AT&T High Speed Internet setup and Linux

I recently switched from Comcast Cable Internet to AT&T DSL Internet, after my promotion from Comcast ran out and the price went up from $30 to $65 a month. The AT&T offer is $19.95 for 6 Mbps/768 Kbps DSL with a one year contract ($150 early termination fee) without phone service.

The quality and speed of a DSL line depends on the distance between the modem and the CO (Central Office, where all the phone lines from the neighborhood come together and are connected to a bigger cable). I found out that my CO is only 1800 feet away from where I live, so I expected good internet speed.

I bought an Actiontec GT701D DSL modem, which is better than the modem that you can buy from AT&T, and it costs only about half. The modem configured itself. After the modem was done with configuring itself, I already had an external IP address, domain names resolved, and I could ping other www.google.com, but access to the web was blocked.

As a new DSL customer you need to register to get a DSL password. The user id and DSL password must be entered into the modem to get internet access. The first time, you use a default user id and password which can be found in the modem handbook. When you try to access any website, you are redirected to the AT&T registration website.

This turned out to be tricky. The registration process is 6 steps. On the first page you are asked to accept a software license agreement (for what software?), then press the Continue button. On the next page (System Check) I was told that I have an Unsupported Computer Configuration (I'm using Linux and Google Chrome). AT&T supports only Windows operating systems, and supported browsers are Internet Explorer and Apple Safari. No way to proceed any further.

I don't give up that easy. The next day (using another internet connection) I installed User-Agent switcher extensions for Chrome and Firefox. The Chrome extension spoofs the Javascript navigator.userAgent and navigator.vendor properties but does not change the HTTP User-Agent header. This did not solve the problem. The Firefox extension changes the HTTP User-Agent header, and setting it Internet Explorer 7 helped, I could proceed to step 3, the registration page.

Another option I tried was using a real Internet Explorer on Wine, but this didn't work because IE7 could not display any HTTPS webpages; IE6 could, but it kept displaying warnings that Active-X was disabled and I could not find a setting to turn it on (maybe some entries in the registry were missing). When I opened the registration page in Internet Explorer on a real Windows system (from an alternative internet connection), it prompted me to download the AT&T setup program. This program, I guess, tries to configure the modem, but as I said earlier, my modem didn't need this. For some reason, when I used Firefox with the User-Agent set to Internet Explorer 7, it didn't ask me to download software.

On the registration confirmation page, a DSL (network) password is generated and shown. Print this page! The new user id and DSL password must be entered into the modem to get access to the internet. It may be necessary to disconnect and reconnect the modem or even reboot the modem after changing the password.

Step 5 collects information about your system. This step is browser dependent: for Internet Explorer, it uses Active-X controls, while for Safari it tries to access Javascript properties that exist in Safari but not in Firefox. Check the error console in Firefox. With the default User-Agent in Firefox, the page was completely empty. There was no way to continue, but step 5 and 6 can be skipped because at this point the internet access should already work. However, I recommend to log in to the new att.net account and verify that all the information is correct. In particular, adjust the marketing options.

I ran a speed test and found that I had slightly more than 5 Mbps downstream and 0.65 Mbps upstream, almost the maximum speed I could expect.