Hi Folks,
I'd welcome comments on the following situation.
According to the Sphinx, my exchange is due to be BB enabled on 12 October -- a mere 4 days off!!!!
It's a BT exchange (Brandon Creek), a BT phone line, and I'm a BT customer for the telephone service (and, currently, also for dialup acess).
The only external signs of activity I've seen so far, passing by the other day, is that the radio dish on top of the pole, which used to face South towards Littleport, now faces North. So maybe something really is happening!
More to the point, between me and it is some 5km of overhead cable, as things stand at the moment (they sometimes fall down, literally ... ).
BT's website tells me, this morning:
"Check availability - results
For Telephone Number 01353676*** on Exchange BRANDON CREEK
Our initial test on your line indicates that you may be able to get Broadband from BT with speeds up to 1Mb, which is up to 20 times faster than dial-up. At the moment, your telephone line is unable to support our 2Mb speed broadband package. Also, due to the length of your line, an engineer visit may be required to set up your broadband service.
Your local BT telephone exchange is unable to support broadband at the moment, but it will by 12th October 2005.
If you decide to place an order, a further test will be performed to confirm if your line is suitable for the speed of service you wish to order.
Order Broadband from BT online and get a FREE modem saving you a £25 charge which applies if you order by phone."
This raises a number of issues, in the context of the fact that, a priori, I'm not that keen to order broadband from BT anyway, for various reasons (one of which is their attitude to non-Windows users -- their basic service, for example, is apparently not even Mac-compatible!).
1. "you may be able to get Broadband from BT with speeds up to 1Mb,"
2. "Also, due to the length of your line, an engineer visit may be required to set up your broadband service."
3. "If you decide to place an order, a further test will be performed to confirm if your line is suitable for the speed of service you wish to order."
All of this tends to point to the possibility that it might not work without engineer intervention (if at all ... ).
So the dilemma is: If I order broadband from a non-BT ISP, where would their engineer stand, being non-BT, in the event of difficulties arising from the BT part of the system (the setup in the exchange, the length and quality of the overhead cable, the final line from the pole to my house, etc. The latter, for instance, had to be renewed by a BT engineer a while ago because its covering had perished, letting the rain in to the cable. Who knows what the cable's like further back along the line ... )?
Would a non-BT engineer be able to fix problems that a BT engineer could fix (which might involve fiddling with exchange setups)? If there could be snags on that front, then maybe going for non-BT might be a bad idea, though on other grounds it would be a good idea!
(I'm particularly tempted by comments on some of the ISPs that have come up recently on ALUG).
Another issue is the "modem/router" that BT would supply (free according to the above, though that's not an important factor). I wonder how a non-BT modem/router would work in this case.
I happen to have in hand at the moment a Peak CAS4047 "High Speed 1 WAN 4LAN Broadband Router" (quoting from the box), which claims to be RJ45-connectable to a Cable/DSL modem, so this should in principle be OK provided there's a modem for it to connect to. But I wonder about the BT "modem/router". I've tested the Peak's browser accessibility (point Firefox to "http://192.168.1.254" and you can have a nice little chat with it, apparently allowing all sorts of things to be set up including routing to the internal fixed IPs of your LAN, while getting a dynamic IP for itself from the ISP, not to mention various firewalling options). So it looks good.
But it would be plugging into the BT modem. Any likely problems?
NB that BT assert on their website that their "modem/router" requires Windows compatibility. I'm not going to waste my time trying to find out from BT Customer Support whether that's really true, or whether you can just switch it on, plug in any DSL-compatible router, wait for it to get its IP address, and then simply carry on, independently of not using Windows.
So I think the dilemma can be summed up:
Would I, as a Linux user, be buggered if I got a BT installation?
Would I be buggered anyway if I got another ISP to provide the service?
Comments welcome!
(Please remember that I'm totally new to this area of going on-line, so I'm not familiar with the bits and pieces).
Best wishes to all, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 08-Oct-05 Time: 13:34:23 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------