What can be said technically about the device “Sphairon Turbolink IAD”, used by Hansenet / Alice DSL for their customers?

The official name is “Sphairon Turbolink IAD (Ident.-No. 286204)”. This Ident No. is printed on the bottom of the devices that come from Hansenet.

The Sphairon Turbolink IAD (“integrated access device”) seems to be a custom specific product for Hansenet, as it is not sold by Sphairon. The best matching product is the Spairon Turbolink 7201 (http://www.sphairon.com/fld3530/index.php). There is no hint that it provides fundamentally better (more reliable) VoIP than, for example, a Fritz!Box, which also has traffic shaping. For the Sphairon Turbolink 7201, the manufacturer’s data sheet reports the following Quality-of-Service mechanisms, which are relevant for VoIP quality:

• ATM-QoS: PVC Queuing and Traffic Shaping; ATM Traffic classes UBR, CBR, VBR-rt, VBR-nrt
• IP-QoS: Queuing, Rate Limiting; DiffServ/ToS and 802.1p/q support

The data sheet can be found at http://www.sphairon.com/media/download/db/datasheet_TL7201.pdf .

The Sphairon Turbolink IAD is however listed in the service area:

• http://www.sphairon.com/fld3530/fld2820/e_serv_turbolink_iad_03.html

• http://www.sphairon.com/fld7106/fld6202/fld7224/

Interesting enough, you can download GPL’ed source code there. It appears therein that the device is based on Linux 2.4.20.

According to some people, the “Sphairon Turbolink IAD” is indeed just a DSL modem (with integrated DSL splitter and NTBA). It has 4 Ethernet ports just because it was modified for Hansenet from a device that included a router. See http://www.hansenet-user-forum.de/viewtopic.php?t=10627 .