Srdjan Todorovic wrote:

Besides - don't BT now provide the BT Home Hub? It uses this wonderful 1970's technology called Ethernet.

Is that the one that comes loaded up to be a BT Openzone hotspot as well, yes providing pay for access to the internet using your bandwidth and electricity to extend BT's network (though at least not your traffic allowance as far as I can tell) whilst also occupying yet another channel on the already congested wifi spectrum.

The same one that regardless of what you do with the admin password BT always have a back door into ?

At least the home hubs have a slightly less insane firewall configuration interface than the 2-wire ones BT supply to business broadband connections....but only slightly.

I'd suggest if you are considering BT as your broadband provider...not using their router.

And I've always found the BT Home Hub to be rubbish, so I got my own router.

Quite :)

Yes, although the network speeds aren't too bad with BT, please be aware that when things go wrong, their support people are about as helpful as those of the other big ISPs, i.e. getting a result from them can be a "challenge". It's also useful to bear in mind that the BT Broadband people have no more clout with BT Openreach than any of the other ISPs so, again, when things go wrong, they are as reluctant to call out Openreach to sort a line problem as any other provider is (it costs them). So they, like the support people of other big ISPs, will first try to pin the blame for any connection problem on YOUR computer rather then THEIR infrastructure and that will be when the challenge occurs, especially if you mention the "L" word.

Caveat emptor.

As others have mentioned, any ethernet ADSL router works fine with BT broadband and with anything with an ethernet port and the ability to talk DHCP. They are unlikely to send you a USB modem. USB modems are EVIL anyway and mustn't be used.

Ken

On 29/01/2010 17:57, samwise wrote:

Any which way you look at it ... BT runs fine with Linux, though like most ISPs their helpdesks are unlikely to want to talk you through configuration of a Linux desktop (not that it needs anything beyond usual DHCP).

Ditch the BT supplied device and get something that can hold the connection better and your good to go ;)

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 08:56:12PM -0000, Martin A. Brooks wrote:

On Fri, January 29, 2010 5:44 pm, Mark Wilson wrote:

...

Hi, I was just wondering does anyone know if it's possible to use BT Broadband on a linux system? I've heard there are problems, something to do with a modem they supply (BT voyager?) and driver issues. Any info would be most appreciated!

There's are many ADSl modems that will work just fine with Linux. However, my advice would be: don't bother.

Buy yourself a suitably featured ADSL firewall/wireless router that presents ethernet to your LAN and never think about the problem again.

Personally, I have one of these:

http://www.seg.co.uk/products/v2820.html

There are certainly much cheaper options available, I just like Draytek kit.

I have a 2820 too, it works pretty well. On the second ADSL line I have a BT Business Hub which is actually a 2Wire 2700HGV router, that too works pretty well but suffers from the disadvantage that BT have taken over its interface so you can't talk to the router if your internet conneciton goes down.

On Sun, January 31, 2010 7:59 pm, James Freer wrote:

Some of you have said that a BT router works ok and some have said ditch it and buy one.

Perhaps you could be kind enough explain technically [but simply for the less knowledgeable!] what exactly is wrong with a wired BT Voyager.

For the average home user? Probably nothing, or very little. On the other hand, I need my router to be able to do port forwarding and QoS. I use it's VPN functions so that I can have a UK IP address regardless of where I am in the world and I have some VPN tunnels that make managing a set of servers rather easier than it might otherwise be. I make a small piece of bandwidth available to any driveby wireless user, but I lock down what they can have access to. All on my router.

I have a BT home hub (Its the Home Hub 2 I belive, the black one with a SIP phone) and when ever I use my MacBook Pro on the wireless it crashes the router and it needs a hard reset but then everything works ok until the next time!

Also, when transfering large amounts of data between my PC and my HTPC say 100GBs+ the router will crash as obviously these to are hard wired as I haven't got a year to wait for the wireless transfer!

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);

On 31 Jan 2010, at 23:28, Wayne Stallwood wrote:

James Freer wrote:

...

Some of you have said that a BT router works ok and some have said ditch it and buy one.

Perhaps you could be kind enough explain technically [but simply for the less knowledgeable!] what exactly is wrong with a wired BT Voyager.

My experience is as follows

Voyager series routers....OK not great but ok, afaik no longer supplied.

Home Hub era stuff.....evil, BT have a back door, can be configured out of the box to silently provide BT Openzone public wifi, nasty web interface, limited in terms of reconfigurability, unreliable Wireless.

BT don't just can, they do reconfigure, - I disabled FON on mine through the interface, and a month later, it was available again, and no option to disable apart from going online to BT and entering all your user account codes and disabling it at BT's end. My Home Hub is actually really nippy - I'm getting a much higher speed on that hub to BT then using any other router, but it also does some other wierd things with port forwarding.

Its port forward interface is actually really nice for causal use - you specify which computer you want to forward to, and then even if you're not static, it only connects it when you're switched on, and always gets the right computer (I presume is mac based, so I highlight the word causal again)

Its downside is that its http forwarding seems to be like a proxy - instead of being at a low level in the networking and just forwarding the packets like most routers, it does seem to be intercepting the request and sending it out again, which is really frustrating at times.

JT