Lucky me, I got my hands on a Telekom Speedport W701v, which has (apart from USB and draft-N) all features I could wish for in a router. WLAN, SIP telephony and … well that’s it actually, but it’s [...]]]> I wrecked my trusty Asus WL-500GP while experimenting with different WLAN
hardware and so it was time for a new router.

Lucky me, I got my hands on a Telekom Speedport W701v, which has (apart from
USB and draft-N) all features I could wish for in a router. WLAN, SIP telephony
and … well that’s it actually, but it’s all I really need every day anyway.

So I plug it in, fire the webinterface up and… IT CANNOT BE USED WITHOUT DSL.
At least I didn’t find a way to hook it up to my cable modem and let it use DHCP to
connect.

Well, I’ve got to admit that this doesn’t mean that I am *sure* that there is
no way to do it but the interface is _so bad_ that even if there was, I
couldn’t find it and I *do* usually get my gadgets to work, just ask anyone who
knows me. I mean c’mon!

Just another brick in the wall between me and the german Telekom. It’s a sturdy one
by now.

I knew I could put OpenWRT on there, but I really wanted to use the VoIP
capabilities and such began the googling which eventually lead here:

http://wiki.ip-phone-forum.de/skript:speedport2fritz.

The Speedport W701v is an AVM OEM product and very similar to the Fritzbox
7170. It’s actually similar enough that one can swap out the firmware, barring
some hardware drivers, and the crafty, layz people of the internet sat down and
wrote scripts to automate the procedure, complete with a menuconfig-style
curses gui for image configuration. Sometimes I just want to hug the internets.

The scripts are a convoluted maze of cross-calling cloc-monsters, so paranoid me
stuck them in a virtual machine and let them run wild.

I’m quite happy with the machine now.