After seven or eight years or however long I've had it, the storm that came through last Thursday fried my Speedstream 5260 DSL modem on my ATT DSL line.

They also fried my DSL splitter, my wireless router, and the garage door opener in what the neighbors describe as a giant white flash followed by a house shaking boom and then a giant red flash.

Of course it could have been much worse, I'll settle for a few replaceable electronics over a tree through the house or fire trucks out front.

In any case, once I get a new POTS splitter and all that in place it's gonna be time to replace the DSL modem. I've paid no attention at all to them over the years, whenever I've moved or upgraded my service they have always said my antique speedstream was still fine, and I know that technology has most certainly changed since then.

They offer a few choices from 2-Wire, Motorola, and Westell, both with and without the wireless built in, but as I said, I know nothing about them other than what I've read online, and to be honest there are just as many people loving each of them as there are hating them.

Anybody have any experience with AT&T's latest DSL equipment offerings? It would be a good time to go Uverse, but it's not offered in my area, so that's out, and I really do have a good deal on the DSL and phone service.

Same thing happened to me a few years ago. Especially if you only pay for a lower speed of service, a newer modem won't make much of a difference. I replaced my DSL modem with the wifi one only because that was the only one Best Buy had in stock at the time. I disabled wifi and the routing capabilities of the modem and still used my router with the new one.

I think they're pretty much commodity products. Just buy the cheapest one.

I've seen too many failures of 2-Wire and Motorola DSL modems.

Yet my Speedstream still works OK....

Yeah, I'm pretty much thinking most of what's out there now is disposable stuff and I won't have a chance of seeing the nine or ten years or more I've gotten off the speedstream.

After a bit of researching online and reading a ton of reviews, I think I'm going with the Actiontec wireless modem router. It's got great reviews, and as luck would have it, B&H has it for $20 less than the standard AT&T modems people are replacing with this one.

I'll let everybody know how it goes once the new splitter gets here.

The new splitter and modem/router came in and I installed them tonight.

The splitter was pretty easy, six wires and two screws.

The modem was also really easy (once I realized the ethernet port on the attached PC was also fried in the storm).

Plug in a computer go to the router configuration page, select you have AT&t and it pretty much does the rest for you.

AT&T's setup is a pain in the butt, you have to sign in and get your username and password for the network (even if you already know it) and enter that into the modem.

In the end, it was fairly easy, just time consuming to go through all the AT&T pages to set it up.

Wireless setup was a few clicks and the only real typing was the password, username and password for the network, and the network name, the rest was just clicking continue as it did all the work.

It's also faster than the speedstream was, but that could be just because it's a fast traffic night (my traffic numbers are all over the place, but considerably higher than I'm paying for so I don't care)