Anybody in Canada have an Amiga connected to high-speed internet (DSL)?

[alenppc]

If I were you I would avoid choosing Sympatico. They are overpriced, they block ports and they force you to rent a modem for $10/month from them forever. Furthermore their customer service is made of brainless drones who "only support IE browsers" and have only been trained to give support to "senior" customers who are using their windows pc for the first time, but the agents are completely useless for anything technical. Rogers is no better. They cost even more and cap their service to something ridiculous like 60 gigs/month or whatever, and if you go over the limit they simply suspend the service as a "punishment" for a couple of weeks, but they still charge you.

What I would advise you is to take a look at http://canadianisp.com/ for a comparison of ISP's in your area.

A lot of people on can.internet.highspeed recommend teksavvy (check it out at http://www.teksavvy.com/ ), they serve Ontario and Quebec. As the name suggests, it is a cheap (but quite good) ISP oriented towards technically minded people. If it wasn't for the downtime hassles I would certainly switch to them. Currently I pay $29.95/month for unlimited bandwidth and I have bought my own ADSL modem/router. Compare that to what Bell is charging.

Regarding the use of a DSL modem on the Amiga, all of the DSL connections in Bell territory are set by default to pppoe, so that should be enough to get your Amiga compatible with just about all modems (correct me if I am wrong). On the other hand you could buy a router with a built-in adsl modem, that way you won't have any problems using it with the Amiga as long as you have an ethernet card. That's what I did.

[alenppc]

Hahaha!! As if to prove my point, Bell has just announced that starting on the 3rd of December 2006 they are going to introduce a 30 Gig cap for their new subscribers!! :lol:

I can't believe they are doing it again! I left them when they introduced a 5 Gig cap, which proved so unpopular they had to lift it after about 7-8 months when they lost hundreds of thousands of customers... and now they're at it again. You just can't believe how greedy that company is!

Anyhow, back to the topic, yes, a router with an integrated DSL modem will work on any computer with minimal maintenance. A simple DSL modem requires the PPPOE login handling by your TCP software, which is a bit more complicated to setup, but is supported by both Miami and Genesis.

Btw, my 68060 A4000 equipped with a mediator PCI is capable of a throughput of over 10 mbits/sec over ethernet when used with the crappy realtek 8139 card (I measured up to 1300 KB/sec).

[alenppc]

Tomas wrote:

Btw, my 68060 A4000 equipped with a mediator PCI is capable of a throughput of over 10 mbits/sec over ethernet when used with the crappy realtek 8139 card (I measured up to 1300 KB/sec).

That is better than my k6 450 debian box using a rtl 8029.

Yes, but that's because the 8029 is a 10 mbps only chip. The 8139 runs on 100 mbps. The reason why the 8139 is unlikely to go significantly faster lies in the horrible design of the chip.
Its DMA capabilities are useless, the CPU has to do all the work. CPU usage jumps to 100% as soon as you begin transmitting. While that might not be a problem on a 1+ Ghz cpu, 50Mhz are not enough...

[alenppc]

Piru wrote:

I don't know where you're getting that. RTL 8139 does better than that, easily.

Ever glanced at the comments of FreeBSD kernel sources?

 * The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is
 * probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible
 * exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master
 * DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance
 * gains that bus-master DMA usually offers.
 *
 * For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor
 * registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned
 * on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to
 * do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely
 * case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet
 * is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only
 * four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four
 * packets queued for transmission at any one time.
 *
 * Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large
 * buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received
 * frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets
 * will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer
 * area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol
 * levels.
 *
 * It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent
 * performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or
 * some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it.

While elbox's drivers have been optimized (when used on 060/50, the card in fact easily outperforms a Win98 P133 machine) this is still far from an ideal solution.