CyTA has recently (October 2006) began distributing a new modem/router device, the Alcatel Thompson SpeedTouch 585, that succeeds the older and never supported ECI B-FOCuS Wireless 352+ device. After the unsuccessful era of the Israeli devices, CyTA finally returns to the older and more trustworthy brand, Alcatel. Fortunately Alcatel is a well known brand with at least better support for its products compared to ECI, given that firmware updates float all over the web, and that counts for something.

It seems that CyTA is actively trying to subcontract the most-difficult-to-configure devices and does not even give the chance or technical knowledge to customers to configure the device for their own needs. It comes preconfigured to your residence or office and I am still wondering if CyTA technicians are capable or have the technical knowhow of configuring the device, or any other device of such matter. In any case this time CyTA actually bothered to setup passwords for accessing the router configuration interface to ensure that customers cannot mess with it (this pisses me so much), but I guess it is for the best for the not-so-technologically-literate-users-who-like-to-mess-up-every-device-that-floats-around.

But the struggle goes on…

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I recently got a hold on of a B-FOCuS MultiPort 342+ router and later exchanged it with a new B-FOCuS Wireless 352+ router, as an upgrade from my ISP. Unfortunately no configuration manual was supplied by the ISP in either case, so the NET was the only source of enlightment on how to configure the router to my needs.

To my total disappointment I was unable to find anything for a long time. Imagine my frustration when some links found in various forums and blogs were dead, unsupported or even in foreign languages I couldn’t read or translate. Fortunately enough using the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine I was able to get a hold on to the configuration manual of a similar ECI product B-FOCuS 270/285/400PR in hope the firmware was similar enough to help me configure my router. Once again my efforts were in vein. The firmware of the two products was different in all aspects.

Later on I found the confiuration manual of the actual product but in hebrew transaltion. The illustrations provided though served as a good guidance in obtaining the required knowledge as the firmware was practically the same.

After all this ordeal I decided to write a small router configuration manual explaining how I configured the individual device to serve as a router, wireless access point, UPnP devce, etc…

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