Westell 327w vs Westell 7500 Transreciever stats

[Chrimos]

This post I will compare the transreciever stats off of a Westell 327W vs Westell 7500.

Before I start displaying stats, let me say that I recieved the 7500 on Wednesday, I contacted Verizon support chat on Monday of replacing my good old reliable Westell 327W that was dying a slow death, which right now still sort of works if you need to use a backup temporarly(and wireless only since the ethernet ports all 4 stop working properly). they told me 4 to 10 buisness days, but I recieved it on the 2nd day and the box says next day dilvery? I don't know if I wil be billed for this router/modem ... I needed something that works and this replacement does everything I need and it has been reliable so far (only had it for 2 days). Westell 327W has been retired inside its orginal verizon box when I first recieved DSL service early 2005.

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*if you are curious on what was wrong with the Westell 327W, here is the brief story. October started to drop connection alot went to do a power cycle and found out it was overheating/running dangerously hot. Compress air and firmware upgrade did not fix it and had to resort to use a very old Celeron CPU fan to blow air inside constantly. Which fixed it. 1 week later, the ethernet ports were giving out. You keep seeing network cable unplug and local area connected constantly flashing on the task bar. (internet pages and videos would stop loading and you always had to refresh the page)Went to buy new cables (cat 6) and the router completley freaked out. I found that the ethernet port worked if you only had 1 connected to it. cat5 or cat5e. Will refuse cat6 for some odd reason. more then 1 it wont work. so I daisy chain the computers together and had only one hooked to the ethernet. Which finally the problem occured the next week. The only thing reliable and working at this time was wireless. November came and I found out if multiple devices started using the wireless the signal(connection to the DSL server) would drop sometimes.It would only drop for 1 sec because everytime I went to check the modem page, it would say connected however I would see that I got a new IP address. December came and the conection drop was worst and the router seemed to have trouble sending packets to the right computer. As more devices come online everything just was slow, even visiting websites was slow and connection kept dropping.

Oddly enough the date of manufacture is 10/12/2004 and it started to give me trouble at 10/1/2011. So exactly 7 years it decided it wanted to die....

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Here are the stats.

Anyways I will just post the transreciever status for each modem. I will include any numbers that I think are important Rev # year manufactured.

Transreciever Status:

Westell 327W

Model:A90-327W15-06

Rev. E

Made in China 10122004

Revision 7.2.3.0

Line Mode: ADSL_G.dmt

Datapath: Interleved

Transreciever:                  Downstream Path             Upstream Path

DSL speed                                 2112kbps                            832 kbps

Margin(dB)                                           21.0                                   10.0

Line Attenuation (dB)                       51.5                                     31.5

Transmit Power (dBm)                     17.1                                   11.9

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Transreciever Status:

Westell 7500

Model:A90-750015-07

Rev. Z

Made in China 07/2011

Revision: A2pB020b3.d20h

Line mode: ADSL_G.dmt

Datapath: Interleved

Transreciever:                  Downstream Path             Upstream Path

DSL speed                                 2112kbps                            768 kbps

Margin(dB)                                           19.7                                  10.0

Line Attenuation (dB)                       54.0                                     31.5

Transmit Power (dBm)                     18.3                                   11.9

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As you can see with the new DSL router, the upload speed has dropped by 64Kbps, the margin dB has also decreased by 1-2dB and line attenuation has gone up by 2-3 dB. Transmit power did go up by 1.2dBm though I don't know if that is a good or bad thing, that it needs more power to keep the downstream path up. No one in the house is real heavy internet user. We all watch youtube, hulu, crackle and some of us play MMORPG online with others and we have not notice that much difference in performance.

I post these stats because when the Westell 327W kept giving out. I was curious and thought I try to look and understand the numbers, I also post it here if anyone is curious also and want to know if there is really a difference in terms of connection performance from a Westell 327W to a Westell 7500.

I would also like to add that with the westell 7500 the stats you see are constiant compared to the westell 327W, with the Westell 327W the upstream changes from 768Kbps (uncommon) to 800Kbps(sometimes) to 832Kbps (normal), when the router kept dropping and giving me a new IP every 1 sec.  The westell 327W gave me a margin(dB) of 20.1-23.0 compared to the westell 7500 which gave me 18.5-22.0. The westell 7500 has also increased the line Attenuation to 54.0 while westell 32W  was 52.0 and the transmit power has gone up from 17.1-17.2 to 18.3.

What I am curious about is people who live on the border or just right outside might have problems with the westell 7500 compared to the Westell 327W? Also I wonder what would happen if people are calling and the phone rings and talking, if it will affect the DSL line/service.

With the westell 7500 I don't think it is possible to reach the 3Mbps plan, The westell 327 might have, if it decided not to die on me. Also interestingly enough When you google Westell 327w it seems like many of the Westell 327w are starting to break down in late 2010 to 2011?

The westell 7500 looks like it has more options and features, it can do VPN and has a better firewall. The only thing that the Westell 7500 annoyed me with the most is the configuation of WPA, first it did not like " quotes as a character compared to the Westell 327W but if you hit the wrong button or setting it will show you wireless is off and some options become unchangable even if you hit turn on. The only way to fix it is to power down and turn it back on...

[smith6612]

Sounds like you're just bumping heads with some firmware differences between the two modems. The 7500 has a few bugs that I believe Westell may have ironed out, but Verizon hasn't built into their version of the firmware yet. As far as the difference in stats between the two modems, it's basically a difference in chipsets and how they react to different line conditions. Around here, the 7500s seem to do a pretty good job in maintaining connections even on longer lines, though there are times where a 327w will downright beat them and vice versa.