Enabling ADSL in China

Well, this is something that took some trial and error to discover, so I hope that this article can save some pain for others, but my google searches that helped me to an answer also seemed to indicate that the settings can vary.

So, it looks like the China broadband (Beijing Telecom?) people give you an ADSL modem (China Unicom GWH-11 ZXV10 H108B in my case). However, this doesn't do the PPPoE that you need and so they tried to set this up on my computer, but were bamboozled by the exotic choice of Ubuntu or Windows Vista. It's XP or nothing when it comes to support (and they mainly use IE6!)

So, eventually I worked out how to get it set up on Ubuntu, which wasn't too hard but I wanted to have a zero-config , especially if I was to use the wifi connection for other devices such as ipod touch and my T-Mobile Pulse which probably wouldnt allow pppoe to be set up without some serious hacking.

So it turns out the keys are that is PPPoE and not PPPoA as it would be in the UK, and the VCI/VPI settings, so here's the magic from my saved off config of my Belkin router:

vpi="0" vci="35" tdId="1" aalType="AAL5" adminStatus="up" encap="llc" qos="disable"

Router model is F5D7633-4.