Alcatel SpeedTouch USB

Although a friend of mine has a Alcatel Speed Touch USB and it works fine for him, I've had nothing but trouble with it. I get the error where the SpeedTouch icon in the system tray goes yellow and says "Initializing ADSL Line", and it won't connect. BT's techsupport, as usual, has been unhelpful.

Sometimes, especially when I'm on a BitTorrent download or downloading from a great number of people at once, my Internet-using programs will stall, even so far as to become unresponsive to CTRL-ALT-DEL. Sometimes, I have to restart my computer to get it to working again, or else wait for around twenty full minutes.

I've had the unusual finding that switching off the other computer in my house - which isn't even connected to the network, and is fully three rooms away - temporarily rectifies the problem. Freaky or what?

In short, I advise against using BT Internet's broadband options if you have a choice - it's overpriced, it now caps your monthly bandwidth and their technical support is poor. However, if you do choose BT Internet, note that this modem (which they supply free) has a fair chance of malfunctioning for you as I described above, in which case you may find yourself shelling out around £35 for a proper ADSL modem.

The Alcatel Speed Touch USB modem came free with my ISP package, but is still reasonably cheap otherwise. An absolute breeze to install, and reliable with good support from the manufacturers.

However, on testing of various systems, this modem will cause regular freezing of many AMD processor systems if you are not using USB 2.0. So if you have an AMD system, with no USB 2.0 support, then either get a different modem or buy a USB 2.0 PCI card (not that expensive and useful anyway).

The Alcatel Speed Touch USB is a fantastic little modem. Extremely fast and very reliable when used with Windows XP.

There is a Driver update available for Windows 98/ME which definitely cures the problems.

It's maximum speed is supposed to be 576.0 Kbps but mine has achieved 615.0 Kbps on a good day but only around 70.0 Kbps when the network is very busy.

I have found it to be a very good and reliable product.

On windows xp it always goes offline automaticly, the icon in the corner is yellow and it says "intalizing adsl line". My ISP is BT, does anyone else have this problem?

Got from pipex March 2002. Came with 1.4 driver so no blue screen probs. Installed ok except didn't read pipex instructions properly and so installed as broadband connection instead of dun conection at first(alcatel connection worked straight away).Rarely disconnects-sometimes requires restart about once a month in order to connect. Used up to 8 hours daily without problems. See adslguide.org for useful tips/comments.

I got it when ordered my BT Openworld package and I paid ~£80 for it. I just realised this thing does not have an Ethernet interface, only USB, and I have to buy another modem when I setup my home network.

Well im glad i didnt have to pay for this , i just feel a little sad that my boss tried to do something nice and now i have to go and buy a real adsl modem/router, thats gonna make my boss feel like he wasted his time and money im sure :-(

I've had the phone company test and then retest my lines , ive had a replacement speedtouch modem , i've had alcatel support on the phone various times , had my ISP involved and guess what , yup it still disconnects randomly and leaving me with a "no dial tone error" and the adsl light flashing due to loss of sync.

Tried updating from the 1.4 driver to the 1.6 driver to the 2.0.1 driver and still does it , if this frog was was real frog and not a ugly looking modem i would of feed it to the french by now. buyers beware thats all i can say.

I joined BTopenworld broadband who supplied me with the Alcatel SpeedTouch USB Modem which i had to pay an extra £80 for.

I found that the modem was difficult to set up and unless you know really what you are doing it's easy to get confused and install it wrongly. So it's not very "user friendly" as such. It also looks like nothing i have seen before, i was a bit shocked when i opened the box, its looks nothing like a ADSL modem more like some alien creature.

Once set up it was not the end of my problems. Some of the time it would drop the connection. Yep braodband the "always on" connection kept dropping. Also sometimes the modem stops responding ! BTopenworld suggest simply restart your computer (this does work!) Yet who wants to have to do this every time it does it?!? It's a great pain and it just suggests that modems a bit cheap and prone to faults.

More serious, later after about having the modem for about 2 months started to get blue stop error screens. This was a serious problem as it halts windows, shuts it down and restarts you computer automatically, so if you were doing any work, it defiantly would not have been saved. I phoned the support line, which i have to say is not useful ! They did not mention up-dating the drivers at all, which was the "fix" to the problem ! They just put it down to hardware or my computer. But from reading many many reviews and comment from this site and others this is a common problem, caused by these modems and that a new up-date needs to be used to fix it.

Im still trying to find more good points about the modem .

Regards

Team434

Had a lot of trouble with this modem when I first got it. It used to disconnect and both lights would go off on the unit. Only solution was a reboot the machine. This was all due to the modem and my VIA chipset. I took a bit of time getting the right BIOS and USB upgrades before the modem was stable, but all the instability was caused by my machine and not the unit itself. I think the SpeedTouch USB unit gets a lot of bad press due to problems with the via chipset and their incomplete support for USB.

I was given the freeserve broadband boxed set as a christmas gift, along with this modem. I had a lot of trouble with the device and so decided to uninstall it. Using the uninstall wizard, it failed to remove any of the device's drivers or software, but instead took a handful of window's .sys files off my system leaving me scrambling about in DOS for three days. I could not restore my system properly and was forced to shell out for win xp and total reformat the hard drive. I cancelled my subscription and recieved a refund. Steer WELL clear.