For those curious, this strange situation is due to the fact that Efficient has been selling some 5660 routers as 5260 Ethernet bridges. All they do is cripple the firmware to disable the router mode and send them on their way. The hardware is completely identical. Now why Efficient would do something like this is a complete mystery, but the fact of the matter is that they are doing it. My personal guess is that the 5660's are as cheap to produce as the 5260's so making lots of 5660's is simpler due to economies of scale.
I recently received a message from an unnamed Efficient insider who told me that until the rollout of Pac Bell's DSL in particular, the demand for ADSL bridges was low enough that Efficient found it more, well, efficient to simply remark its routers as bridges and send them to customers. Of course, in this day and age practically all DSL "modems" are actually bridges, and the user has to connect using the PPPoE protocol. Anyone remember when everyone who got DSL was given a Static IP? I do...ah, the good old days of 1998.... ;)
Both the 5260 and 5660 models are now discontinued.
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by MrCornell 
last modified: 2002-09-20 22:02:56 |
