Lots of qualifications to the replies so far. The crux of the matter is, make sure your contract includes everything you need and that you know what the limitations are. Read the fine print, despite its length and excruciating tedium. People outside of cities and major towns won't be on unbundled exchanges so the lines will belong to BT even if you pay the line rental to your ISP. Unbundled exchanges can have the ISPs' own equipment, although BT Openreach will still do the repairs when stuff breaks (you hope).
Regarding routers, I don't know a single one which doesn't run some form of Linux but some are easier to hack than others. Most can be telnet'ed or ftp'ed to (if you know the right ports) with lesser or greater beneficial results and many use the BusyBox interface. Linksys routers seem to have the largest base of people working on the mods but suspect most brands and models are possible to modify. Unless you're doing special stuff, hacking won't be necessary. Even most of the stuff that Martin speaks about is available as standard with many routers.
BT Home Hubs are made by Thomson but have a lot of BT-specific stuff, e.g. the configuration is done through a heavily BT-decorated web site. Many BT routers will NOT work on non-BT networks although a few will. Your mileage may vary. This ability may not be important to you as routers are cheap and can be replaced if you move away from BT. Even those that are BT-locked can sometimes be unlocked by installing hacked firmware.
Routers fail a lot and often have broken firmware. Always install firmware upgrades if available. The fact that an update was released means the previous version was found wanting in some way, i.e. was totally broken. Sometimes they just fail after a time, or are DOA. It sounds like James has a faulty one. A Home Hub shouldn't care that a Mac is connected. I've seen various brands work fine for a couple years and then decide to develop a fault, e.g. flakey ADSL syncing or intermittent wireless encryption handshaking failure. Sometimes a reset to factory defaults fixes, sometimes it's the dustbin. These things are inexpensive units made mostly in China. We can't expect too much.
For almost all applications, any router will do. If you're on BT broadband, any BT router is fine with a Mac (unless as previously stated, it's broken).
Have fun and don't worry.
Ken
On 31/01/2010 22:44, Richard Lewis wrote:
you pay your line rental to them (not BT, but you do have a real BT line, unlike TalkTalk); you're not in a contract for your line rental (whereas with BT you have to enter a 12 month contract for line rental);