ADSL on a Mac

Gordon:

As far as I'm aware Apple are (or will be) flogging their own USB modem for dial-up; however, failing that, the "filter" of which they speak is a small adaptor you stick on the phone line to stop the DSL interfering with the audio quality of your phone line. Literally two filters: low-pass for voice phone, and high-pass for data. They cost a couple of euro, which considering how little's in them is still a rip-off.

Any ethernet-equipped DSL modem will work just fine with your Mac; they use a web-based adminstration thingy, and are OS (and hardware) agnostic.

Hope this helps,
Gadget

[edit]Gah! Timing!!! [/edit]
[edit]Oh yeah. That dialup modem? http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/10/12/usbmodem/index.php [/edit]

Gordon,
Go to Asante (http://www.asante.com/products/index.asp) and look through their products. Then order by Fedex, which will make sure to deliver to you. I have been using them for years here in Tokyo and they are not expensive. They offer routers in all types of configurations. For example I use a friendlynet (can`t remember the number, maybee 5005) router which has a serial printer port, a cable modem port and a standard telephone port on it. Many router incorporate a standard telephone port for maintenance. This should do you nicely.

I just wanted to clarify stuff here.

From what I can find out, the Greek telephone system is analogue, operates on the same voltages etc., and (generally) uses RJ-11 connectors, which means that it's (as far as any sort of modem goes) identical to what's in Ireland, the US and a bunch of other countries. You don't need a digital line for broadband; 90%+ of the world (including the world's richest country, the US, and Ireland) gets by with dear old analogue, so that's not a point of worry.

As regards modems/routers, generally speaking (with a small number of exceptions - I believe Australia's Bigpond is one, though I think that's because they were early adopters before standards were properly set) there's nothing stopping you using any type-compatible modem/router you please (i.e. a DSL modem to connect to a DSL service, or a PSTN modem for dial-up internet access), to get your connection up and running; the only difference is that you probably won't be able to use the included instructions word-for-word. In practice, this means that if the ISP sends you a USB-only modem, you should be able to get them to replace it with an ethernet ready one (as you're probably not the only non-Windows DSL user in their region) or just go out and buy yourself one.

Quite often, there's very little difference between the price of a wireless router and a wired-only router (generally speaking there's no such thing as a wireless modem as it needs a computer connected to it to tell it to open a connection, whereas the router can do that without outside intervention (if properly configured, anyway))

This isn't something you should be worried about. You'll find a system that works for you, and it probably won't be as obscure or expensive as you might think based on what's been said earlier in this thread.

Gadget

Gordon:

There's no such thing as a telephone-to-ethernet adaptor - unless, perhaps, you consider something like an Airport Extreme (not Express!!! There's a big difference!!!) - this is a wireless base station that has a built-in modem and can also plug into an ethernet DSL modem down the line if you go that route. It also has a LAN port that you could plug into a small hub and plug your two Macs into, or simply connect your old Mac using wired ethernet and the new iMac using the (as far as I remember) built-in wireless.

http://www.apple.com/airportextreme/

I don't think it's terribly cheap (US price is 200 dollars) - and as such you may want to invest in surge protection for both the phone line and the power supply to this thing - but it could solve your problems at a stroke, and give you a logical route to DSL later (assuming that Wireless LAN standards haven't moved on again in the interim). It'll also allow you to share a USB printer if you want to, which might also be handy.

(Can't imagine why I didn't think of this sooner...)

Hope this helps...
Gadget

You may have misunderstood me (I think).

The Airport is a wireless router (as in it's intended to share a wired internet connection between one or more computers in a house/office/whatever location using your choice of wired or wireless ethernet connections), the difference between it and virtually every other wireless router out there is that it's got a modem built in. There used to be a fair few routers out there that had, but not these days - the Airport Extreme (the "Extreme" moniker is because it supports the faster 802.11g wireless standard, where the original Airport only supported 802.11b) is the only one I can think of with an ordinary dial-up modem built in as well (or the facility to be able to plug one in, even...) virtually all such devices assume you've got broadband (either cable or DSL) these days.

