Dear Adam and all others,
thanks for all your replies.
On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 10:52:37AM +0100, Adam Bower wrote:
On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 10:24:47AM +0100, Jan T. Kim wrote:
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.
Basically, you don't want to buy broadband from BT, as they will not offer you technical support if you are using Linux (amongst other reasons).
That's a valuable bit of information, as I would have been inclined to just go ahead with BT, as I have my phone line with them and I thought that, being a big company, they should more or less have seen it all... I had some doubts, though, that perhaps as a big player, they may, on the other hand, just ignore the "non-mainstream" market. The replies you sent all seem to indicate that this is indeed the case.
There are plenty of other ADSL suppliers who provide broadband over a BT phone line. If you already have NTL cable tv or phone then getting broadband with them could be sensible. Basically they provide you with an ethernet socket on the back of the cable box. You can then connect a router to this to connect all the other machines to.
An ethernet socket sounds like a reasonable start, and if they also provide dynamic IP numbers and name servers via DHCP, that is the kind thing I'm looking for.
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.
If you want wireless my suggestion would be to get ADSL (if you have a BT phone line) from someone like Black Cat Networks [1] (who host this mailing list and provide DNS for Alug etc.) and buy some kind of adsl router with a wireless access point built in. (Netgear, Belkin & Linksys will sell suitable routers and there are other manufacturers).
The main reason I suggest Black Cat Networks is that I am very happy with their service (more so than any other ISP I have used) and so are other Aluggers who use them and Jonathan (who owns/works for/runs Black Cat) is in the pub every month for the 2nd Thursday Norwich Alug pub meet.
This sounds attractive to me, I would be quite inclined to go locally with a company that is known to be "Linux aware". It seems to me that the ADSL service they offer might be a bit more than what I was looking for -- e.g. I don't think I need a static IP; my main use of the connection would be shuttling files back and forth between home and work (via scp / rsync etc.), installing Debian packages, and occasional general surfing / email checking etc.
But then again, a nicely working connection to the rest of the Internet may well be worth the additional costs (mainly the setup fee)...
Perhaps, I should come to the pub meeting next month... that should be 13 Oct, right?
Best regards & thanks again, Jan