AliceBox
In Berlin I am online with Alice. Well, I can’t say I am too impressed about the Alice customer care. (May I say I hate these hotlines where you just cannot reach anyone but a computer?) But they got the connection arranged within about 2 weeks. Not top notch – but OK. What I found most compelling is that you can cancel within 4 weeks. A flatrate of 4-16 Mbit/s for 25 EUR a month is quite cool. And you don’t even need the usual Telekom phone line. Nice. What I really don’t get though is why they provide “crippled” routers.
The so called “AliceBox” is a Siemens C20-010-I router. When I tried to get online I was utterly confused as the router wasn’t giving out any IPs via DHCP. Took me quite a bit to realize that you have to connect via PPPoE. Which essentially declassifies it as a simple DSL modem. Well, as I wanted to use my Airport Express anyway it doesn’t really matter too much for me. Unfortunately for me the password didn’t work, but as this guy shows you can actually get the AliceBox to behave as a proper router.