Netopia's R-series was an interesting family of routers for various WAN connection types, including several flavors of SDSL. It also included one non-router product based on the same hardware platform.
Given that I have always had a philosophical objection to using any router not explicitly chosen by me on my own volition, even if it's fairly decent, I haven't given these Netopia routers much consideration for a long time. However, everything is relative. When I got fed up with the abominable (in)Efficient Networks 5851 on our Covad-provisioned SDSL line and tried Netopia R7200 instead, it felt like heaven.
The routers in this family have a PC-like DE9 serial console port (a male DTE) on which they present a VT100-style menu interface. They autodetect whatever baud rate you talk to them at, much like AT modems. Some Netopia documents make references to some kind of command line interface, but I could never find a way to enter it; the only interface I've ever seen on these routers is the VT100-style menu one. Resetting a used or ISP-configured router to the blank state is very easy: short a pair of pads with the power on, and the box grants you password-free access to the configuration menus. You can then set your own password if you want, and setting the correct configuration from scratch is very easy, so no need to fret about erasing the old one along with the password.
They are still consumer-level routers though. While they don't exhibit the same horrendous bugs as Inefficient Networks and disabling DHCP, NAT and firewall/filtering is pretty easy, don't expect a GRE tunnel from a Netopia box. The other reprehensible thing about these boxes is the artificially restricted feature set with secret feature-enabling keys — see below.
One area in which Netopia had seriously screwed up was the way they labeled and self-identified these routers. All R-series routers are actually one common generic router motherboard with different WAN modules installed. Although Netopia never kept this fact particularly secret it seems, they could have made it much more explicit in the way their routers identify themselves.
It is perfectly fine to assign distinct part numbers to preconfigured
packages, but one should also acknowledge quite explicitly that they are
just that, a few preset configurations out of an infinite number of
possible others, and that the actual product is completely generic.
An R7100-C is a Netopia motherboard equipped with a Copper Mountain SDSL
wanlet and configured to act as a router, a D7100-C is a Netopia motherboard
equipped with the same wanlet but configured to act as a
pseudo-DSU, an R7200-T is the same motherboard equipped
with an SDSL/ATM wanlet and preconfigured for Covad, etc.
But it would have been much nicer if each unit identified itself as
generic Netopia router version so and so, such and such WAN modules
present
instead of having the firmware artificially reconstruct the
sales/marketing part number from the discovered options and make each
prepackaged configuration look like a totally different product.
However, the problem goes beyond a nitpick about self-identification into
the taboo area of artificially restricted functionality.
For Copper Mountain SDSL and IDSL Netopia had offered two products: one a
router, the other a bridge or
pseudo-DSU
as I call it.
The two are actually absolutely identical hardware, but identify
themselves as different products and have different and mutually exclusive
functionality!
Obviously the only difference is a flag in an EEPROM or NVRAM somewhere.
Furthermore, Netopia had even made this artificial functionality restriction
explicitly known by selling enhanced features
for money which were
actually nothing but secret keys to be entered in a dialog box in the
router's firmware, causing it to unblock some previously hidden feature.
Bourgeois obstructionism
punishable by at least 10 years in gulag by our good old Soviet laws.
It appears that Netopia had served as
Copper Mountain's second reference
CPE
platform after their own CopperRocket, or maybe
even the first for some modes.
Netopia's original SDSL WAN module was actually
designed by CM it appears, and supports only CM SDSL.
Netopia had then built another WAN module for
SDSL/ATM, primarily
Nokia but also supporting generic
Flavor A.
We are not aware of any other SDSL options from Netopia for the R-series.
In particular,
to our knowledge Netopia had no generic
SDSL WAN
module for non-CM and non-ATM flavors, i.e., no generic
Flavor B
.
However, the rival (in)Efficient Networks 5851
seems to have many more different submodels.
Netopia had also supported IDSL with their generic ISDN hardware, although again different models (different packaged configurations) probably offered different artificially restricted sets of configurable options. (Note that CM had built a special wanlet for Netopia with their own microprocessor and firmware only for SDSL. For CM IDSL Netopia had to implement CMCP on their motherboard, and it appears that they did indeed.)