BT are not bad, it's just you get the whole shrink wrapped thing and end up paying more than with any other ISP, so avoid them as mentioned by others. BT line yes, BT service no.
BT = fairly crap
This may sound obvious but do not under any circumstances get AOL, my new housemate got them last year and I am just waiting for the contract to expire so I can go with plusnet instead. AOL have dirty transparent SMTP proxies which drop mail, USA registered IP addresses (which flag up security warnings when buying goods online) and a website that does not mention the DNS server IP addresses at all.
AOL = crap.
Also, do not under any circumstances use prodigynet http://www.prodigynet.co.uk/. They offer the cheapest static IP based 20:1 contention service around but the guy that runs it, Nick is a psycho and will not cancel your account ever! beware.
Prodigynet = crapper
If you fancy yourself at Linux, like a challenge and have a spare PC then you could make your own router/firewall/gateway. My home network which I share with three other students consists of an old Compaq deskpro SFF connected to a USB Thomson Speedtouch ADSL modem, broadband, a 16 port switch and a belkin wireless card. I have a full fledged IP tables based firewall/router (wired and wireless) for £100 when purchased off ebay, I can serve web pages, ftp, SSH if I want to, the possibilities are endless. The 2.6 kernel support for the Speedtouch USB modem is briliant and works like magic http://www.linux-usb.org/SpeedTouch/. Just an idea.
As I said I earlier, I intend to move to plusnet as they are a fairly good ISP, I will look at blackcat first though.
Jan T. Kim wrote:
Dear ALUG folks,
I have moved from Germany to Norwich a couple of months ago and now I consider getting a broadband Internet connection for use with Linux (evidently on this list, I guess...).
Looking at the offers by BT and NTL, I have not been quite able to determine what hardware is provided with the packages offered. For example, the most basic package from BT is advertised as "Not Mac compatible", but I've not been able to figure out what causes this incompatibility.
Certainly, some of you on this list have a broadband connection? I'd be interested if you could share your experience and tell me how you managed (or failed) to use a broadband package. I'm most interested in the basic ones -- having Internet access at work (UEA), I don't need huge download capacity, web space or other add-on features.
The computer(s) to be connected are laptops (running Debian), if that makes any difference. As a next step, I'd also look into getting wireless, so I'd be interested in comments on that too.
Thanks in advance and best regards, Jan