At home we use the BSNL dataone connection. For the past few weeks we have been having a lot of trouble in getting connected to the network. After a making a couple of complaints BSNL had sent someone to check the lines. However, since he was not able to find anything wrong he asked us to make sure that the settings in our computer were right and went back. There was nothing much I could do about the settings so we called them again. This time two people came over and one of them Mr. Sridharan started looking at what exactly the problem was. Apart from being extremely well versed about networks and routers to my surprise he was very comfortable with my Linux desktop. He was able to find exactly the problem was and fix it within a few minutes 
. Now the network connectivity is wonderful and the speed also seems to have increased.
For those of you wondering what exactly the problem was … Apparently there are many modes under which the ADSL modem operates. In order to obtain the ‘link’ fast we will have to make sure that it is set to operate in multimode. Another information I did not know about was that we could configure the bsnl authentication ( for which I used to set up pppoe using pppoeconf) can be done on the modem itself. Once this is set up we can have the computer configured to use a static IP in the range 192.168.1.x where x can take the values between 3 and 255.
