On 12-Oct-01 John Seago wrote:
[...] I can only conclude that it is caused by part of the route between ourselves and the List, I live in Halesworth, East Suffolk, and am connected via the 01986 (Bungay Exchange), which Bt Anytime claim is unmodenised and therefore unable to cope with my internet connectionat all.
While I've missed the topic that John's message was following up, the above sounds like BT Cacatoro to me (did anyone watch "Watchdog" last night, by the way?).
Basically, any line that can carry a voice converstaion can carry digital comms modulated to acoustic signals with a modem (that's what they're for, after all), even if it's only at 300 baud (but even lousy lines should be able to take 9600 baud). Somewhere down the line, this should hit the BT digital network and get converted back, after which all should be fine.
As to "unmodernised", even Neolithic exchanges will accept Pulse dialling,which only requires the user to change the modem dial prefix to ATDP.
Of course, at low baud rate anything involving download of graphics garbage into your browser will take forever, and this may be what BT are talking about.
It should still, nevertheless, be possible to authenticate your BT login from a dialup script (though, with no experience whatever of BT's ISP services, I can't offer details).
Can anyone else help John with a script-dialup for BT-Anytime? Once logged in, you should be networked to the Net provided your local routing tables etc have been correctly set by the login.
[For those who missed it, Watchdog followed up the story that BT are deliberately making their BT-Anytime service increasingly difficult to use, without making it impossible to the point where users can claim compensation, in order to force users off BT Anytime onto more profitable alternatives. John's quote of BT Anytime is not inconsistent with this story.]
Best wishes to all, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 12-Oct-01 Time: 10:36:02 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------