Connection problems with the Alice Gate 2+ ADSL modem

Alice is a brand owned by Telecom Italia, one of the largest fixed phone operator in Italy. Alice is dedicated to offering ADSL Internet, also servicing Germany, France, San Marino and the Netherlands (http://en.wikipedia.org/…lecom_Italia).

The Alice Gate 2+ is the default ADSL modem you receive after installing an ADSL line for the Internet in Italy. One model has a Wi-Fi antenna and some ports you can use to connect devices via cable. There is also a version featuring a VoIP service which you can use instead of the primary land-line phone, but forces you to change your phone number.

After the physical installation of the modem, there are a few problems you could possibly run into. Depending on the operating system used, you can have no Internet connectivity at all or you can have problems with file uploads and downloads.

Fortunately, they're quite easy to solve. The way to go is to edit your operating system tcp settings.

Ubuntu, Linux, Mac OS X

Symptom: after a few sent/received bytes, the network traffic stops. To fix this, open /etc/sysctl.conf as root (create it if it doesn't exist). Make sure it contains the following values:

net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling = 0
net.ipv4.tcp_ecn= 0

Windows Vista

In Windows Vista, it's impossible to upload files and sometimes downloads stop after the first few kilobytes. If this is what's happening to you, open a new Command Prompt as Administrator and see the current tcp configuration:

netsh interface tcp show global

Then disable the autotuninglevel and ecncapability:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global ecncapability=disabled

This will probably help you fix the problem with this modem, but you can find more about it at the source I used for this article: http://www.lemiefrequenze.org/…archives/162

POST#0055 2009-JAN-11

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Commentary (2):

COMM#12492 2009-APR-23

Beavis wrote:

On Mac OS X Leopard you just need this:

net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=0

COMM#13546 2010-MAR-4

Alessandro wrote:

THANK YOU!

I have an ALICE GATE 2 Plus WiFi and this stupid modem was driving me crazy.

Now my Ubuntu Kermic works perfectly :-)