In case I misunderstood you, I'll try and be absolutely specific with what I mean here:

The Airport Extreme is not a device to allow you to connect to some wireless service provided by an ISP (such as Irish Broadband and their Ripwave stuff, which I'm sure you've seen mention of on boards). It is a box that contains the following things:
* A router (as in a box of tricks that includes a firewall, NAT, stuff like that - what you need to connect more than one computer to the thing and share internet access relatively safely).
* A WAN port - an ethernet port intended to be plugged into a DSL modem, a cable (as in "cable TV") modem, or other high-speed (relative to dialup) internet service. ("WAN" == "Wide Area Network" - basically, the ISP's network in this case)
* A LAN port - an ethernet port that you can plug your computer into. Some routers sport a built-in hub - essentially a multiple adaptor for ethernet - that allows you to plug more than one computer in - but the Airport doesn't. No big loss, as you can pick one up for half nothing and plug it into the Airport yourself.
* A Modem - yes, an old-fashioned dial-up modem.
* An 802.11b/g wireless access point (AP) - this is the lump of radio hardware and associated electronics that allows the Airport to connect to other computer(s) using radio/wireless technologies.

Now, in terms of how all this comes together, it's like this. The router sits in the middle. To one logical "side" is the Internet at large - the Airport can connect to this through either the WAN port (assuming there's some sort of suitable modem plugged into it), or through the phone line using the modem, or (if I remember correctly) can use the modem as a fallback if the other connection goes down. You can tell the Airport exactly how you want it to operate in this regard using the Airport software tools (which will work just fine on a Mac, unsurprisingly )

Traffic from whichever internet connection you use gets passed to the router, which acts like a traffic cop - it decides what traffic is meant to go from your local network to the internet, from the internet to your local network, and what should not pass (e.g. certain types of bad traffic from the internet will get blocked - this is what the firewall bit does - and traffic that's supposed to be going between computers on your network won't be let out on the the Internet at large if it's not meant to be there. It also does a bit of what's called Network Address Translation - this is where each computer inside your network gets a "local" address, and before data passes from any of these computers onto the Internet at large, the router pretends that it is sending the data by stating that it is the originator of the data, and when whatever response comes back to the original message, it figures out who should get the response, rewrites the destination address accordingly, and sends it on - the reason for this is that as far as the ISP is concerned, there's only a single computer connected to their system from your house/office whatever - and as far as they're concerned, the Airport is that computer.

Now, for you to connect your computer to the internet using such a device, you can either connect to the wireless hub using the Airport card in your iMac (I don't know if your other machine has a wireless card in it or not), or (alternatively) you can connect the computer's ethernet port to the LAN port on the Airport using a Cat5 ethernet cable. By buying/obtaining a cheap ethernet hub, you can attach more than one computer to the Airport - simply connect the hub the Airport, and connect the computers to the hub.

I hope there isn't too much detail there, or that the level of detail isn't too Fisher-Price, but hopefully it might help you get a handle on what you're trying to do here. With the exception of the references to the dialup modem, what I've said above applies equally to any other wireless/wired router on the market.

The only other things I'd add to this are:
* If you decide to use a router such as the Airport, you don't need to have any specific computer on to access the internet - the Airport/other router will take care of that for you. If you use one PC to share an Internet connection, the sharing computer will have to be running for as long as the other computer needs an internet connection.
* At least while you're using dialup, examine the settings that decide when the router dials up the internet carefully. As the router decides for itself when it'll dial out, you'd want to keep it on a tight leash in case it racks up a monster phone bill!!!

Gadget

Well, if you buy the Airport Extreme thingy, all you'd be missing when you'd decide to go with broadband is a DSL modem, which are a less complex (and therefore usually less expensive) beast than a router - though these are also now considered "commodity devices", if you know what I mean, in terms of being cheap and available. The advantage that comes with this is that your computers wouldn't require any reconfiguration or anything like that - just change a few settings on the Airport (to tell it to use a DSL modem on the WAN port instead of the 56k dialup modem) and you're away. I don't think that there's actually much of a difference in price between an external (i.e. Ethernet/USB) DSL modems and an external (serial/USB) 56k modem. Just did a quick check for a frame of reference here, and I've spotted a few different models available on-line in Ireland for about 40 euro inc. VAT.

I think it's a good way of getting a workable system (with wireless capabilities almost as an added bonus) that can be upgraded to DSL/whatever later relatively cheaply (I mean here that the upgrade is cheap) and with a minimum of fuss, and the whole thing is Apple-friendly by virtue of the simple fact that it's made by them - unfortunately, this is reflected in the price tag.

(Sorry about the slow reply - was "off the grid" for a few days)

Gadget

I don't speek or read Greek but "Crypto" - when googled - links back to mostly Greek sites.

Anyway I came accross this - LINK - also a Crypto product but with Ethernet which should work fine with the Mac and also be supported by your ISP or at the very least by someone here who can help you set it up. The "splitter" is just as Gadget explained above and can be bought from most telco shops for a couple of squids.

By the way broadband is dear in Greece - 79 yoyos for a 1Mb connection.

ZEN