows values for incoming and outgoing traffic, but it turns out rather than actual "usage" meters that count how many megabytes you have transferred, they are speedometers, that show that because of the nature of some number of customers sharing the throughput of a T1, it's literally impossible for me to transfer above one megabit per second from the greater Internet. (Accounting rather generously for ATM overhead.)
To add to all of that, the C1000a was even less stable on the line than the PK5001z and Q1000a were.
The PK5001z is great because as long as it has power, it will retain the log, and you can even tell it to keep the log through reboots of the device, and although I'm losing out on my gigabit Ethernet switch ports, I could get those back by using a consumer router as a WAP, buying a regular range extender like my favorite mention the Netgear EX6200 or by adding a gigabit switch.
I did not run it long enough to come up against any errors with the wireless (or even long enough to join any clients to wireless) or heat (even after about two days with it on) but wow, is it terrible for troubleshooting, and even worse for low SNR margin situations. I don't have any other ADSL devices on hand at the moment, but while I wait to hear back from CL about my line, I'm just pleased at the logs this thing produces.
Here's a quick example:
"modem log"05/23/2014 01:34:46 AM NTP Time initialized by NTP server05/23/2014 02:43:40 AM DSL WAN Physical Link Down05/23/2014 02:45:12 AM DSL WAN Physical Link Up. Upstream 704 kbps Downstream 1536 kbps, DSL Type is ADSL_G.dmt
It doesn't say why the link failed, but I really like that it shows the speeds and exactly when it happened. The only thing I think could improve the logs is a measurement of the DSL Power stats right when it trained up.
The C1000a wouldn't have bothered me nearly as much as it did if the functionality to measure this stuff simply wasn't present in the interface, but I can now see what in particular makes the C1000a so much maligned among the most technical users.
If they were possible to find, I would be pretty interested in trying out the C2000a, C2000t (I wish I'd picked up the one that uid://1880923 did when I saw it on eBay) and PK5001A to see what the other devices (both liked and maligned) are like on this front.
One more feature request, in case uid://1627664 looks at this, would be for the system logs on these devices to record total and daily usage at 23:59:59, and ideally per-session usage each time the link drops. It the device ever gained the ability to e-mail the contents of yesterday's logs at 00:00:01, I would be absolutely over the moon, but as long as the log gets saved, I can go in every few days and pull out the data I need or want. Even though my Q1000 works perfectly well, if I were told that there were a new modem that had this functionality and it all worked properly, I would go buy it.
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